Siri AI finally reached the Apple Watch, and early testing suggests it's not ready for prime time.
Siri AI requires Apple Intelligence, which runs only on an iPhone 15 Pro or newer paired with an Apple Watch Series 9 or later. A Lifehacker reviewer testing it on a Series 12 watch running watchOS 27 found mixed results. Simple tasks like setting a timer or checking the weather worked fine, and reading calendar events went smoothly. But asking for the nearest yoga studio returned a list of distant options until the question was reworded, and setting a calorie-burn goal of 325 saved instead as 320 in the Fitness app. The watch's Siri app also crashed repeatedly during testing, and many requests took five to ten seconds to process.
The most telling gap wasn't speed - it was context. When the reviewer asked Siri to recall a text message request, the watch found the message but couldn't identify who sent it; the iPhone version of Siri AI handled the same query in one pass, even naming a sender who wasn't in the reviewer's contacts. That split shows where Apple's ambitions have outrun the watch's hardware.
For a company that spent two years promising a smarter Siri, shipping a wrist-bound version that's slower and less capable than the phone it's tethered to feels less like a launch and more like a rough draft.