Siri AI Learns 5 New Languages in iOS 27.2 — Not Hindi

Apple pushed out iOS 27.2 on October 26, and the headline feature isn't a new icon or a redesigned app — it's five new languages for Siri AI, the conversational assistant that had been stuck speaking only English since it launched in September. French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish are now live in beta. Hindi, spoken by well over 600 million people, is not on the list.

What actually shipped

Siri AI is Apple's newer, more conversational layer on top of the classic Siri voice assistant, built on the Apple Intelligence features Apple has been rolling out across iOS, iPadOS and macOS. Until this update, it understood and replied in English only, which meant most of its flashier tricks — holding context across a conversation, pulling in on-screen information, handling multi-step requests — were off-limits if you spoke to your phone in anything else. iOS 27.2, alongside matching updates for iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and visionOS, changes that for five of the world's most-spoken languages, with Apple describing the rollout as a beta rather than a finished product.

Apple also named four more languages it plans to add by the end of the year: Chinese (Traditional), Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese. That's a reasonable spread of major markets, but the absence of Hindi from both the current release and that forward-looking list is the part worth sitting with.

Why the EU still can't use any of it

None of this is available to iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch users in the European Union, a restriction Apple has maintained since Apple Intelligence first launched there. Apple hasn't spelled out the exact legal trigger in this release's notes, but the pattern matches previous cases where it pointed to the EU's Digital Markets Act — a law that forces large tech platforms to open up their systems to rivals — as creating interoperability and data-sharing obligations Apple says it isn't ready to meet for these AI features. Mainland China is excluded too, for separate regulatory reasons tied to how AI services there must be reviewed and licensed.

A feature can ship for half a billion phones and still skip the one market where the assistant would need to be smartest about mixing languages mid-sentence.

The India gap, again

Code24 wrote about Siri AI's India launch back in September, when it arrived in the country without any Hindi support despite India being one of iPhone's fastest-growing markets by unit sales. Six weeks and one major update later, nothing has changed on that front. Hindi isn't just missing from this release — it isn't even in the four languages Apple has committed to for the rest of the year, which means an Indian user who doesn't default to English is looking at a wait stretching well into 2027 at the earliest.

That gap matters more in India than in most places Apple sells phones. India doesn't block Siri AI the way the EU does — there's no equivalent restriction under the DPDP Act, India's data protection law, or from MeitY, the ministry that oversees IT rules here. The assistant works fine in India; it just doesn't work in the language a huge share of the country's smartphone owners would actually prefer to use it in. For a company that keeps citing India as a priority growth market for both hardware and services revenue, shipping five European and East Asian languages before the one with the largest number of native speakers in Apple's own customer base is a hard thing to read as anything but a prioritization choice.

What to watch

A few things worth tracking from here:

• Whether Apple adds Hindi, or any other Indian language, to a future update's roadmap rather than just the current one
• Whether the EU's regulatory standoff with Apple over AI features shows any sign of resolving
• How Siri AI's quality in the five new languages compares to English at launch — beta features from Apple have historically needed a few point releases to catch up

None of this is a crisis for Apple. Siri AI will keep expanding, language by language, on a schedule Apple controls entirely. But every list of languages that leaves Hindi off it is also a small, repeated signal about whose daily use of a phone counts as the default case Apple designs for first, and whose comes later.