Just after the start of 2026, Google parent Alphabet became more valuable than Apple for the first time since 2019, a technically meaningless milestone, but a symbolically powerful one. And it’s still true that Apple is the less valuable company, and Google’s AI partnership with Apple is perceived as a big part of why.
Now, according to Bloomberg’s machine gun of Apple scoops Mark Gurman, Apple is weeks away from demoing the product of that partnership: its revamped version of Siri. For Apple’s sake, it had better not suck.
Next month we should expect “demonstrations of the functionality” of Siri at some sort of Apple event, possibly a small one, Gurman says. This new Siri will be powered by a Google-built AI model, but Apple won’t tip users off about that while they’re using it. In fact, even internally it’s called “Apple Foundation Models version 10,” Gurman notes. This new Siri will, if all goes according to plan, just work a lot better than what iPhones and other Apple devices are currently armed with.
Siri is perhaps best understood as the organizing “personality” of the Apple Home software and hardware ecosystem, and it’s sorta… fine as a smart home assistant. It’s comparable to similar products from Amazon and Google, with a few more tendencies that chafe slightly, like how it may respond to basic informational questions with info-dumps that start with phrases like “Here are two options!” Or it will just glitch out and say something like “Uh-oh! There’s a problem.”
When used on an iPhone, Siri feels a little like having a smart home assistant in your pocket, which, why? If your phone is in your hand and you want to set a timer, you’re looking right at the Clock app icon and you’ll probably just use that. If you want something that can answer questions conversationally, you can just use a product like Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, or, hell, Microsoft Copilot.
With all that in mind, Gurman subtly describes the new version of Siri as a productivity beast. The new version “should be able to tap into personal data and on-screen content to fulfill tasks.” That sounds nothing like the current iteration of Siri, which feels like a naive being called into existence in the moment with no context about what’s going on. It would indeed be powerful to have a Siri that can respond nimbly to what the user is doing, and incorporate the data already in their phone to provide actual help. Based on descriptions like this, I can imagine looking at an event website, for instance, and saying “Hey Siri, do I have time for this?” and then getting a decent answer.
And Gurman says this Siri will “be conversational, aware of relevant context and capable of sustained back-and-forth dialogue,” which also means it’s meant to take a real bite of the chatbot market. Where Siri once relied on ChatGPT (arguably too much), it will now, in theory, compete with it.
But the Apple-Google partnership driving the new Siri is interesting trivia at best, and most people won’t care or notice, because, as Gurman notes, “Apple is a product company,” and “the provenance of the technology is mostly irrelevant.” That means if the takeaway by March is “Lol, Siri still sucks,” Apple is going to pay the price in terms of public perception, not Google. And Google gets its $1 billion either way.
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