3 Minutes
Apple’s assistant is about to get a serious upgrade — and if you’re signed up as a developer, you might try it within days. Mark Gurman reports that Apple plans to push iOS 26.4 Beta 1 around the week of February 23, delivering the first public taste of a much smarter Siri.
This isn’t a cosmetic tweak. Behind the scenes Apple has tapped Google’s latest language work: Gemini 3, a model with roughly 1.2 trillion parameters. Apple calls its tuned version the Apple Foundation Model (AFM) v10. The result? Siri that understands the contents of your device in context and can act on that understanding.
So what can this new Siri actually do? Short answer: real work. Ask when a restaurant reservation is on Tuesday and Siri will scan your emails, messages and calendar to find the booking and answer. Give it an instruction such as “find my driver’s license photo and email it to my insurer” and Siri can execute the full workflow as an agent—locating the file and sending the message without you lifting another finger.
There’s a caveat. iOS 26.4’s Siri is engineered for task execution, not for long, chatty conversations. Think assistant-as-doer rather than assistant-as-chatbot. The fuller, back-and-forth conversational Siri that more closely resembles a chat AI is expected to arrive with iOS 27, likely as a beta after WWDC in June.
Interested in trying it now? Be realistic: beta software is buggy, battery life can take a hit, and some apps may misbehave. If you still want in, here’s the path developers will follow to enroll and install the update:
- Open Settings on the iPhone.
- Go to General, then Software Update.
- Tap Beta Updates at the top of the screen.
- Select iOS 26 Developer Beta and follow the prompts to download.
Back up your device before installing — rolling back from a developer beta often requires wiping the iPhone. Do not skip that step.
There’s an economic footnote that matters: this capability comes from a high-profile deal between Apple and Google, reportedly around $1 billion, which lets Apple package and tune Gemini for iPhone use. That arrangement explains how Apple accelerated an AI leap without building everything from scratch.
Expect an incremental experience with 26.4: faster task automation, smarter local context understanding, and hands-off actions that save tiny frictions across daily life. The grander conversational shift, the one that will let Siri sustain a natural dialogue and remember context across turns, is still on the roadmap for the next major release.
Will everyone see immediate, dramatic change? No. But if you value convenience and are willing to accept the quirks of beta software, this is the first version of Siri that feels like it’s actually doing things for you, not just answering questions. Try it, test it, and tell Apple what breaks—this is where the next era of iPhone assistants takes shape.
Leave a Comment