Apple has handed Siri to Google, and Amazon's Alexa+ has reached Australia

Apple's most consequential decision about its own assistant turned out to be a purchasing decision. The rebuilt Siri the company announced on 8 June 2026 runs on a Gemini model licensed from Google, according to reporting by Bloomberg and CNBC.

Apple made the announcement at its developer conference. Its newsroom release quoted Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, promising “a profoundly more intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable Siri”. Apple said the assistant can draw on personal context to search a user's messages, emails and photos, act across apps and answer questions about what is on screen, and that it ships as a free update this northern autumn across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27.

Apple's release does not mention Google. Bloomberg reported in November 2025 that Apple was nearing a deal worth about US$1 billion a year for a 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini model to run the rebuilt assistant, and CNBC reported on 12 January 2026 that Apple had chosen Gemini for the job. Neither company has published the terms, so the billion dollar figure should be read as those outlets' reporting rather than an established fact. The result is an assistant whose reasoning Apple buys from its largest search partner.

The company executing that strategy is also changing hands. Apple announced on 20 April 2026 that Tim Cook will become executive chairman and that John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, becomes chief executive on 1 September 2026. Board chair Arthur Levinson said in the same release that the board believes “John is the best possible leader to succeed Tim”.

Apple's headset plans have narrowed. The company shipped a refreshed Vision Pro with an M5 chip, announced on 15 October 2025 and priced from US$3,499. MacRumors reported on 3 June 2026 that the analyst Ming Chi Kuo believes Ternus cancelled both a second Vision Pro and a lighter Vision Air, leaving two glasses products in development: AI glasses Kuo forecasts for 2027 and display equipped AR glasses for 2029 or later. Kuo wrote that removing the Vision Pro line “was the right call”.

Amazon has done roughly what it said it would do, slowly. Alexa+ began as a United States early access product on new Echo hardware announced in New York on 30 September 2025, where CNBC reported prices of US$99.99 for the Echo Dot Max, US$219.99 each for the Echo Studio and Echo Show 11, and US$179.99 for the Echo Show 8.

Amazon's newsroom now lists Alexa+ as available in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, France and Australia. The Australian rollout began on 6 August 2026 as an early access program that is free while it runs. Amazon says that once early access ends, Alexa+ will be included with Prime at no extra cost, or will cost AU$29.99 a month for customers without Prime. More than ten further countries are flagged for 2027. Amazon's enterprise counterpart, the agentic workspace Amazon Quick Suite, was announced by AWS in October 2025.

Google has kept moving on its own models. Sundar Pichai announced Gemini 3 on 18 November 2025, superseding Gemini 2.5. At Google's 2026 developer conference, Elizabeth Reid, vice president of Search, wrote that AI Mode had passed one billion monthly users with queries “more than doubling every quarter”, that Gemini 3.5 Flash had become the default model in AI Mode globally, and that agents which watch the web on a user's behalf, along with agentic booking, would arrive over the northern summer for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

For households, the differences between the three have thinned considerably. All three assistants now hold a conversation, act across applications, and put the better half of the feature set behind a payment, whether that is Prime membership, a Google AI subscription or the purchase of an Apple device.

Three things remain open. Apple has not published independent verification of its claim that queries routed to a Google model stay private. Ternus takes over on 1 September 2026 with the largest AI commitment in Apple's history already signed. And no company in this group has published error rates for the assistants now being installed in millions of homes.