These are the Apple Intelligence news from WWDC that really matter to you

Apple may not have mentioned AI during the first 28 minutes from its WWDC software conference on Monday, but don’t be fooled. Apple Intelligence was the main event, with the company’s AI expected to get a major boost this year.

This year’s keynote aimed to deliver on many of the promises the company has made about its AI since its introduction two years ago. The biggest news concerns the emergence of Smarter, AI-enabled Siri. But there was also plenty of other AI news, which we’ve rounded up below.

All of these updates will be available with the next generation of Apple software, especially in iOS 27. The iPhone software is expected to be widely released this fall, after beta versions are released this summer. You’ll need an iPhone with the computing power to run Apple’s AI, so iPhone 16 models or newer will be compatibleas well as a few iPhone 15 Pro models.

Watch this: Everything Apple revealed at WWDC 2026

12:50 p.m.

Siri, Siri and more Siri

Siri is the cornerstone of the new Apple Intelligence, wherever she appears in Apple apps and devices. Apple has promised to use AI to create a smarter Siri since launching Apple Intelligence in 2024. And it has paid the price for its delay, including a $250 million legal settlement announced last month. Now we finally have a clear idea of what Apple’s AI-enabled assistant will be able to do – although we don’t yet have a solid launch date beyond “in beta later this year.”

To begin with, even the name changes: discover the new Siri AI. This version comes with its own app and new customizations, including new voices for you to choose from. Siri AI will be in your iPhone, Mac, Watch, CarPlay and even your AirPods.

“It’s very much the Siri that Apple first hinted at two years ago, but this time fully realized,” CNET senior editor Katie Collins reports. “But the real test, whether it meets the expectations of people dreaming of a true digital personal assistant, remains to come.”

Siri AI is more conversational. It remembers what you asked it previously, so you can chat with it like you would a friend – or more likely, an AI chatbot – so it follows a long series of prompts. It can take steps to search your device, the web, and ChatGPT. In the example shown in Apple’s WWDC keynote, you can ask Siri to search the web for information about World Cup matches and send your friends a personalized invitation using only voice messages.

Siri AI also benefits from Visual Intelligence, the company’s technology that allows AI to interact with images and videos. It also has improved personal context, meaning it can use information from your apps (like calendar, messaging, etc.) to personalize its responses. Siri AI will only be available in English at launch, and it may not be available in the EU and China due to regulatory issues.

Screenshots of Visual Intelligence — Visual intelligence helps AI (and you) better understand what’s happening in your screenshots and photos.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET

Spatial cropping, photo editing and AI slop

Spatial cropping may sound like fluffy jargon, but it’s a new way to literally crop your photos, thanks to viewing technology taken from the Vision Pro headset. You can touch, drag, and change the perspective of a photo as if you were moving a camera, after the photo has already been taken. AI fills in the gaps to create an edited photo.

Three images of a woman sitting in grass whose composition was edited using Apple's Spatial Crop tool in iOS 27. — The original photo (left) changes perspective (middle) and the spatial crop fills in background details using generative AI (note the building in the distance that wasn’t visible in the original.
Apple/Screenshot by Jeff Carlson/CNET

There’s also a new Expand tool that lets you resize any photo and let the AI fill in the gaps. It looks like Adobe’s generative expansionif you used it. There is also a new Siri mode in your camera app. The AI won’t tell you how to take the photo, but it should understand what you’re pointing it at to give you more information, identify objects, or suggest actions, like splitting a bill while looking at a receipt.

Perhaps the AI update I’m most excited about is a promise to improve the cleaning tool. This existing AI editor can remove distracting objects or random photobomber. This is great in theory, although I can attest that there are many cases where the removal isn’t precise or the AI replacement isn’t seamless.

Learn more: How to download the iOS 27 developer beta and try out the new Siri AI

“Our goal in integrating AI into the Photos app is to help photographers enhance their images in a way that respects the original moment,” Alok Deshpande, Apple’s director of software engineering for Cameras and Photos, said during Apple’s presentation. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s the case.

If you want to let AI completely take the reins of your images, the new image playground is ready for you. Apple’s Creative AI Center is getting new AI models to create better images, including images that are more photorealistic and hopefully less botched by AI. It also benefits from better editing tools, like the ability to highlight specific elements, resize designs, and edit them with text prompts.

Siri AI and Gemini

Google’s Gemini is one of the most successful and popular artificial intelligences on the market – and therefore one of Apple’s biggest competitors in this area – but the two tech titans have teamed up to create new fundamental AI models for Apple, based on Gemini technology.

These on-device models must be multimodal, meaning they can understand speech, images and videos as well as text.

Apple’s biggest selling point for its own AI is its privacy promises. AI and privacy mix like oil and water, which means there is major privacy issuesespecially for sensitive tasks involving your finances and healthcare. When Apple launched its AI in 2024, it did so with its private cloud computing infrastructuredesigned not to store your data or chat logs when processed off-device.