Apple Switches Siri to Google Gemini in iOS 27: The Biggest Partnership Shift in Tech

[RightNutter]

The news that Apple has chosen Google Gemini to power the rebuilt Siri in iOS 27 dropped this week and the implications are significant for the entire AI industry. Apple assessed that Gemini offers the best combination of multimodal capability and on-device integration for its device ecosystem, which is a significant compliment to Google and a blow to OpenAI whose existing integration with Siri had been seen as a major distribution advantage. The partnership reflects a commercial deal between the two companies but also Apple's genuine technical assessment of where the models stand.

Separately Apple is reportedly working to distill Google's multi-trillion parameter Gemini down to run on-device, which would address both latency and privacy concerns that have followed cloud-dependent AI systems. If Apple can successfully compress Gemini's capabilities into something that runs locally on iPhone hardware, that would be one of the most technically impressive achievements in consumer AI and could fundamentally change the privacy calculus for AI assistants.

For the competitive landscape this changes things considerably. Every iPhone user who interacts with the rebuilt Siri will now be interacting with a Google AI model, which gives Gemini distribution that no amount of marketing spend could buy. OpenAI retains its direct ChatGPT relationship with hundreds of millions of users but losing the Siri integration removes a key vector for casual user adoption that Apple was supposed to provide them.

Apple Plans to Let Rival AI Chatbots Integrate With Siri in iOS 27www.macrumors.com