Picture a parking machine demanding your license plate number while your memory draws a blank. Nicole Nguyen, the Journal’s personal-technology columnist, was in exactly that spot, so she asked Siri. It promptly recited the plate, pulled from a photo of her registration renewal notice. Siri, of all assistants, came through. In Tuesday’s Personal Journal, she sums up a couple of months with the new iOS 27 version: real magic, a few letdowns.
What it gets right
The AI version runs only on iPhones starting with the 15 Pro. There, Siri can see whatever is on your screen, in any app. It correctly named a Tarte Tropézienne from a pastry-class video and built a packing list from a school email. Aim the camera at a receipt, and it will offer to split the bill.
Better yet, it searches your own stuff. After several days of indexing, it found her son’s dentist appointment in a text and her passport number in Photos. That trick only reaches as far as developers allow, though, and many of her most-used apps come from other companies.
It isn’t flawless. Like other chatbots, Siri is sometimes wrong. It takes a beat longer than ChatGPT and Claude, too, and it hedges, warning that it “may make mistakes” and is “not a doctor.” The new photo tools that extend or reframe a shot did odd things to a few faces.
Your data’s new address
Now for the fine print. Siri now leans partly on Gemini models from Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL). Apple (AAPL) says it doesn’t store data from cloud requests, and neither company can access it. Uneasy? You can opt out in Settings.
Still, an assistant that can recite your passport number turns your phone into a filing cabinet that talks. As Nguyen notes, that’s the kind of private data nobody wants leaking in a breach or feeding a future AI model. Keep a strong passcode, and ask whether photos of IDs really belong in your camera roll.
Siri can’t fetch an umbrella yet, so that part is on you. Bring a recent statement, and fifteen minutes will show which money accounts already live on that phone.