GoKawiilApple’s Siri team, led by Craig Federighi, held a post-WWDC keynote tech talk with members of the press this afternoon to talk through iOS 27 and the new Siri AI.
During the talk, Federighi shared more details about Apple’s collaboration with Google.
Federighi was joined by Amar Subramanya (vice president of AI), Mike Rockwell (Siri lead), and Sebastien Marineau-Mes (software VP).
On the Google collaboration, Federighi explained:
Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.
So let’s talk about what we do use, or how our system is built.
It starts, of course, with our Assistant experience. And as you saw earlier today, this Assistant experience is deeply integrated into the system, into iOS, into iPadOS, into macOS. You saw on the iPhone how the assistant emerges, I think really beautifully, in Liquid Glass out of the Dynamic Island, how you can summon it from the side button or by speaking to Siri by name. But more than that, it’s integrated across all sorts of places in the system. So whether you’re writing with Writing Tools, clicking with the context menu, all of this is deeply integrated into the system experience.
Now, plugged into that is the Siri app. The Siri app is a great way to get back to a conversation that you previously started, to either look at what you’ve previously been doing, maybe extend that conversation, or start a new one. But this app isn’t just reaching out to some model in the cloud. It’s built on top of powerful system software in Apple Intelligence.
This includes the System Orchestrator, which is key to the privacy architecture of our entire system. It’s what coordinates requests against things like the App Toolbox that provides access to actions within your apps, the Spotlight Semantic Index to access personal content to help fulfill your request, and even things like on-screen context to understand what you might be looking at at the moment you’re making a request.
This, in turn, is built on a set of powerful on-device models. These handle everything from understanding speech to synthesizing the voice that speaks back to you, to understanding visually the environment and the on-screen context, understanding if there’s something relevant there, understanding text that might be on the screen, as well as a whole set of other models.
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