Apple just handed Siri over to Google, and it's costing them a billion dollars a year

iOS 27 landed this month, and with it the first version of Siri actually running on Google's technology instead of Apple's own model.

Under the deal, Apple is paying Google roughly $1 billion a year to license Gemini for a rebuilt Siri, on top of the separate multi-billion dollar search deal the two companies already have. The new Siri launched on 14 September in English only, functioning as a proper chatbot capable of web search, image generation, coding help and multi step commands, a genuine step up from the assistant that has spent a decade struggling to set a timer reliably.

Five more languages, including French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, are due to follow in October. The European Union and China are getting neither. Apple has pointed to unresolved compliance requirements under the EU's Digital Markets Act and separate regulatory hurdles in China, and has not given a timeline for either region to catch up.

After years of Siri jokes and half finished promises about a smarter assistant, this is Apple quietly admitting it needed outside help to compete with ChatGPT and Gemini's own consumer apps. Handing a chunk of its most important upcoming feature to a company it competes with directly in search and hardware is a significant call, even with Apple's own foundation models reportedly still running underneath parts of the experience.

For English speaking users in the US, the wait is over. For everyone else, especially in the EU and China, Siri's glow up is happening somewhere else for now, and there is no confirmed date for when that changes.