Siri AI Open to “All” Developers
Starting today with the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3, and visionOS 27.3 betas, a new Developer Preview enables any developer to integrate their app with Siri AI, giving businesses and developers new ways to reach and serve their customers.
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Today’s preview allows any app to bring its content and actions directly into Siri AI by using App Intents, making it easier for all apps to tap into Siri AI’s newest capabilities, including personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, natural language, and more. So people can just ask for help in their own words, and Siri AI carries out any custom action you’ve built, from checking a delivery to booking a reservation to placing an order. For complex requests, we’re also introducing skills to let you teach Siri AI how to combine several actions into a single experience. And Siri AI can now surface any entity in the Spotlight semantic index, not just the ones that fit an existing schema.
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To learn more about the new APIs, how to use them, and how to evaluate your app’s experience with Siri AI, read new documentation.
As someone who, last time I checked, doesn’t have any glimmer of hope of using Siri AI on iOS in the EU, I found this announcement vaguely insulting and highly disingenuous, but that’s Apple for you when it comes to addressing developers these days…
The app skills sound very similar to what other LLM-driven AI models offer, enabling richer understanding of complicated tasks.
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It’s also going to be a lot easier to initiate Siri actions for third-party apps. With the Siri AI Developer Preview, users don’t have to explicitly mention the app’s name in many circumstances. For instance, if a Live Activity for a ride-sharing app is active, Siri will automatically understand that a request to “change the ride address” corresponds to the app driving the Live activity.
So uh Apple basically just implemented exactly what I was looking for, in iOS/macOS 27.3. You add a skills bundle to your app, full of markdown files, providing guidance to Siri. And, clearly, any agent like Claude or Codex.
The short version is that Siri AI is no longer a specialized, domain-specific assistant but can instead work with any type of app. The longer version is that this also means Apple had to fundamentally improve the Siri AI harness during the iOS 27 cycle to support these new capabilities. For example, the updated Siri AI harness (called “agentic planner” in iOS 27’s code) can now dynamically read skills supplied by apps at runtime when performing a complex action. That’s right: Apple is also fully supporting the Markdown Agent Skills spec now with the ability for developers to supply a variety of skills in their apps to give Siri more precise instructions for longer actions and complex requests.
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And here are the new tools included in Siri AI’s agentic planner, as parsed from the iOS 27.3 beta firmware:
view_skill: This one loads an app’s instructions for a specific skill.get_skill_response: Lets the system receive a skill’s result or follow-up question.available_skills: Metadata listing the skills Siri can choose from, with their names and descriptions (but not the full body text).activated_skill_instructions: Metadata containing the loaded skill’s instructions for the current turn.Apple itself is already shipping three skills in the first beta of iOS 27.3, including one that teaches Siri how to select and edit text in the Notes app.
Apple tried to do two things. They wanted a Siri that understood what our apps could do, and a system broad enough to include apps of every shape and size. But that was never going to happen; we still had to squeeze our apps into boxes Apple picked.
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But lo, with a random post on X, I saw that Apple is finally freeing us from domains. You can supply your arbitrary app intent definitions to the system, and even supply skill files in Markdown to help Siri know how, and when, to use them.
This sounds amazing, and I didn’t think we’d see App Intents integration into Siri AI until next WWDC[…]
Like many developers, I’m extremely happy with the iOS 27.3 changes for Siri AI, where Apple did the obvious (if hard) thing and mapped tool calling to app intents.
Often one app intent works well as both a Shortcuts action and a tool, but sometimes you want one app intent for Shortcuts and another for Siri AI.
It would be great to have a way to expose an intent only to Siri AI.
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