Apple’s upgraded Siri goes live, but key AI functions are unavailable in the EU and China

Apple’s upgraded Siri, which was positioned as a major step toward a more AI-driven assistant, is arriving with practical gaps. Reporting on the rollout says the new Siri capabilities will not work in the European Union or China for now, even as Apple prepares the assistant for broader release elsewhere.

In China, a market Apple depends on for iPhone growth, the limitations mean users are expected to rely on older apps and existing assistant functionality on current Apple devices rather than the new Siri experience. The reporting also frames the situation as a missed chance to immediately match the pace of AI features users have been seeing from other platforms.

Apple is describing at least part of the update as a beta, which indicates ongoing development rather than a final product release. That matters because the same reporting notes that many of the improvements were teased at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but were not actually available at the time the update was discussed.

The assistant upgrade is described as drawing on Apple’s own “world knowledge” rather than relying on Google search data. The report also says that Gemini, Google’s AI model, powers many of Siri’s new capabilities, aligning Siri more closely with the broader Apple Intelligence effort that Apple has been building around AI features.

The reporting also points to boundaries in what Siri can do right away. While it includes references to child safety features, it suggests the overall set of capabilities is narrower than what consumers may have been led to expect. It further quotes Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, addressing concerns about whether Siri is good enough to compete with AI assistants already on the market for years.

Apple’s stated approach, according to the reporting, has been to keep refining while emphasizing how the assistant is meant to serve people using context from what’s happening on a phone. The company’s challenge is credibility, particularly after years of customers looking for Siri to catch up to generative AI assistants that have become mainstream.

For consumers and app developers, the near-term patchiness raises a coordination problem. New Siri features typically depend on a mix of device hardware, software rollout timing, and regional compliance. If Apple’s AI assistant capabilities are throttled in the EU and China, the developer ecosystem behind those workflows may also have to wait for the same capabilities to reach users.

What Apple does not clarify in the reporting is the precise reason for the EU and China gaps, including whether they are primarily regulatory, technical, or partnership-related. Apple also has not, in the materials referenced here, offered a timeline for when the missing Siri functions will arrive in those markets, leaving users to watch the next beta iterations and software updates closely.