Siri gets Google's AI, but it is blocked in Russia

At its annual WWDC 2026 conference, held as usual in June at the Apple Park campus, Apple unveiled a revamped Siri with built-in AI from Google: the Gemini family of models. It is the first time Apple's voice assistant has leaned on technology from an outside player of this size, rather than solely on the company's own developments. Yet for a significant share of users worldwide, Russia included, the updated Siri turned out to be unavailable.

What was shown at WWDC 2026

Stacey Ford, Apple's vice president of operating systems program management, told journalists about the work on the AI features. Officially, her talk was about Spotlight search. Ford described a familiar frustration: looking for a file or an email that is definitely on your device, while search stubbornly fails to find it.

The metaphor also captured a broader problem for Apple in recent years: the market's expectations for Apple Intelligence long outran what the company could actually show the public on stage. The Google partnership was an unexpected turn for Apple, given that until fairly recently the company had bet exclusively on its own models within Apple Intelligence and repeatedly postponed launch dates for promised features. Moving to third-party technology for one of its most recognizable products, the Siri voice assistant, amounted to an admission that building top-tier models in-house, on a competitive timeline, proved harder than expected.

Launch facts:

• Venue and occasion: a presentation at the Apple Park campus during WWDC 2026
• Speaker: Stacey Ford, vice president of OS Program Management at Apple
• Technology: Siri received built-in AI based on Google models (Gemini)
• Source: the AI News portal (artificialintelligence-news.com)
• Problem: some countries and regions, Russia included, were left without access to the update

Why part of the world is left without access

Integrating Google's third-party AI into a core Apple product is a complicated step from a regulatory standpoint. It requires approvals in different jurisdictions, compliance with local data-processing requirements and, most importantly, actual availability of Google's own services in a given country. In a number of regions, Google services are restricted or unavailable altogether for infrastructure and regulatory reasons. This applies to markets where Google's presence has historically been wound down or significantly reduced, Russia included. For users in such countries, the updated Siri effectively reverts to the earlier, far less capable version of the assistant familiar from previous Apple Intelligence releases.

What this means for Russian users

In practice, owners of iPhones and other Apple devices in Russia will not get the Siri capabilities Apple showed at WWDC 2026 for the foreseeable future, at least until an alternative technological or legal solution emerges for such markets. The situation largely mirrors the experience of other large countries where Google services are historically restricted: Apple users there are also stuck with a cut-down version of the assistant, without access to its most visible new features.

For Apple, this creates a reputational fork in the road. Once again the company shows off a breakthrough technology on the year's biggest stage but cannot guarantee equal access to it worldwide, which feeds the already long-standing criticism of the pace and consistency of Apple Intelligence's development. For the market as a whole, it is one more example of how geopolitics and regulatory barriers increasingly determine which version of an AI product reaches a user depending on country, and not only on device model or subscription tier.

It is also telling that Stacey Ford's metaphor about search that "doesn't find what is definitely on the device" ended up applying not only to Spotlight but to the fate of the whole presentation: users in the excluded countries formally know that the new, more powerful Siri exists and works, yet cannot access it on their own devices, no matter how current their iOS version or how expensive their iPhone model.