Just after the start of 2026, Google parent Alphabet became more valuable than Apple for the first time since 2019, a technically insignificant, but symbolically powerful milestone. And it’s still true that Apple is an undervalued company, and Google’s AI relationship with Apple is seen as a big part of why.
Now, according to Bloomberg’s Apple machine gun Mark Gurman, Apple is weeks away from unveiling the product of that partnership: its own improved version of Siri. Because of Apple, it is better not to breastfeed.
Next month we should expect a “functional demonstration” of Siri at some kind of Apple event, probably a small one, Gurman said. This new Siri will be powered by an AI model developed by Google, but Apple will not advise users about that while using it. In fact, it’s even internally referred to as the “Apple Foundation Models 10 version,” notes Gurman. This new Siri will work, if all goes according to plan, much better than what iPhones and other Apple devices are equipped with.
Siri is perhaps best understood as the programming “personality” of the Apple Home software and hardware ecosystem, and well… well as a smart home assistant. It’s comparable to similar products from Amazon and Google, which have a few more slightly annoying quirks, such as how they might respond to basic informational queries with information dumps that start with phrases like “Here are two options!” Or it will just come right out and say something like “Uh-oh! There’s a problem.”
When used on an iPhone, Siri feels like having a smart home assistant in your pocket, which, why? If your phone is in your hand and you want to set a timer, look straight for the Clock app icon and you’ll probably just use that. If you want something that can answer questions in a chat, you can use a product like Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, or, hell, Microsoft Copilot.
With that in mind, Gurman subtly describes the new version of Siri as a productivity beast. The new version “must be able to access personal data and on-screen content to perform tasks.” That doesn’t sound like the current iteration of Siri, which feels like it’s a bit of nonsense at the moment with no context about what’s going on. It would be really powerful to have Siri able to respond well to what the user is doing, and combine the data already on their phone to provide real assistance. Based on descriptions like this, I can imagine looking at an event website, for example, and saying “Hey Siri, do I have time for this?” and get the right answer.
And Gurman says that this Siri “will be conversational, aware of the relevant context and capable of back-and-forth dialogue,” which also means that it is intended to take over the real chatbot market. Where Siri once depended on ChatGPT (arguably heavily), now, in theory, it will compete with it.
But the Apple-Google collaboration to drive the new Siri is a very interesting trivia, and most people will not pay attention or notice, because, as Gurman notes, “Apple is a product company,” and “technology startups don’t matter.” That means if the money taken in March says “Lol, Siri is still eating,” Apple will pay the price in terms of public opinion, not Google. And Google gets $1 billion of it anyway.
