Earlier this week, I attended Apple’s online Apple Intelligence Group Lab, much of which focused on Siri AI. Much of the ground covered is available in Apple’s documentation, but the presentation included additional detail, which is worth highlighting, although I encourage you to watch the two Apple Intelligence Group Labs for more context and details.The big-picture change that Federico explained earlier this week is that Apple is greatly expanding the actions available to Siri. Today, Siri AI’s natural-language abilities are limited to tightly defined domains like calendar, reminders, and messages. If a developer’s app doesn’t fit a schema (or hasn’t implemented an App Shortcut), Siri won’t be able to respond to a user.Apple isn’t dispensing with schemas, but it’s loosening the reins, giving developers far wider latitude than before. Apple noted during the lab that schemas are still developers’ best bet for getting Siri to respond because Apple’s already done the work to ensure they work.What’s changing is that Siri will be able to directly access developers’ App Intents that have been defined as tools. That’s a big change from today where a developer’s main access to Siri is through App Shortcuts, using a defined phrase that names the app. Instead, if a developer marks their App Intents as tools, Siri will be able to access those App Intents directly when a user makes a natural-language request, much like how MCP works with tools like Codex and Claude Code.Other interesting tidbits about tools mentioned include that they’ll use Private Cloud Compute to process the request and that apps are limited to 40 tools.Skills are a third brand-new way to access Siri that’s designed for more complex, multistep actions that can chain up to 32 tool calls. Like the skills you may be familiar with from Codex and Claude Code, Siri’s skills are Markdown instructions with YAML front matter that explain what Siri should do with certain requests. Xcode 27.3 beta also includes coding-agent skills that help developers add Siri support to their apps and test them.Finally, beginning with iOS 27.3, which will ship in January if history is any indicator, developers will be able to customize the look of snippets of information from their apps similar to how Apple’s own apps’ content can look in Siri. As for tools and skills, those will be available to ship to the App Store in the spring.