Apple’s Vision Pro Will Stick AI Siri Right in Your Face

The $3,500 Vision Pro is still getting a small ounce of love from Apple. At WWDC 2026, the company announced that the next version of its “spatial” operating system supports its new agentic AI Siri capabilities.

Siri is everything in this new update, and Apple promises users won’t have to go far to access its AI assistant. On Vision Pro, you can simply look at a 3D visualization of Siri in your field of view and ask the chatbot any number of inane queries. This version of Siri appears as a giant, floating marble-like ball that will stay cemented in virtual space wherever you place it. While Apple says you’ll be able to change Siri’s voice, it’s unclear whether you’ll be able to change the assistant’s name—an option that’s been around since iOS 18 in the pre-AI days. Hopefully, we’ll be able to invoke it by saying “Hello, Orb.”

In all Apple products, from Macs to iPhones and beyond, the new Siri is supposed to manage your devices by collating all your files, emails, and messages. It should be able to perform some agentic tasks, such as looking up your files and then offering details on each one. For Vision Pro, Apple promised users can look around their environments and ask questions about what they see. We’ve seen similar features on devices like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but that device’s AI descriptions can be very hit or miss. What’s likely more useful is the ability to look at virtual objects and apps running in your field of view and ask questions about what you see.

There are few other non-AI improvements coming to visionOS 27. For one, Panorama photos can now be viewed as spatial scenes, which adds the same pseudo-3D effects as other spatial photos. You can add panoramas to “My Environments,” which means you can inhabit some of your memories in a virtual setting. In addition, Apple’s adding a new “Thórsmörk Environment” to Vision Pro with a river scene illuminated by the aurora borealis at night.

There are a few smaller, though welcome, updates, including expandable notifications and curved windows for apps like Safari, Apple TV and Freeform. The headset should also connect to Wi-Fi up to 3X faster on startup. Perhaps my most requested feature—as somebody who has such a hard time with screen recording in Vision Pro—is the addition of high-quality unfoveated screen recording. This allows the user to record up to three minutes of content that hopefully ups the clarity of what you can usually get from the headset’s internal sensors.

Apple’s AI is using Gemini AI for these on- and off-device AI summaries, so we’ll have to see how accurate they are when these features arrive in a public beta next month before a full release later this fall. While visionOS 26 fixed those digital “Personas” so they didn’t look like cartoon renditions of users’ bodies, there aren’t many landmark changes coming to visionOS 27. On Mac, Apple refined the look of Liquid Glass so text was far easier to read on smaller LCD displays. Vision Pro, the originator of the Liquid Glass UI, doesn’t need as much refinement. All other Apple devices are getting a few extra updates to improve stability and performance, and Vision Pro may also benefit.

The next step for visionOS is to make it compatible with some version of smart glasses or AR glasses. We may not see new glasses until 2027 at the earliest, so for now we’ll just have to accept that the Vision Pro is Apple’s only “spatial” device, and we may not see many landmark changes to the operating system until new products arrive some time in the future.

This story is developing…