Apple's long-awaited revamp of Siri could use Google Gemini's smarts, with the move to improve the digital assistant potentially costing Apple $1 billion per year.

Apple customers have been waiting for an upgrade of Siri that was promised as part of Apple Intelligence, but has yet to materialize. If a report on Wednesday is accurate, Apple is getting closer to signing a deal with Google to Gemini to make Siri better.

People familiar with Apple's AI work speaking to Bloomberg claim that the search giant's model will be used to power Siri functions in 2026.

The two companies are still finalizing a deal for the AI's use, the report continues. So far, it seems that Apple could pay about $1 billion per year to Google for the privilege of using its model.

This is a massive model, far larger than any of Apple's the report continues. Google's Gemini model weighs in at 1.2 trillion parameters. Apple's cloud-based Apple Intelligence is closer to 150 billion parameters.

Taking advantage of Google's model would give Apple the capability to process more complex data sets, and have more features than the current Siri provides.

Potentially limited usefulness

While the plan sounds grand, the actual result to consumers may not be as groundbreaking as the model's size hints.

The agreement would have Google's Gemini model handling the summarization and planner functions of Siri. This refers to elements that help Siri take in information and then deal with complex tasks.

Siri will still rely on Apple's in-house models for tasks, presumably for privacy reasons. However, for Google's tech, it will run on Apple's own Private Cloud Compute servers to silo user data away from Google's main infrastructure.

It also means that you're not going to see Google Gemini penetrating Apple's operating system. Here, Google is being a cloud-based partner that will be called upon by Siri, not a deeply-integrated element of an iPhone.

The so-called deal is also not going to involve Siri integrating Gemini into its chatbot functionality, either. That may change in the future, as CEO Tim Cook proposed that third-party chatbot support could be extended beyond the current ChatGPT integration.

This was seemingly a possibiity back in February, when code references for third-party model support mentioned Google alonside OpenAI.

A continued billion-dollar relationship

This would not be the only relationship between Apple and Google where the two exchange massive funds in favor of preferential treatment. If the deal reporting is accurate, this could be the reverse of another well-funded agreement.

Apple's Safari default search engine payment has Google paying Apple in the region of $20 billion per year to be the main search option in Apple's browser. While those payments were considered in danger earlier in 2025, a federal ruling in September allowed Google to maintain payments to distributors for favoring its products and services.

While the supposed Siri-Gemini deal also involves massive sums, it would be flowing in the opposite direction for once.