Visual intelligence on an iPhone is about to get an upgrade.
iOS 27’s camera app will benefit from some AI intelligence, with a new Siri Camera Mode making visual intelligence more accessible to users.
Apple is widely expected to bring more AI features to the iPhone at WWDC 2026, including a much-delayed Siri update. Now, it looks like the Siri overhaul will also extend to the camera app in iOS 27.
According to Mark Gurman sources at Bloombergthere will be a new Siri mode joining the existing photo and video modes in the camera app. The idea is that users can switch between modes and take a photo, which can then be used as part of a request to ChatGPT or Siri itself.
In reality, this isn’t a big step forward for Apple, but rather a slight rebranding of something that already exists.
Apple introduced Visual Intelligence with the iPhone 16, accessible from the camera control button on the side of the device. What’s happening here is that the same functionality is built into the Camera app itself rather than being a separate standalone interface.
The experience will be slightly updated, with a new trigger inspired by the Apple Intelligence logo instead of the plain white circle. The current method of controlling the camera will also work fine, but launch the camera app directly in Siri mode.
Functionally, the functionality will be quite similar to existing visual intelligence. Dates and times can be taken from a poster, for example, or they can be used as a basis for obtaining more contact details of the restaurant.
New for 2026 will be the ability to capture nutrition labels on food packaging, allowing them to be automatically entered into a food logging application. Likewise, it will be possible to extract the coordinates from the snapshot and put them in a contact list.
Beyond the camera app
This isn’t the only way Apple is injecting more AI features into iPhone photography. Tuesday, Bloomberg said that the Photos app would benefit from additional changes, beyond the existing cleaning functionality.
These AI elements will provide a variety of photo editing features, such as extending an image, cropping, enhancing, and contextual editing. For example, enhancements could change the color and lighting of a photo, or improve the quality of the image.
Reframe will apparently use the technology behind spatial photos, so users can change the perspective of the photo after it’s taken.
All of this will involve processing on the device rather than in the cloud.