Siri and Apple Intelligence in iOS 27

Justin Clarke-Salt

Version 1.11 of Next3Trains is built for iOS 27, and most of what’s new is about Siri. Some of it works on every iPhone the app supports, some of it needs a newer version of iOS, and the most interesting parts need Apple Intelligence. Here’s what to expect on each.

On every iPhone

Ask for a destination. As well as “Check my trains in Next3Trains”, you can now say “Next trains to London Bridge in Next3Trains”. You only name where you’re going: the trains leave from the departure station of your current route, chosen the same way Check My Trains chooses it - your location, your widget, or the route you last looked at. The destination doesn’t have to be one of your saved routes, so standing at Blackfriars with a Blackfriars to Haywards Heath route saved, that phrase gets you Blackfriars to London Bridge. It works on Apple Watch as well. The phrases are listed in Why isn’t Siri working?.

Siri shows your trains as well as reading them. Ask either question and Siri now puts up a card with your route across the top and a row for each train - time, destination, platform, and whether it’s on time, delayed or cancelled. The status is shown with a distinct symbol and the word as well as a colour, so it reads correctly with colour filters on. What Siri says is the same as before, with a short line such as “Next trains from Leeds to York” on screen while it talks. The card is an iPhone thing; the watch speaks the answer.

The Get Train Times action in the Shortcuts app shows the same card, headed “Trains from Leeds to York”, when its output is set to Text; with JSON output you get a one-line confirmation instead. What the action hands on to the next step of your shortcut hasn’t changed, so anything you’ve already built keeps working.

“With” and “using” work too. “Check my trains with Next3Trains” and “Check my trains using Next3Trains” are now understood as well as “in Next3Trains” - iOS 27’s Siri turned out to be stricter about that little word than earlier versions were.

Icons. Your saved routes show a train icon in Spotlight results, and stations show a map pin in the Shortcuts app’s pickers and in Siri’s “which one did you mean?” lists.

Alerts open the right route. Tapping a delay, cancellation or platform change notification on your iPhone now opens the app on the route the alert is about, rather than on whichever route it would otherwise have picked. Dismissing the notification without tapping it does nothing, as before.

On iOS 17 and later

Better suggestions over time. Each time you look at a route in the app, the app tells iOS that you did and what the board showed, so Siri Suggestions and Spotlight can start offering Check My Trains around your commute. This builds up slowly over days of normal use.

Which stations Siri knows

For “Next trains to…”, how many stations Siri will recognise depends on your iPhone:

  • Before iOS 27, or without Siri AI, Siri knows a shortlist of about 25: the stations in your saved routes, the ones you’ve picked recently, and the major hubs. If the station you want isn’t among them, save a route to it, or use Get Train Times in a shortcut.
  • On iOS 27 with Siri AI, Siri can look up any of the 2,612 stations by name or three-letter code. If a name matches several - “Manchester”, say - you’ll be offered a short list to pick from.

That limit is only about what Siri can pick out of a spoken sentence. In the Shortcuts app, the Next Trains To Station action lets you search the full station list on any version of iOS - see Using Next3Trains with Shortcuts.

On iOS 27 with Siri AI

These need Siri AI, the new Siri in iOS 27. It runs on iPhones that support Apple Intelligence, with it turned on, in a region and language where Apple offers it - Apple is rolling it out as a beta, in English first. There’s nothing to enable in Next3Trains itself.

  • Ask about what’s on the screen. With a route card showing, you can ask Siri “when’s the next train on this route?”. In the station picker, “which station is that?” or “pick the second one”. In a train’s details, “what’s the third stop?”. On a station’s information sheet, “how do I get to this station?”. Each screen tells Siri exactly what it’s displaying, so the answer refers to the right thing.
  • Alerts Siri understands. When a delay, cancellation or platform change notification arrives, it’s tagged with the route it’s about, so you can ask “what’s that notification about?” or say “open the route from that alert”.
  • The same routes on every device. Your routes and stations are recognised as the same thing on iPhone, Apple Watch and Mac, so a conversation with Siri that mentions one can carry on across devices.

If Siri isn’t doing what you expect

  • “Next3Trains is not enabled to do this with Siri.” iOS 27 asks your permission for each app before Siri will use it, and until you’ve given it every phrase gets this answer - including the ones that work perfectly afterwards. Say just “Next3Trains” to Siri and accept the prompt, or turn Siri on for the app under Settings → Apps → Next3Trains.
  • Siri shows the card but doesn’t say anything. That’s the Siri Responses setting. On Automatic, Siri decides for itself whether to speak, and often stays quiet when you’re looking at the phone. Choose Prefer Spoken Responses in the Siri settings if you always want the departures read out.
  • Siri runs something else. If you’ve made a shortcut of your own with the same name as one of the app’s actions - “Check My Trains”, “Get Train Times” or “Next Trains To Station” - Siri may run your shortcut instead of the app’s action. Rename or delete it and the built-in one takes over.

What hasn’t changed

Siri still needs the app’s name in the phrase - “Check my trains in Next3Trains”. That’s Apple’s rule for apps, not something I can remove. If you want a phrase of your own, the shortcut method described in Why isn’t Siri working? still works.

Privacy

What Siri sees is the same sentence it would speak - your stations, times, platforms and statuses - handled through the standard Siri system on your device. Nothing new is sent to me, and there’s no new permission to grant beyond Siri’s own. The on-device summaries of disruption notices are a separate, opt-in feature - see What are Disruption Summaries?.