Siri AI Lands in India With iOS 27 — But Still Can't Speak Hindi

If you updated your iPhone to iOS 27 this week hoping to finally chat with a smarter Siri, here's the catch: it only understands English right now, even if you're in Mumbai, Chennai, or anywhere else in India.

What actually shipped

Apple pushed out the public beta of its rebuilt Siri AI alongside iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 this week, months after unveiling the overhaul at WWDC in June. The new assistant is Apple's biggest rework of Siri since it launched in 2011, and the headline detail is who's powering it under the hood: Google's Gemini models, running through a mix of on-device processing and Apple's own "Private Cloud Compute" servers for anything that needs more horsepower.

That's a notable shift for a company that has spent a decade building its reputation on doing things in-house. Apple isn't handing Google your data directly, though — the Gemini model was custom-built for Apple's use, and Apple says none of it is used to train Google's own products. Whether that distinction holds up under scrutiny is something privacy researchers will likely keep testing.

The India gap

Here's where it gets interesting for Indian readers. Apple deliberately excluded the EU and mainland China from this rollout because of regulatory friction — the EU's Digital Markets Act requires interoperability commitments Apple hasn't sorted out yet, and China has its own rules on foreign AI models operating locally. India didn't get excluded. Apple's own feature-availability listing includes "English (India)" as a supported variant, meaning Indian iPhone users with a compatible device can turn Siri AI on right now.

But turn it on and it still only speaks English. There's no Hindi, no Tamil, no Bengali, no Marathi — nothing from the list of languages that cover the vast majority of India's roughly 500 million smartphone users who don't primarily operate in English. Apple has confirmed French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish are coming in October. Not one Indian language made that list.

That's a real gap in a market where voice assistants arguably matter more than in English-first countries, precisely because typing in a regional script on a phone keyboard is still clunkier than speaking. It also raises a data-residency question Indian users should keep an eye on: anything Siri AI sends to Apple's cloud servers for processing is happening on infrastructure outside India, which is the kind of detail that matters under India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act — the law governing how personal data collected in India gets handled, including where it's allowed to be processed and stored.

Why Apple went with Gemini at all

Apple's software chief Craig Federighi has been pushing back on the idea that the new Siri is just another chatbot bolted onto the phone.

"We see Siri not as a separate chatbot, but rather as an integral but conversational tool that you use in the moment," Federighi said, describing how the assistant is meant to work across apps and personal context rather than as a standalone app you open to ask questions.

We covered the original $1 billion Apple-Google deal when it first surfaced late last year. This week's rollout is that deal actually showing up on people's phones, not just a plan on paper anymore.

What to actually expect if you install it

• Siri AI needs a reasonably recent iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or Vision Pro — older hardware won't get it at all.
• It's opt-in through the iOS 27 public beta channel, not forced on every user immediately.
• English is the only language at launch, everywhere, including in India.
• The full public release (out of beta) is expected this fall alongside the wider iOS 27 rollout.

For Indian developers building voice or assistant features, this is also a small signal worth noting: even a company with Apple's resources is choosing to stagger language support rather than launch everywhere at once, which says something about how hard reliable multilingual voice AI still is to get right — particularly for languages with less training data available than English has.

The bigger question isn't whether Siri AI eventually learns Hindi or Tamil — it almost certainly will. It's how long "eventually" turns out to be, and whether Apple treats Indian-language support as a priority or an afterthought once the English rollout is stable. Given how the October language list shaped up, the early signs point toward the latter.