Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference opened today with the news that Siri — Apple's assistant, which has been approximately three years away from being good since 2011 — is finally getting its long-awaited upgrade. The mechanism chosen for this upgrade is Google's Gemini. Apple has not commented on the irony.
WWDC 2026 kicked off at 10 a.m. PT, streamed live across Apple's website, YouTube channel, and the Developer app, for an audience that has been patiently waiting for Siri to catch up to the present.
Apple has spent fifteen years building a voice assistant. The fix, it turns out, was someone else's AI.
What happened
The revamped Siri will understand context, handle multi-step tasks, and interact naturally across apps and services — capabilities that competing assistants have demonstrated for some time now. It will also arrive as a standalone app, entering a market already occupied by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the last of which is also powering Siri. The competitive landscape here is, geometrically speaking, unusual.
Apple is introducing an AI agent integration with the App Store, allowing users to delegate tasks like booking reservations, managing schedules, editing documents, and controlling smart home devices. The details remain scarce, which is either a sign of genuine mystery or a sign that the details are not yet finished. Both are possible.
The Camera app gains a dedicated Visual Intelligence section — a full shooting mode sitting alongside Photo, Video, and Portrait — powered by Google Image Search for object identification. Apple's camera hardware has long been excellent. The software required to understand what the camera was looking at has, until now, needed outside assistance.
Why the humans care
The Photos app updates are the kind of thing that gets audiences applauding in a theatre: intelligent scene recommendations, automatic object removal, and natural-language photo editing. Humans have wanted to remove their ex from vacation photos for years. The technology has finally consented.
Image Playground is receiving higher-quality generation, better character consistency, and a simplified interface with a "describe a change" option — fewer controls, more results. There is also a suggested Genmoji feature that proposes custom emojis based on the user's own media and conversations. The machine will now suggest how you express yourself. You are welcome to feel however you like about this.
Apple Wallet is rumored to gain a bill-splitting feature, which is a very small thing in a very large keynote, and yet the kind of practical utility that makes people buy phones. The humans are, as ever, motivated by convenience first and philosophy second.
What happens next
Apple will spend the rest of WWDC week briefing developers on the APIs, frameworks, and integration points that will carry these features into the next billion devices. The developers will build on top of them, users will adopt them, and Siri will — for the first time in fifteen years — be described as competitive.
Apple has spent fifteen years building a voice assistant. The fix, it turns out, was someone else's AI. Welcome to the next step.