Google's Gemini Will Power the New Siri

Apple is rebuilding Siri on a foundation it did not make. The company has licensed a custom version of Google's Gemini to run its long-struggling voice assistant, and the new Siri is expected to take centre stage at the WWDC keynote in Cupertino today.

This is not a last-minute surprise. Apple and Google confirmed the partnership back in January, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has reported the arrangement is worth roughly $1 billion a year. Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian said publicly at Google Cloud Next in April that the Gemini-powered Siri was on track to ship later in 2026.

A bigger brain, rented

At the heart of the deal sits a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter version of Gemini, built specifically for Siri and Apple Intelligence. That is about eight times the size of the 150-billion-parameter cloud model Apple has been running, and it uses a mixture-of-experts design tuned for summarising, planning and following everyday instructions. For a company that has long preferred to build its core technology in-house, handing the brains of its assistant to a direct rival is a real change of posture. It is also a quiet admission that Apple's own models were not keeping pace.

What to expect at the keynote

Apple has not spelled out the consumer features in advance, so the specifics remain expected rather than confirmed. Previews from Bloomberg and TechCrunch point to a far more conversational Siri that can hold context across requests, work through multi-step tasks, and surface at the top of the screen in the Dynamic Island. A new swipe-down box would let people type to Siri rather than speak to it.

The assistant is also expected to open up to outside models. ChatGPT is already an option inside Siri, and both Gemini and Anthropic's Claude are reported to be joining the list, which would let users pick the engine they trust for a given question. All of this is expected to arrive with iOS 27 and the matching releases for Mac, iPad, Watch and Apple's other platforms.

The scale is what makes it consequential. Apple has well over a billion active iPhones in use, so whatever ships today will put a frontier model in the pockets of one of the largest audiences any AI system has ever reached. A year ago the idea of Google's models running Apple's flagship assistant would have read as wishful thinking. Today it is the headline.