The Siri AI icon, from Apple’s developer announcement opening Siri AI to all developers. Image: Apple
Any app can now plug into Siri AI. With the first iOS 27.3 betas on Tuesday, Apple opened a Developer Preview that lets every developer bring their app’s content and actions into its rebuilt assistant, and introduced “skills” that teach Siri AI how to string several of those actions together into one job. Apple says the features reach customers “in a few months”, with App Store submissions opening in the spring.
What changes for apps
Until now, Siri AI could only work with apps whose features fit Apple’s predefined categories, such as messaging, to-do lists or audiobooks. The preview drops that limit. Developers expose their own actions through App Intents, the framework they already use for Shortcuts and widgets, and Siri AI can carry them out from a request in plain words, “from checking a delivery to booking a reservation to placing an order”, Apple says.
Apple’s documentation spells out how far that goes. People won’t have to name the app if it is on screen, has a Live Activity running or came up earlier in the conversation: someone waiting for a ride share could simply say “change my ride pickup to a new address”. Siri AI can also act on an app in the background when it is named, and pass content from one app to another, such as finding saved sneakers in a shopping app and sending them to a partner through a messaging app. Results appear in cards that carry the app’s own design.
Siri AI can also surface anything in the Spotlight semantic index, not only items that match Apple’s schemas, and there is no new entitlement or programme to join.
How app skills work
Skills are for requests too messy for a single action. A shopping app, Apple’s guide to app skills suggests, could explain how to search for items, fill a basket, pick payment and delivery and confirm the order. Each skill is a Markdown file called SKILL.md, with a name and a one-line description at the top that Siri reads to decide whether the skill fits a request, and plain-language instructions below: which actions fit together, which to prefer, what to avoid and any knowledge specific to the app.
The format will look familiar to anyone who has used Agent Skills, the add-on format Anthropic created for Claude, which also puts a name and description at the top of a SKILL.md file. Apple is clear that skills are guidance rather than a script: “You can’t use app skills to enforce deterministic behavior,” its documentation says, and Siri AI won’t simply run the listed steps in order.
To help, Xcode gains a Siri Integration Advisor that suggests fixes to an app’s intents, and a new SiriEvaluations framework lets developers script requests and check how Siri handles them as their code changes.
When iPhone owners get it
Not yet. During the preview, Siri AI works with an app only in builds developers run themselves or share with internal TestFlight testers, not with external testers or App Store versions. Apple says the APIs may change, and that it will “follow up with more details about the terms and usage policies” for these experiences.
Apple’s own apps go first. The beta starts rolling out new Siri AI actions across Calendar, Files, Finder, Journal, Mail, Maps, Messages, Music, Notes, Photos, Preview, Reminders, Safari, Shortcuts and Weather, so people can ask it to find a coffee shop they visited last week or archive files they haven’t opened in over a year.
Where Siri AI works
Siri AI needs an Apple Intelligence device and runs in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, the last four added in iOS 27.2 last week. Apple says Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese are coming “soon”, but gives no date. It is still unavailable in the EU on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, and not offered to anyone under 13. Siri AI also has daily usage limits, which Apple says will be expandable “for a fee in the future”.
The same beta begins Apple Intelligence testing in mainland China, which arrives in December with Alibaba’s Qwen but without Siri AI. Anyone outside the supported countries, or still waiting for access, can check our Siri AI waitlist guide.
Why it matters
A capable assistant is only as useful as the apps it can reach, and Siri AI has so far been limited to Apple’s own apps and a narrow set of app categories. Opening it to every developer, weeks after Apple let AI agents edit files in Pages, Keynote and Numbers, is the clearest sign yet that Apple wants Siri to be the agent that runs your iPhone, though critics doubt that will be enough to catch rivals.
Sources: Apple Developer: Siri AI is now open to all developers; Apple: Siri AI Developer Preview; Apple: Orchestrating complex actions with app skills; Apple Developer: Get ready with the latest beta releases.
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