Apple reboots siri as a chat-first ai inside ios 27, sources say
Apple will scrap the nine-year-old voice-first Siri and replace it with a threaded, text-and-voice chat agent that lives in every corner of iOS 27, according to people who have seen the software. The overhaul, code-named Project Campo, is scheduled for a soft launch on 8 June at WWDC and a public rollout this autumn, ending Apple’s long resistance to the chatbot format it once dismissed.
A reluctant pivot becomes strategy
The shift is as much a humiliation as a triumph. Craig Federighi told Tom’s Guide last year that typing to an assistant felt “backward”; engineers were instructed to keep interactions glanceable and hands-free. But internal metrics seen by Bloomberg show that Apple Intelligence failed to lift daily Siri usage above 8 % of active devices, while ChatGPT’s iPhone app passed 50 million downloads in six months. The board reportedly gave the ai group a blunt mandate: match the conversational benchmark or lose headcount. Campo is the result.
The new Siri behaves like a pastel-green thread inside Messages. Users open a dedicated app—yes, a standalone Siri app is finally in testing—and see a scroll of prior chats, each previewed by a rounded rectangle. A plus button spawns a blank session where text or voice input sits at the bottom, file attachments clip inline, and the upper-right toggle disables the microphone for silent offices. Favourite threads can be pinned; old ones archive to iCloud. It is, in every visible way, Apple’s answer to ChatGPT, but with system-level privilege.
Deep hooks into your data
Campo’s real edge is access. The agent can read Mail, Notes, Messages and Calendar without a permission prompt because the neural engine processes everything on-device through Apple Foundation Models, the in-house stack that has quietly absorbed chunks of Google Gemini under a $1 billion licensing deal signed in January. Ask “Show me the PDF Jake sent last week about Tokyo hotels” and the engine surfaces the file, highlights the paragraph with check-in times and offers to add the dates to Calendar. Third-party apps will get the same power later via an expanded App Intents API, letting users scroll menus by voice—think “scroll to the brunch tab” inside Resy—a capability that Android has promised but never shipped at scale.
The old neon orb is also gone. Triggering Siri on an iPhone 15 Pro shows a thin pill in the Dynamic Island that pulses while the model streams tokens. Results spill into a Liquid Glass sheet that can be flicked down to continue the thread. Spotlight, once the universal search, merges into this sheet; queries like “photos from last summer with dogs” now return on-device embeddings instead of dumb filename matches.
Ship dates still sliding
Engineers caution that most Campo features will not reach the first iOS 27 beta. The personal-context engine—delayed from iOS 26—remains unstable under low-memory conditions, and the App Intents expansion covers only 18 Apple apps so far. The standalone Siri app may not appear until iOS 27.2, and the macOS counterpart could slip to 2026. Yet the pressure is visible: Apple has doubled the ai org to 5,000 staff, moved John Giannandrea’s group into the Infinite Loop 4th floor once reserved for hardware, and frozen headcount across the Vision Pro team to re-route silicon budgets to Campo.
The stakes are binary. If the threaded Siri lifts engagement above 25 %, Apple can market the iPhone 17 as the first truly conversational computer. If it stalls, suppliers say the company has a fallback plan to pre-install Google Gemini as the default assistant in key markets, a surrender that would cost Apple an estimated $3 billion in lost services revenue. Either way, the Siri that once set the standard for voice will officially end its life this autumn—reborn, or replaced, by the chat window it once mocked.