What Siri’s New AI Is and Whether Your Device Can Use It
Siri’s new AI is Apple’s upgraded, personalized assistant that works like a text-based conversational app similar to ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude, syncing your chats across iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a seamless experience.
This guide is for people who want Siri to behave more like a modern Apple AI assistant, with conversations you can type, revisit, and organize instead of one-off voice commands. Before you start, you need to confirm that your device supports Apple Intelligence, because only those products can run Siri AI in the first place. Your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch must support Apple Intelligence for Siri AI, and some features, like changing Siri’s voice pace and expressivity, are limited to selected newer hardware. Devices that support Siri AI at launch include selected recent iPhone, iPad Pro and Air models with M1 or later, Mac with Apple silicon, Apple Watch Series 9 or later, and Vision Pro. Note that Apple Watch needs to be paired with an Apple Intelligence supported iPhone to run Siri AI.
Step-by-Step: Turn On and Tune Siri’s New AI App
Once your hardware is eligible, think of Siri AI as a Claude-like chat app that lives on all your Apple devices and keeps your conversations synced through iCloud. You can type or speak to it, and your queries become ongoing threads instead of disappearing responses. The gotcha is that setup and options live partly in Settings and partly inside the Siri app, and they may differ slightly between iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
- Update your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, or Vision Pro to the latest software that includes Siri AI, making sure the device is on the compatibility list for Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.
- Open the new Siri app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac; you’ll see a text-based conversational interface where you can type or use voice to ask questions.
- If your conversations are not visible, tap the X icon at the top to exit the current view and return to the all conversations screen.
- Tap the three-lines menu icon and choose either Grid or List to set how your past Siri conversations are displayed, depending on how much you want to see at once.
- On iPhone or iPad, open Settings (or System Settings on Mac), select Siri, and under Opens To choose whether the Siri app launches to A New Conversation or Recent Conversations.
- Still in the Siri settings, tap Keep Conversations and choose 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever, knowing that selecting a shorter period will permanently delete older chats immediately.
After this one-time setup, every question you ask via the Siri voice assistant is saved into the Siri app, alongside anything you type there, and everything syncs across your signed-in iCloud devices. Remember that some advanced Siri AI behaviour, like changing pace and expressivity, will only appear on specific newer models.
Customize Conversation Views and History for Everyday Use
Once Siri AI is running, the main comfort upgrade is making the conversation list behave in a way that fits how your brain works. You can switch between List and Grid to decide whether you want more items on one screen or bigger, more spacious tiles. If you often jump back into older answers, List view shows more at a glance; if you prefer a lighter, more visual layout, Grid may feel cleaner.
The preview setting is where you choose how much of each answer is visible on the conversations screen. In Siri settings, you can set Preview to None or to between 1 and 5 lines of text. If you select None, the Conversations screen will only show chat titles, which is good if you care about privacy around other people. Choosing 1–5 lines reveals that many lines of the answer so you can scan what’s inside without opening the full chat. All of this is synced through iCloud, which means your past Siri conversations stay available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a consistent experience.
Control What Stays, What Deletes, and How Siri Opens
Siri AI can quickly become a second brain, which means it can also turn into clutter unless you keep its history under control. In the Siri settings on iOS or macOS, the Keep Conversations option is the main switch: 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever. If you move from Forever to 30 Days, any chat older than 30 days is permanently deleted at once, so decide whether you need old work or study threads first.
You can also clean up manually inside the Siri app. On the Conversations screen in List view, use a two-finger drag gesture to select multiple conversations in one move, then tap the trash icon to delete them. This gesture behaves like selection in Mail or Messages and is faster than tapping Select and ticking items one by one. Another small but meaningful choice is how the app opens: in Settings > Siri, the Opens To option lets you decide if Siri launches straight into a new conversation or into Recent Conversations. If you treat Siri like a daily AI notebook, Recent Conversations makes sense; if you use it more like a quick helper, opening to a fresh chat keeps things focused.
Is the New Siri AI Setup Worth It?
Setting up Siri AI is worth it if you want your Apple AI assistant to feel more like a modern chat-based tool than a one-off voice helper. Once configured, Siri behaves like an app similar to Claude, storing your conversations, syncing them across Apple devices through iCloud, and giving you control over how much history you see and keep. The main things to watch for are device limits and feature gaps: not all compatible devices get Siri AI, and some features such as changing pace and expressivity only appear on specific newer models. For most people, a short session in Settings to tune view style, auto-delete, and default opening behaviour will make Siri feel calmer, cleaner, and more personal without much effort.
