Apple has confirmed a new generation of its voice assistant, Siri, at its Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, where the keynote address was underway. According to Bloomberg coverage from the event, the company unveiled what it is calling Siri AI and presented it as a standalone app rather than just a feature buried inside the operating system.
The company framed the new Siri as a far more capable and useful assistant, able to do much more than the basic commands long associated with the phrase hey Siri. During the keynote, Apple vice president Mike Rockwell walked the audience through use case after use case to illustrate the expanded functionality.
A central part of the announcement is that Google's Gemini underpins Apple's artificial intelligence. According to the coverage, Gemini serves as the foundation model both on the device and overall, running on the handset and in a secure cloud, something Apple framed as an important breakthrough for the assistant.
Investors reacted within minutes. The moment Siri AI was confirmed, Apple shares shot up to a session high of about 2.7 percent, before easing back toward gains of roughly 1.2 percent as the keynote continued. Analysts described the swing as a mix of buy the news and sell the news playing out almost in real time.
The confirmation was broadly in line with what Bloomberg had reported beforehand, including expectations of much higher levels of capability and functionality for the assistant. That reporting had set the stage for what Apple ultimately presented on stage.
Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, were down about 1 percent during the session. Part of that was attributed to a buy the rumor, sell the news dynamic, and part to the fact that Gemini may be replacing business Google already had with Apple, such as arrangements tied to the Safari browser.
Taken together, the move positions Siri as a more powerful assistant at the center of Apple's devices, while deepening the company's reliance on Google's model for its core AI. The full set of details was still rolling out as the keynote in Cupertino continued.