Via Mark Gurman, Apple has landed on its strategy for the new Siri update coming as soon as iOS 26.4 in the spring of next year. Behind the scenes, much of the new Siri experience will use Google Gemini models.
The custom Gemini model will run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, to help fulfil user requests. Apple has promised that the new Siri will be able to answer personal questions like ‘find the book recommendation from Mom’ by hunting through data on your device and generating the appropriate response on-the-fly.
As previously reported by Bloomberg, the new Siri architecture will have three distinct components; a query planner, a knowledge search system, and a summarizer. Google Gemini models will run on Apple’s servers and provide planner and summarizer capabilities.
User privacy will be preserved by running the Google models on Apple’s server infrastructure without any external data sharing, and on-device personal data will likely be processed using Apple’s own Foundation Models.
The new knowledge search component may also be powered using Gemini models. It will enable Siri to have ‘understanding’ about world topics and trivia, and allow Apple’s voice assistant to answer more general knowledge questions without resorting to third-party integrations like the mediocre ChatGPT integration, or falling back to basic ‘I found this on the web’ search results.
While the backend implementation of Gemini models will be extensive, Bloomberg says Apple is not expected to promote this partnership. Gemini models will just power parts of Siri secretly behind the scenes. All of the new Siri will be marketed as Apple’s technology running on Apple servers, presented using an Apple user interface. The deal will simply help Apple fill in some crucial technology gaps where its own LLM systems are currently not good enough.
The arrangement isn’t too dissimilar from what Samsung does with its Galaxy phones, where many of its ‘Galaxy AI’ features are thin wrappers around Google Gemini features.
The deal is a practical choice that helps Apple finally ship Siri AI features that it first promised to deliver a year ago. Ultimately, Customers don’t really care about implementation details, they just want the iPhone to have features they expect it to have.
We currently expect Apple to announce the new Siri release in the spring alongside the launch of iOS 26.4, in March or April. Apple is also readying a new smart home display device that will take advantage of the new AI assistant capabilities.
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