iPhone owners who speak French or German to Siri can drop the “Hey”. Apple’s iOS and iPadOS 27 feature availability page now lists French (France) and German (Germany) under “Activate with Siri”, the option that wakes the assistant when you say just “Siri”, and it adds eight languages to Visual Look Up.
Apple doesn’t date the edit or tie it to a specific update. A copy of the same page captured on September 11, which already carried the iOS 27 heading, had neither addition. We compared the two ourselves on September 19.
Who can now say just ‘Siri’
Here is Apple’s full list for “Activate with Siri” as it stands:
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- English (Australia)
- English (Canada)
- English (United Kingdom)
- English (United States)
- French (France)
- German (Germany)
- Mandarin Chinese (China mainland)
Until this change the list stopped at the four English variants and Mandarin Chinese. The regions in brackets matter: Apple names French as spoken in France and German as spoken in Germany, not the Canadian, Belgian, Swiss or Austrian variants. Apple’s page doesn’t list the shorter phrase for those variants.
This is classic Siri activation, and it has nothing to do with Siri AI. The new assistant is still English only, and Apple’s page lists it as “Not available in China mainland and the European Union”. A French or German speaker who says just “Siri” reaches the familiar assistant, not the new one. Our piece on Siri AI’s English-only launch covers when other languages are due.
How to switch to just ‘Siri’
Apple’s iPhone User Guide notes that the shorter phrase is “available on supported iPhone models in some languages and regions,” and points to the feature availability page to check. If your language qualifies, these are Apple’s steps:
- Go to the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Tap Siri.
- Tap Requests.
- Tap “Siri” or “Hey Siri”, then follow the instructions to set it up.
Apple says iPhone then listens for “Siri,” “Hey Siri,” or both, depending on your choice. To retrain Siri with your voice, Apple says to turn the option off, turn it back on and follow the onscreen instructions again.
One tip from the same guide page: place your iPhone face down to stop it responding to “Siri” or “Hey Siri” when you don’t want it to.
Visual Look Up adds eight languages
Visual Look Up identifies things in your photos and videos, such as landmarks, art, plants, pets, books and food, and can suggest recipes for a dish. Apple’s page now lists these eight languages that were not on the September 11 capture:
- Arabic (Saudi Arabia)
- Chinese, Traditional (Hong Kong)
- Chinese, Traditional (Taiwan)
- Dutch (Netherlands)
- Korean
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Thai
- Turkish
They join English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, for 14 entries in all. To try it, open a photo in full screen or pause a video. If the Info button shows a symbol with stars, Visual Look Up is available: tap it, then tap Look Up at the top of the photo information.
Smaller changes on the same page
The Dictionary’s definitions and thesaurus now list English (Australia) and English (Canada). English (Philippines) appears for QuickType autocorrection, predictive typing, inline predictions, multilingual typing and QuickPath. The QuickType keyboard’s language list moved most: by our count it has 32 more entries than on September 11, among them Afrikaans, Basque, Esperanto, Luxembourgish, Xhosa, Zulu and several Cree languages.
None of this touches the Apple Intelligence language list, which still stands at 16 languages.
