This fall, with watchOS 27, Apple Watch will finally get access to Siri AI with a software update that turns your wrist into the most widely-used wearable AI platform on Earth.
That’s not hyperbole. Siri AI on Apple Watch is arguably the most important feature to this year’s watchOS update. Though it didn’t get much attention at WWDC, the update also offers a preview into how Apple will wrap AI into its future smart glasses.
One important caveat is to observe that Siri AI on Apple Watch still requires your Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone to do the heavy lifting. The interaction is easy: tap the Digital Crown and Apple’s new glowing icon appears on screen (you’ll also find this in the App viewer). The experience looks identical across every Apple device — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro — making the assistant feel like one consistent product rather than a different experience per device.
The Siri app lets you access all your past Siri conversations (unless you turn that feature off) and pick up an old conversation right where you left off. Conversation history syncs privately through iCloud, so you can start an exchange on your iPhone and continue it later from your wrist. You can also pin a conversation you expect to revisit.
You can also use Siri on the Apple Watch to ask questions, launch apps, or even get more complex responses, such as step counts on a specific day. It can also answer difficult and specific queries with detailed answers and can summon real-time information from the web.
That’s key, of course, as it means the smartwatch on your wrist can help you access specific details from all your contextual information; it can get details from messages, emails, and notes, for instance. Or you might use it to find a number and call it, access your door code, or look up customer information for business — all without touching your phone.
One of Apple’s own examples demonstrates this well: Saying, “Show me photos from when I went to Spain,” results in precisely that. You can also ask follow-up questions and keep the conversational going naturally, rather than being confined to single, isolated commands.
Beyond personal data, the watch can also act in apps — get directions home, send an email, play a playlist, or even more specifically, “Play the song that Brandon sent me.”
Context runs deep. A new Call Context tool can proactively surface relevant information from across your apps when phoning a business or help locate a confirmation code from Mail while calling an airline. This arguably challenges a real pain point when speaking with providers and is a good illustration of Apple’s broader AI strategy: to use on-device intelligence to remove everyday friction without asking you to track down the information yourself.
It’s frustrating that you still can’t use the Watch to remotely run applications on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. What you can do is trigger Shortcuts that run on your iPhone: enable this first on your phone by selecting the Shortcut you want and switching on “Show on Apple Watch.” Once that’s done, you can run the Shortcut from your wrist, even by voice.
That’s useful now, but as more complex apps add Shortcuts support and App Intents become more widely adopted by developers, it should be easy to trigger genuinely complex, multi-stage tasks on your iPhone from your wrist.
It’s worth noting: early hands-on testing of the watchOS 27 beta has found Siri AI genuinely impressive on personal-context queries, but still buggy in places. This is very much a first-generation feature — promising, but not yet fully reliable.
Developers are already beginning to experiment with the potential for wearable AI. One of the best current examples is Granola, which just launched a Watch app built specifically to take notes during in-person meetings away from a laptop. The idea is that you tap your wrist, the screen turns green and makes a sound to alert your companion(s) that it is recording and then you carry on as normal. Once the meeting stops, switch the app off and you’ll get polished notes with meeting summaries and action items provided to you.
The only reservation I have with Granola is the lack of documentation on privacy and data retention on the developer site. Tools like these will almost certainly become more private, more secure, and more prevalent once Apple’s on-device dictation APIs extend fully to watchOS.
That last thing is perhaps the most important as wearable AI emerges: the decisions Apple makes around watchOS and SiriAI will be foundational to its future wearable AI glasses products.
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