While you’ll still be able to press a button in iOS 27 to trigger Siri, the animation and response will now emerge from the iPhone’s Dynamic Island — that’s the black pill-shaped area at the top of the screen that today houses Live Activities, the real-time updates and interactive displays from apps that appear directly on the phone’s Home Screen. This mode will work best for quick voice queries or searches, much like how people use Siri currently.

A new mode, however, will put Siri-powered search within easy reach, capitalizing on people’s muscle memory for swiping down on their screen to access Spotlight Search — a built-in way to find information from both your phone and the web in one place. The swipe-down gesture will still open search, but now those searches will draw on the AI-powered Siri, which includes a rebuilt AI model that uses Google’s Gemini AI technology under the hood for added intelligence.

From here, iPhone users can search, launch apps, start messages, ask about the weather, add calendar appointments, search their notes, and trigger app shortcuts, Bloomberg reports, with results displayed in formatted text in a card-style interface that also emerges from the Dynamic Island.

Apple’s approach to AI is strikingly similar to its earlier multi-billion dollar partnership with Google that made Google the default search engine on iPhone. Just as building a search engine from scratch was never in Apple’s playbook, AI presents a similar calculus — it’s too expensive and complex to go it alone, at least right now. So Apple is working with outside partners for AI technology that users want today, while simultaneously building out its own models, including local AI, that runs on local devices rather than the cloud — an approach that allows Apple to lean into it privacy brand without needing to catch up.