Apple releases iOS 26.5 Beta 1 and once again, we are disappointed

Apple released iOS 26.5 Beta 1 today and many have been eagerly anticipating the release of this update because of Siri. Ever since the tech giant delayed Siri 2.0 last month when the iOS 26.4 Beta failed to update the digital assistant, iPhone users have been waiting for this moment. The thought is that Apple wouldn’t risk further embarrassment by missing yet another opportunity to release the much improved version of Siri.

Siri 2.0 is supposed to be able to read your display. If a friend or family member texts an address to you in WhatsApp, you could tell Siri to “add this to their contact card,” and Siri will know exactly which address you want added and whose contact card to add it to. With deep app integration, you’ll be able to select a photo from your gallery, and ask Siri to send it to your Mom.

Siri 2.0 features we were hoping to see arrive today

Speaking of dear old Mom, with Siri 2.0 you can ask the digital assistant to tell you when your Mom’s flight will arrive. To do this, Siri will go through your email and look for the one that has the flight information. Siri will then go through real-time flight data to give you an up-to-date response. For this and other queries, Siri will also browse through your photos, calendar, and other personal data seeking the information you asked for.

Apple releases iOS 26.5 Beta 1 without any change made to Siri. | Image by PhoneArena

When Apple releases iOS 27 (the first Beta could be released June 8th, the day of the WWDC 2026 Keynote), we could finally see the complete brain transplant for Siri thanks to Apple’s deal with Google. For an annual payment of reportedly $1 billion from Apple, Google will equip Siri with a custom Gemini model with 1.2 trillion parameters. Once Siri starts using this model, you will notice a huge difference in Siri’s ability to answer questions.

Once again, there are no changes made to Siri

To see if you received the iOS 26.5 Developer Beta today, go to Settings > General > Software Update. If the notification arrives, follow the directions to install it.

The bad news for now is that it appears as though there are no changes to Siri in iOS 26.5 Beta 1. So now we wait for the release of iOS 26.5 Beta 2, or do we? The absence of any update for Siri with today’s release could indicate that we might not see any improvement to Siri until iOS 27 Beta 1 is released. As we already mentioned in this artcle, this update could become available on June 8th. Meanwhile, we should inform you that iPadOS 26.5 Beta 1, tvOS 26.5 Beta 1, watchOS 26.5 Beta 1, visionOS 26.5 Beta 1, and HomePod 26.5 Beta 1 have also been released today.

If anything new does surface in iOS 26.5 Beta 1, which I did install on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, this article will be updated.

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