SpotlightSearchTool is a new Foundation Models tool that lets a language model directly query your app's Core Spotlight index, enabling conversational, context-aware search over your app's own donated content. Developers can drop it into any LanguageModelSession to get AI-generated answers grounded in app data.
• Enables natural-language Q&A over app-specific content without sending data to an external server — the model reasons over your Core Spotlight index on-device.
• Zero boilerplate: one line of code adds the tool to an existing LanguageModelSession, and the model automatically decides when to invoke it.
• Supports advanced customization — GuidanceProfiles, contact resolvers, and custom pipeline stages let you tune relevance and computation for complex queries.
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 →App 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.