Apple shipped iOS 27 this week, and for the first time in years, people are actually opening Siri on purpose.

The update includes the assistant overhaul Apple first teased over a year ago. It’s not just faster responses or better voice recognition. The whole interaction model changed. You can now have actual back-and-forth conversations without re-stating context every time. Siri remembers what you just asked about. It can see what’s on your screen and reference it. And crucially for developers, third-party apps can now plug into these capabilities through Apple Intelligence APIs.

What Actually Changed

The biggest shift is contextual awareness. Previous versions of Siri treated every query as a fresh start. Now it maintains conversation state across multiple turns. Ask “What’s the weather?” and follow up with “What about tomorrow?” and it actually works.

Screen awareness matters more than it sounds. Siri can now see what you’re looking at and act on it. Get a text with an address, ask Siri to add it to your calendar, and it just does it. No copying, no app switching, no clarification dance.

The third-party integration is where this gets interesting for developers. Apps can now expose actions and queries through SiriKit 2.0 (yes, they reused the name). Unlike the original SiriKit, which required pre-defining every possible interaction, the new version lets Siri understand natural language requests and map them to app capabilities dynamically.

Daydream: First Real Example

Fashion discovery app Daydream shipped an update the same day iOS 27 dropped, and it shows what’s actually possible now.

The app already let you save outfit photos and find similar items to buy. With iOS 27, you can ask Siri “find me that blue jacket from the photo I saved yesterday” without opening the app. Siri processes the request, Daydream searches your saved photos, runs visual search on the jacket, and returns shoppable results. All through voice.

Daydream also added on-device image understanding using Apple Intelligence’s vision APIs. Point your camera at someone’s outfit, and the app can identify individual pieces and find where to buy them. The processing happens locally, which means it’s fast and your photos don’t get uploaded anywhere.

This isn’t revolutionary technology. Google Lens has done visual search for years. But the integration is what matters. It works the way you’d actually use it, through the assistant you can trigger hands-free, with apps you already have installed.

The Superhuman Bet on Agents

While Apple focused on making its assistant marginally less frustrating, Superhuman is going bigger. The email client acquired Fathom this week, a YC-backed meeting notetaker with 400,000 monthly active users.

Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra said the acquisition is about building “agentic work” features. That’s startup-speak for “AI that does tasks for you instead of just suggesting things.” Fathom already transcribes meetings and generates summaries. Superhuman already drafts emails. Put them together and you get an assistant that can theoretically join your meeting, take notes, and send follow-up emails without you touching a keyboard.

Whether anyone wants this is a different question. Fyxer, another AI email assistant that OpenAI profiled this week, takes a more cautious approach. It uses GPT-4o fine-tuning to learn each user’s writing style, then drafts emails that actually sound like you. The key feature, according to OpenAI’s case study, is that people trust it. That’s telling. The biggest problem with AI assistants isn’t capability anymore. It’s whether you trust them not to send something embarrassing on your behalf.

Superhuman’s Fathom acquisition makes sense if you believe we’re headed toward agents that handle entire workflows. It’s a risky bet if we’re not.

Who Should Care

If you’re building iOS apps, the new SiriKit is worth looking at. The bar for useful voice interactions just dropped significantly. You don’t need to imagine every possible command anymore. Just expose your app’s core capabilities and let Siri figure out the mapping.

If you’re working on productivity tools, the Superhuman acquisition is a signal. Email and calendar apps are all racing toward the same vision of AI that handles routine work autonomously. Whether users actually want to cede that much control is still an open question, but the products are getting built anyway.

If you’re just an iPhone user annoyed that Siri has been useless for a decade, iOS 27 is worth the update. It’s not perfect, but it’s the first version that feels like it might actually save you time instead of wasting it.

Apple took years to ship this. Google Assistant and Alexa have been more capable in some ways for a while now. But Apple has the platform integration advantage, and they’re finally using it. We’ll see if it’s enough.