Chinese iPhone users will get Apple's AI features in December, without the revamped Siri
Apple confirms that testing starts on 4 November with an iOS 27.3 beta, and is working with Alibaba in China on the Qwen chatbot.
After a long run-up with Chinese regulators, Apple Intelligence is coming to China. Apple announced on its Chinese newsroom site that the features will be tested from 4 November in an iOS 27.3 developer beta, with a full release in December. MacRumors was the first to spot the announcement. 9to5Mac calls it unusual for Apple to announce a beta date in advance, and points out that strictly speaking the company has only confirmed the start of testing.
According to MacRumors, Chinese users will get features including the writing tools, Genmoji, the tool to erase objects from photos, notification summaries and priority notifications, visual intelligence and live translation with AirPods. The new AI version of Siri and Image Playground are not included. For now the features only work on the iPhone 15 Pro and newer, until Apple also obtains approval for the iPad, the Mac and other devices. The Verge reports that Apple is working with Alibaba to build its Qwen chatbot into some parts of the system, similar to the ChatGPT integration elsewhere.
The launch follows a series of steps. Reuters reported in July that Apple Intelligence had cleared a major regulatory hurdle in China, and in August that Apple had trained its own language model specifically for China, The Verge and 9to5Mac write. The AI version of Siri also stayed out of China in the recent expansion to new languages in iOS 27.2.