I Tested the New Siri App. It’s Slow and Still Not Smart.

The Siri app is one of the biggest changes in iOS 27. For the first time, Siri lives in its own app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro and, with watchOS 27, on Apple Watch too. As 9to5Mac reported, it keeps all your Siri conversations, syncs them through iCloud and lets you pick up where you left off.

I use an iPhone 17 Pro and an Apple Watch Series 12, and I use Siri every day. But honestly? I use it for music and the weather. And I think that is how about 90% of people use Siri. It is not smart, and in my opinion, it won’t become smart even now.

In this article: What the Siri app does · My test: five minutes and a wrong answer · What users are saying · A borrowed brain and a waitlist · Delete your Siri history · Siri on Apple Watch · FAQ

What the Siri app does

The app looks like an iMessage thread. You see your old chats, you can continue them, and Siri understands what is on your screen. With personal context, it can look into your messages, emails and photos to answer questions about your own life.

The old Siri had one thing going for it: it was fast. But you could only use it for a few simple things, nothing more. Now Siri has, let’s say, a brain from Gemini. And in my experience, it is even dumber than before.

My test: five minutes and a wrong answer

The best example was this. I asked Siri to find the nearest specialty store around me that is open until 5 p.m. It found one. But it took about five minutes. And it even got the name wrong, and the store was only open until 2 p.m.

Thank God I checked the information the good old way, through Google. And the most fascinating part: when I told Siri that neither Siri nor Gemini was helping me and that it was still dumb, it answered that it didn’t see any problem.

Some tech sites praise Siri AI. TechCrunch even wrote that with iOS 27 the author is “actually using Siri again.” I honestly don’t know how. Maybe they got some special version, or maybe some of these articles feel like PR for Apple. In my opinion, it is a disaster.

What users are saying

And I am not alone. What is worst is that the whole internet is complaining about how slow it is, but the articles still make it look like the smartest thing ever. Here is what real users wrote on the MacRumors forums, in a thread literally called “Siri is still dumb and slow”:

• One user said sending a message or shuffling a playlist now takes two to three times longer than before, even on an iPhone 17 Pro.
• Another has an iPhone 18 Pro Max and said Siri is “incredibly slow and clunky” and went back to the old Siri.
• Others described long waits just to add tomatoes to a grocery list.
• One caught Siri making up iPhone settings and weather forecasts, then denying there was a problem. That is exactly what happened to me.
• One said that in the car he has to scream at Siri until it finally works. Another asked for a song, Siri read the name back twice and never played it.
• And my favorite: an Echo Dot bought in 2018 for $40 “runs circles around Siri.”

To be fair, some users defend it. They say it is still a beta, or that they don’t want an AI with full access to their phone anyway. One user said it got much better a few days later, maybe because the servers were overloaded at launch. But when people with a brand new iPhone switch back to the old Siri, that tells you everything.

A borrowed brain and a waitlist

We know that Siri now runs on a completely different brain. According to TechCrunch, it is built on Google’s Gemini models. I think Apple sees that it is not winning this war, so it simply moved to the side where it works best. In my opinion, Apple is good at one thing here: it is not ashamed to admit it is behind, and it chose to go where things work. But if you put in someone else’s brain, at least make it work. I hope it is just the beta and they will fix it.

And this is the real embarrassment. How can you sell something as a super feature for two years, then put people on a waitlist as if it were a wow feature, as if you developed Siri’s brain yourselves, when for the first time you are using someone else’s brain that you just put into the Siri app? And after two years it is still not finished, still dumb and slow. What is going on with Apple, for God’s sake? In my opinion, the whole company has slowed down when it comes to innovation. And don’t tell me that building a chatbot on someone else’s brain is that hard, when today vibe coders build apps in a few days that work better than Siri AI.

As I said, this is not rocket science anymore. Apple focuses on cameras, on polishing the system, on Liquid Glass, but it forgot that there is an AI war going on right now, where you have to push and move forward. Apple cannot afford to wait and make everything perfect, the way it is used to. That doesn’t work with AI. AI gets better every day. If Apple keeps playing the “we’re not in a hurry, we’ll wait until it’s perfect” game, it will be terribly behind, especially when OpenAI is building its own gadget. I think Apple will not win this war, even though I really love the Apple ecosystem. I wrote about how fast OpenAI is moving in my article on GPT-6 and ChatGPT’s Intelligent UI.

Delete your Siri history

The Siri app saves your conversations forever by default. Tom’s Guide called it a “permanent digital diary,” and I agree.

I definitely recommend to everyone, even if you think you have nothing to fear, to set Siri to delete your history. If Siri remembers everything, it means our information is being collected somewhere, even on secure iPhones. We don’t know what can happen, especially in an era when chatbots also end up in the hands of hackers and are so powerful in bad but skilled hands that they can turn against all of us. When something remembers all our conversations and everything we do on our phones and computers, it knows us.

How to do it: open Settings, tap Siri, then Keep Conversations, and change Forever to 30 Days or 1 Year.

Siri on Apple Watch: mostly marketing

On Apple Watch, the Siri app shows your conversations from all your devices. But as 9to5Mac found, there is no obvious button to continue a chat. You have to open the conversation and then hold the Digital Crown or say “Siri.”

For voice control, quick technical tasks, or adding something to a note or a shopping list, yes. But the display is far too small to really work with an AI assistant. In my opinion, it is more of an add-on. Making a big deal of it, putting AI into every gadget, is more about marketing than anything else. I’m sure there will be one or two features on the watch where we say “that’s great,” but the rest will be marketing, because right now the word that sells best is “smart agents in gadgets.” For more on my watch, read my Apple Watch Series 12 first impressions.

Photo: omid armin / Unsplash

Siri app: FAQ

What is the Siri app in iOS 27?

A new standalone app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro and Apple Watch that saves your Siri conversations and lets you continue them across devices through iCloud.

Which iPhones get the Siri app?

iPhone 15 Pro and newer, the models that support Apple Intelligence. Siri AI may also put you on a waitlist first.

Does the Siri app run on Google Gemini?

According to TechCrunch, the new Siri AI is built on Google’s Gemini models rather than Apple’s own model.

How do I stop Siri from keeping my conversations forever?

Open Settings, tap Siri, then Keep Conversations, and change Forever to 30 Days or 1 Year.

Can I go back to the old Siri?

Yes. Siri AI is still labeled beta, and you can switch back to classic Siri, which many users say is faster for simple tasks.

Sources: 9to5Mac, TechCrunch (Ivan Mehta), Tom’s Guide (Kaycee Hill), MacRumors Forums.

Our Take

The Siri app is a good idea with a bad engine. After two years of waiting, it is slow, it makes mistakes, and it needs a waitlist and a borrowed brain from Google.

Delete your Siri history, check everything Siri tells you, and don’t believe the hype until Apple actually fixes it.

My final word: this is exactly where Apple has to speed up in AI and stop waiting for the perfect moment, because the perfect moment will never come. Apple is already terribly behind the companies that do nothing but AI: Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.