Siri AI adds five languages today, but the EU is still locked out

Apple has widened Siri AI, its rebuilt assistant, to five more languages: French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. The change arrives today with the 27.2 software updates, and the feature is still labeled a beta.

Apple says Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese will follow before the end of the year. Counting English, which Apple lists alongside the new languages, that would take Siri AI to ten languages.

Who gets Siri AI today, and who does not

Siri AI ships in the 27.2 releases of Apple’s operating systems for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro. Apple says it needs a device that supports Apple Intelligence and has its language set to one of the supported options. The list now reads English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Two restrictions matter for readers outside the US. First, Apple says Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. The company adds that it is “working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward”, and gives no timeline. Second, the feature is not offered to users under 13.

The wording also separates two lists. Apple Intelligence as a whole works with 16 language settings, including Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Swedish and Simplified Chinese. Siri AI covers only a subset of them, so a user with a German or Italian device can have Apple Intelligence but not the new assistant.

Server-side limits and a fee that is coming

Apple describes Siri AI as a more personal and conversational version of Siri. It draws on messages, emails and photos, reads what is on the screen, and can carry out tasks inside apps, such as drafting an email or editing and sharing photos. It also pulls in up-to-date information from the web. Those are Apple’s own descriptions, and the announcement offers no benchmarks or independent tests.

The fine print is more revealing. Features that depend on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits. Apple names Siri AI, the intelligent photo editing tools, Image Playground and the AFM 3 Cloud models in Shortcuts. The limits can vary with the feature, the complexity of the request, system demand and other factors, and Apple does not publish a number. It also says expanded access “will be available for a fee in the future”, without a price or a date.

For someone in Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Lisbon or Madrid, that means the assistant is free to try now, but heavy use may hit a ceiling that Apple has not quantified.

What to watch as the rollout widens

The analysis here is about what would confirm or contradict Apple’s claims, and the first signal is privacy. Apple says Siri AI does not compromise user privacy. In our earlier explainer on Private Cloud Compute, we noted that Apple’s design for cloud requests is only partly open to inspection. Apple released a security guide and a research environment, but only some components came under a limited-use license rather than an open-source one. Its top bounty for a remote compromise exposing user requests is $1,000,000. Whether researchers find flaws will say more than any marketing line.

The second signal is the daily cap. The same explainer pointed out that Apple has not said how much of Siri AI runs on the device, and the usage limits suggest some requests leave it. A fee for extra capacity would change the economics of a feature that has so far been part of the operating system.

The third is reach beyond phones. Apple’s new Apple TV 4K, priced at $299 and on sale from November 13, brings Siri AI to the living room, but our report noted that EU buyers need a compatible iPhone or iPad for it, so the EU gap follows the hardware. The language news is also uneven: that article lists English support for eight markets at launch, so the Apple TV starts narrower than the phone.

The EU is the open question. Apple made a similar move in 2024, when it held back AI features in Europe amid regulatory hurdles, as we covered in Apple postpones AI features in Europe. Two years on, Apple’s statement still points to talks rather than a deal. Apple does not say which rule is the obstacle in this case, and the announcement does not state the reason, so none should be assumed.

What the source does not establish is how well Siri AI performs in the new languages. Apple gives no accuracy data, no list of features that may be missing in some languages, and only the general warning that some features may not be available in all regions or languages. Readers who switch their device language to use it should expect gaps, since the product is explicitly a beta.