iOS 27 expands App Intents to deeply integrate with Siri's on-device language model, enabling natural-language invocation of app actions with richer parameter resolution and multi-step task chaining. Apps can now expose capabilities that Siri understands contextually without rigid phrase matching.
ā¢ New @AssistantIntent macro replaces boilerplate AppIntent+AssistantSchema conformances from iOS 26
ā¢ Parameter resolution now uses the on-device Foundation Models LLM for fuzzy matching instead of strict enum binding
ā¢ Intents can return structured values consumed by downstream Siri actions via the new ReturnsValue protocol
ā¢ AssistantEntity replaces the older AppEntity+AssistantSchemaProtocol pattern for entities surfaced to Siri
ā¢ Siri can now infer intent parameters from conversation context, eliminating the need for users to speak exact trigger phrases
ā¢ App Intents can be chained by Siri across multiple apps in a single request, enabling powerful cross-app automation
ā¢ Developers get built-in confirmation dialogs, disambiguation UI, and streaming response support without writing custom Siri UI code
Foundation Models is a new Apple framework introduced in iOS 27 that gives developers on-device access to the same Apple Intelligence language model powering system features, enabling text generation, structured output, and tool-calling entirely on-device without a network connection.
Visual Intelligence brings iOS 17's Visual Look Up capabilities to a new developer-facing API surface in iOS 27, letting apps pipe live camera frames or static images through on-device scene understanding to extract subjects, text, barcodes, and rich semantic labels without any cloud round-trip.
iOS 27 opens the Foundation Models framework to third-party LLM providers via a new public LanguageModel protocol, enabling anyone to integrate custom, server-based, or open-source models using the same Swift API as Apple's on-device system model.
In-depth guide
iOS 27 On-Device AI & Apple Intelligence āApp Schemas let developers describe their app's content and actions using pre-defined domain schemas (like the Calendar domain) so Siri can understand, search, and act on app data without custom NLP. Entities conforming to IndexedEntity are donated to Spotlight's semantic index, enabling natural-language queries over app content.