Apple announced on Saturday that its Intelligence capabilities will arrive in China this December, marking the company's first rollout of these features in the region. The company confirmed earlier reporting from Bloomberg, with developer testing beginning on 4 November ahead of the full iOS 27.3 release in December—roughly two years after Intelligence initially debuted in the United States.
The initial Chinese launch will include Live Translation across Messages, FaceTime and Phone, Writing Tools, Visual Intelligence, the Clean Up photo editing feature and Genmoji. Mail and notification handling will also benefit from summaries and priority sorting, all powered by Apple's proprietary models.
A significant partnership with Alibaba underpins the rollout. The Qwen model from the e-commerce giant will be accessible within Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, enabling users to query images or PDFs directly. China's internet regulator gave its approval to this arrangement in July.
The redesigned Siri AI that Apple unveiled at WWDC 2026 will not be part of the December launch, nor will Apple's most recent feature additions. Although Siri added five languages this week, mainland China remains excluded from the new assistant. The existing Siri continues to function through typing, and Apple notes it now maintains better contextual awareness during conversations.
Compatibility extends to iPhone 15 Pro and later devices, encompassing the iPhone Air and iPhone Duo. Users must configure both their Siri and phone language settings to either English or simplified Chinese to access these capabilities.
The path to this launch has encountered obstacles along the way. Apple developed a China-specific model in collaboration with Alibaba, and in March the features briefly became available before receiving formal regulatory clearance.
Source: The Next Web
