Siri AI makes the Apple Watch finally feel like a wrist computer

Siri has been on the Apple Watch since day one, though I’m usually hard-pressed to find people who actually make good use of it. It’s kind of just… been there — mostly as a way to set timers when my hands are full. But after playing around with the watchOS 27 developer beta, I get the sense that’ll start to change. Not for everyone, and definitely not overnight, but the upgrade from plain ol’ Siri to Siri AI feels like a significant shift in how Apple — and other tech companies — think we ought to be using our smartwatches.

To be clear: If all you want Siri on the wrist to do is set an alarm or get the weather forecast, by golly, it’s still good at that. But whereas I previously found the Apple Watch to be useful for health and fitness tracking with a side of notification triage, Siri AI lets me do more actual computing from the wrist. A big reason for that is it doesn’t feel like there are two separate Siri experiences on your phone and watch.

“Our main goal with the integration with Watch is to make sure that that experience was consistent. What we don’t want is the user having this experience where they ask Siri in one place, and they get a different answer if they ask [in] another,” says David Clark, Apple’s senior director of software engineering for watchOS. “By having the watch tightly connected with the phone, having that personal context drive the whole experience, we can start setting the expectation that it’s one Siri AI.”

The disconnect between phone and watch was an issue I had last year while testing Gemini on the Pixel Watch 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 8. I often struggled to gauge when it made sense to experiment with Gemini on the wrist versus pulling out my phone. The use cases suggested to me were either to answer random questions, which the phone was still faster at, or to complete complex queries that spanned multiple apps. Prompts like “Remember to remind me to bring an umbrella when it rains” or “Create a K-pop-inspired playlist in YouTube Music.” Gemini on the wrist stank at the former, and while it could generate a playlist, it wasn’t an organic request I’d ever really make. When I asked it to recommend a local coffee shop and text the location to a coworker, I got one 40 blocks away. I got better results on my phone, even if I had to manually text the location.

I haven’t really had this issue with Siri AI on watchOS 27. Partly because Siri AI is very upfront about what prompts it can’t do and will suggest alternatives. For example, it can’t do reminders based on weather forecasts, but it can set reminders based on when I leave a location. As for the phone versus wrist search results, I haven’t noticed any wide discrepancies. In fact, the queries you make on the wrist are stored in the same app as on your phone.

Thanks to often-annoying ecosystem lock-in, the Apple Watch is a nifty note-taking device on-the-go. Siri AI makes referencing notes and reminder lists on my phone or MacBook easier because I can just ask it to bring up the contents. At Michael’s buying embroidery floss I was able to ask Siri to bring up the list of thread colors I’d stuck in the Reminders app, and then check them off on the wrist as I hunted through the haphazardly stocked bins. Likewise, it’s easy to start looking something up while you’re out and continue later on your phone or MacBook’s Siri AI app.

The main drawback of Siri AI is it’s a new habit you have to build. When I had to think fast, I often didn’t remember my watch’s upgrades. You still have to deal with latency while Siri AI thinks, and even if Big Tech says LLMs understand naturally worded prompts, it always works better the more specifically you word your requests. As an AI assistant, it’s prone to goofs. If you’re an impatient person, chances are Siri AI on the wrist will irk you from time to time.

Workout Buddy — the AI-powered motivational fitness “coach” — is getting a few upgrades. In watchOS 26, Workout Buddy mostly surfaced milestones. This year, it’s expanding what insights get surfaced and now works in Spanish.

“This year we’ve added facts that look even deeper at your trends, not just based on today’s workout versus historic [ones],” says Clark. “If you’ve just conquered a hill, put in a little extra sweat, we’ll know that the pace you achieved was in spite of elevation, and so it’ll congratulate you for hitting the top of that hill and keeping on going.”

My workouts have been less intense as of late, so I’ve yet to get any of these new insights. If you were hoping Siri AI on the wrist would offer health recs, that’s not in the cards right now. I’m personally relieved that Workout Buddy or Siri AI aren’t more proactive about health advice. However, Clark says that you can use Siri AI’s broad world knowledge to get “science-backed answers” for questions like “What is LDL cholesterol?” or recommend stretches for running recovery. In other words, it’s mostly intended to be a resource to help people quickly access information.

Another nifty update is the new App launcher, a kind of quick menu for the apps you use most frequently or most recently. As someone who tends to use the same six apps on the Watch, this has been incredibly convenient. You might find it less so if you use watchfaces with a lot of complications, but I’ve been trying a more zen watchface featuring a photo of my derpy cat. This allows aesthetic flexibility without sacrificing functionality.

But my favorite watchOS 27 feature is the new single tap gesture. Where the pinchy pinch lets you scroll, and the wrist flick dismisses screens, the single tap lets you select. Combined with the smart stack and raise to talk gesture, it’s super easy to use the Apple Watch single-handedly. I’m a gesture power-user, and this has made it easier for me to quickly check information without ever needing a second hand. If you don’t make use of these features, I highly encourage giving gestures another go

I’m still experimenting with various parts of watchOS 27, but so far, it feels like the culmination of several updates over the past three to four years. The expansion of gestures, smart stack widgets, and now Siri AI make the Apple Watch today feel like a very different device than it was in 2022. One by one, the features were neat but somewhat iterative. With the arrival of Siri AI, these disparate parts start to coalesce into a bigger picture: a watch that can finally be a useful wrist computer. It’s not all the way there just yet, but even so — I’m still pretty excited.