All signs point to Apple reinventing Siri as a conversational AI chatbot in iOS 27, complete with a standalone Siri app. With privacy in mind, the app will reportedly contain an option to automatically delete your Siri chats every 30 days.
This privacy-first approach should give Apple’s AI chatbot an edge over its competitors.
Privacy-first approach could limit Siri’s response quality
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other chatbots heavily rely on past conversations and saved memories. This provides them with additional context and understanding of the user’s needs, which in turn allows them to provide more accurate responses.
User-friendly? Yes. Privacy-first? Not so much. OpenAI’s ChatGPT does not even provide an option to delete individual chats.
Apple will reportedly take a different approach with its revamped AI-powered Siri chatbot in iOS 27. The company will seemingly restrict what information can remain across chats and how long Siri can retain and refer to it.
“Apple will place tighter limits around how memory works, including restrictions on what information can persist and how long it can be retained,” wrote Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter on Sunday.
Taking a cue from Apple’s Messages app, the new Siri app will provide an option to retain conversations for 30 days, one year or forever.
Gurman further adds that Apple will even allow users to decide if the Siri app opens to a grid of their previous conversations or a new chat altogether.
A way to justify inferior results?
While Apple’s privacy-centric approach to the AI-powered Siri chatbot might work, it could affect the response quality. And that means Apple risks falling further behind competitors that already offer faster, smarter and more capable AI assistants.
Still, Apple might spin a Siri that’s slightly less capable than competitors as a win.
“While Apple has maintained that it wants to keep user protections while also delivering AI, it feels like the general population is starting to realize that privacy requires trade-offs,” Gurman wrote. “But that may actually work to the company’s advantage. Apple can use the idea that it’s making the right choice on behalf of consumers to slyly cover up any AI shortcomings.”
The company might “argue that its approach is fundamentally different from rivals that broadly train models on user interactions and cloud-stored histories,” Gurman wrote.
New Siri to carry the beta tag
Apple launched Apple Intelligence in late 2024 with a beta label. The company supposedly plans to do the same with the new Siri in iOS 27. (The AI chatbot currently carries a beta label in internal test builds.)
More importantly, Apple will seemingly offer a toggle to let users opt out of the Siri beta.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
You can reach out to him at mail[at]rajeshpandey.me.
