Siri AI expands to five new languages with the iOS 27.2 updates

What Apple released

Apple released version 27.2 of iOS, iPadOS, macOS and its other operating systems on 26 October 2026. The headline feature is an expansion of Siri AI, the entirely new version of Siri that launched with iOS 27 in September. According to Apple's newsroom post it is now available in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Siri AI is built on Apple Intelligence and draws on personal context to help users find things across messages, emails, photos and more. Apple says it can draft an email from scratch, edit and share photos, answer questions about what is on screen, and pull up-to-date world knowledge.

The company frames the language expansion as the first step in a global rollout, with support for Chinese (traditional), Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese coming by the end of the year.

New controls in 27.2

9to5Mac's walkthrough of the update details what else changed.

Apple also added the ability to exclude specific apps from Siri's view of your data. Users can prevent the assistant from reading from chosen apps, giving a per-app privacy control rather than an all-or-nothing switch.

Regional availability is uneven. 9to5Mac notes the new languages are not available in the EU or mainland China, consistent with Apple's staged compliance and data-handling rollout for Apple Intelligence features.

That regional carve-out is a business constraint as much as a technical one. Apple Intelligence has to work within GDPR in Europe and China's local data rules in the mainland, and Apple has been slower to switch features on in those markets than in the US. The EU rollout matters commercially because the bloc is one of Apple's largest regions.

Where the languages sit

The five new languages cover the biggest Western European and Asian markets Apple serves, but the rollout is still narrower than classic Siri, which supports dozens of languages. The gap matters because Siri AI is a different product: it is the conversational, context-aware assistant built on Apple Intelligence, not the rules-based Siri that ships on older devices.

Language support is a cascading problem for an assistant like this. Translations are only the start; Apple has to localize onscreen-awareness behaviour, refusals, privacy notices and any content filtering in each market, and it has to test the assistant against how people actually speak informally in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Apple says language support will continue to expand, with the four promised languages arriving by the end of 2026. That timeline suggests most of the remaining rollout happens in the December 27.3 or 27.4 cycles.

The update also reinforces Apple's device generation split: Siri AI needs an Apple Intelligence-capable device, so the language expansion matters most for iPhone 16 and newer hardware users.

The device split also creates an upgrade incentive: the assistant is a headline reason to move to newer hardware in the markets that just got the new languages. Apple's selling point is that Siri AI runs on-device where possible, which keeps data local but also means older phones simply do not get the feature.

Why it matters

The expansion is Apple's attempt to grow Siri AI beyond its English-only launch market. Apple Intelligence has been rolling out in stages, with the China approval making headlines this month after Apple reached a local-partner agreement. AI Lookout covered the China test-version approval in October.

The broader context is the assistant race. OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic are all pushing conversational, agentic assistants, and Apple's user base gives Siri AI a distribution advantage if it can match their capabilities.

The language list also points at where those rivals are exposed. Google's Gemini app supports more languages, but its assistant does not have Apple's on-device reach or the tight integration with messages, email and photos. Siri AI's pitch is that it can do useful work on your own data without handing that data to a cloud vendor.

Conversation recall is the sensitive part. Giving an assistant memory of past chats is powerful but raises privacy questions, which is why Apple paired it with explicit controls and app exclusions in the same release.

What to watch

Watch whether Siri AI reaches the EU in the next updates, since Apple's privacy architecture has to fit EU regulatory requirements, and whether the four remaining languages ship on Apple's promised schedule.

Watch also how conversation recall behaves in practice: whether it stays local or uses Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and whether users trust the controls enough to leave them on.

The competitive read is that Apple is widening the moat. Rivals' assistants ship in English first too, but Apple can push Siri AI to hundreds of millions of devices in markets where Google and OpenAI have weaker on-device positions. The language list is the visible evidence of that strategy.