Apple is putting Visual Intelligence directly inside the iPhone Camera app with iOS 27.
At WWDC 2026, Apple announced a new Siri mode in the Camera app that lets you point your phone at real-world objects and ask questions about them. The mode sits between Photo and Portrait in the camera switcher, and lookups don't vanish when you close the app — they persist in the new Siri app shipping with iOS 27. Contextual actions come along for the ride: Apple demoed the feature reading a restaurant bill and offering to split the cost. The rollout extends to macOS 27 ("Golden Gate"), where a keyboard shortcut lets you draw a selection around any part of your screen for Visual Intelligence analysis, and to iPad, where it's wired into the screenshot workflow.
None of this is new territory — Google Lens has done point-and-identify search on Android for years. Apple's argument is integration depth: persistent lookup history, follow-up questions, and suggested actions make this more than a scan-and-forget tool baked into a standalone app. There's a real hardware gate, though: the feature requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, leaving the standard iPhone 15 — still a sizable chunk of the installed base — locked out entirely.
The Mac version launches in English only, a caveat Apple tends to describe as temporary and fix on its own schedule.