Siri hasn’t had the best year, largely owing to major feature delays amid ever-stronger AI competition. While the big Siri upgrades we’ve been waiting for are reportedly coming next spring, Apple has five surprise new features available now in iOS 26.
iOS 26 makes Siri’s existing Apple Intelligence features more powerful and useful
Apple launched iOS 26 yesterday to all users, and simultaneously published a document outlining new features in more depth than ever before. Surprisingly, the document mentions five upgrades for Siri in iOS 26.
Until now, Apple has never mentioned Siri getting improvements in its latest update—likely to avoid reigniting criticism over the previously announced features that aren’t available yet.
Here’s what Apple says is new for Siri in iOS 26:
Siri product knowledge: Device and context awareness
When offering you product knowledge, Siri now takes your on-screen and on-device context into account, including information about your settings, model, and software.
Copy and paste responses from ChatGPT with rich formatting
Maintain rich formatting, like bold, links, headings, inline images, bullet points, and tables, when you copy and paste responses from ChatGPT into new places.
Create files from ChatGPT
You can now ask ChatGPT to generate a document based on the response to a prompt like, “Make a spreadsheet.” Then use the Share Sheet to save to Files or open in your preferred app.
Follow up on ChatGPT responses with actions
Siri can help you take action on responses from ChatGPT, so if you ask something like “What are some great songs for karaoke?” you can follow up by saying “Play the third one.”
AirPlay Enhancements with Siri
When you’re using AirPlay to play music on HomePod, you can now ask Siri to play to other HomePod speakers in your home.
Siri features in iOS 26: wrap-up
I understand why Apple didn’t want to publicize its new iOS 26 features for Siri, since the bigger updates we’ve been waiting for are still MIA. That said, I’m glad iOS 26 offers improvements to some of the key Apple Intelligence changes that did actually ship in iOS 18.
ChatGPT integration is a compelling addition, and these latest changes help close the gap between how ChatGPT works through Siri and how it works in the native ChatGPT app. And Siri’s product knowledge gaining device and context awareness is similarly a solid improvement that should make that feature more useful than before.
What do you think of iOS 26’s new Siri features? Let us know in the comments.
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