Siri AI Skips the EU in iOS 27. Here's What Still Reads Text From Your Photos

On June 8, 2026, Apple published a short newsroom post with a long title: Due to DMA, Siri AI delayed in EU for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. The relevant sentence is blunt. Because of the Digital Markets Act, Apple “will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union.”

The coverage that followed was mostly accurate and occasionally not. A few outlets rounded it off to “the EU doesn’t get Visual Intelligence,” which isn’t what Apple said. The distinction matters if you’re trying to work out whether your phone is about to get worse.

Short version: it isn’t. Something you were going to get is being withheld. That’s a different thing, and for the specific job of pulling text off a photo, it changes almost nothing. Apps that already work in the EU, such as Textora, cover much of what the new Siri camera mode was going to do with that text.

What Apple actually said

Here’s the list, verbatim, of what EU users won’t have access to:

the new dedicated app to revisit conversations, an expanded Visual Intelligence experience, integrated tools for writing, Siri mode in Camera on iOS

Four things. Note the word expanded in front of Visual Intelligence. Apple’s own Apple Intelligence page carries the same framing in a footnote: “Siri AI will not initially be available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS.”

Two details in Apple’s wording are worth pausing on.

This is about new features, not removal. The announcement is written entirely in the future tense about capabilities arriving with iOS 27. Apple describes Siri AI as “an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence.” That is a new product sitting on top of the Apple Intelligence layer that already shipped in the EU. Nothing in the announcement says existing features are being pulled.

There’s no date. Apple states it does “not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.” Not a quarter, not a year. If you read a headline promising Siri AI in the EU by some specific month, that number came from somewhere other than Apple.

What this changes for reading text off a photo

Very little, and the reason is that text recognition on iPhone was never part of Apple Intelligence.

Live Text arrived in 2021. It runs on Apple’s Vision framework, processes on the device, and is not gated on Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, or your region. Long-press a photo of a menu in Lisbon and you’ll get the same selectable text a user in Chicago gets. The DMA situation doesn’t touch it.

Same for the document scanner built into Notes and Files, and the scanning in the Preview app that arrived with iOS 26. Same for third-party OCR apps, which mostly call the same Vision APIs Apple’s own features do. Textora, for example, is on the App Store in Germany and France and reads text on the iPhone itself.

What EU users don’t get is the newer, Siri-mediated layer on top: asking Siri conversational follow-up questions about what the camera sees, the Camera-based Siri mode, the writing tools integration. If your workflow was going to be “point the camera at a contract and ask Siri to summarise the payment terms,” that’s the thing that isn’t coming from Apple. Textora’s document chat does a version of it as an opt-in cloud feature, sending only masked text, never the photo.

If your workflow is “get the text out of this image so I can paste it somewhere,” you were never waiting on Siri AI.

What still works in the EU, ranked by how little effort it takes

Live Text, free, already on your phone. Long-press text in any photo, or tap the text-selection icon in the bottom corner of the viewfinder. It handles printed text well and is the quickest option for a one-off copy.

Where it stops being enough: it works on one image at a time, keeps no history, won’t turn a stack of pages into one searchable PDF, and doesn’t organise what it reads into contacts, events or reminders. Apple also supports a limited set of recognition languages, so if you work in Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Greek or anything in Cyrillic, check any Vision-based tool against your own documents before relying on it.

The Preview app scanner, free, iOS 26 and later. Good for multi-page documents, and it produces a PDF. It’s a document scanner, not a text-extraction tool, so what you get out the other end is a file rather than a paragraph you can paste.

Textora when you need batch processing, a searchable history of what you’ve scanned, structured output rather than a wall of text, or the “act on what the camera sees” part of Siri mode. It’s free to download, needs no account, runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 16 or later, and is available in the EU. Siri mode in Camera, where it ships, needs an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone 15 Pro or later and launched in English only.

Textora covers much of the same ground. It adds a business card to Contacts (with a review sheet first), turns a schedule into one or several Calendar events, creates Reminders, reads QR codes and barcodes, reads scanned text aloud, and translates it, on the iPhone itself on iOS 18 or later when the language is downloaded. Text recognition happens on the phone; the cloud AI features are off unless you turn them on, and then only masked text is sent, never the photo. What only Siri mode does is add Wallet passes and split a bill with Apple Cash.

For European administrative work that ends in a portal upload, Textora exports a searchable PDF with the text layer under the scanned image, saves it to Files in one tap, and can merge, rotate and delete pages or sign the PDF on the device.

The thing worth actually worrying about

Not the feature gap. The uncertainty.

Apple’s phrasing, “not currently have a timeline”: is the kind of language companies use when the outcome depends on a negotiation they don’t control. The DMA compliance question is live, and Apple has been visibly unhappy about it. This could resolve in six months or it could sit unresolved through another iOS cycle.

If you’re an EU user making a decision about tooling, the sensible read is: don’t build a workflow around a feature Apple hasn’t committed to shipping to you. Build it around what’s on your phone today. If Siri AI arrives later, that’s an upgrade rather than a rescue.

What I’d tell a friend in Berlin

Use Live Text for a quick one-off copy. It’s free and it’s already there.

If you find yourself scanning more than a handful of documents a week, or you want the contacts, calendar and reminders side of Siri mode without waiting for Apple, add Textora. Test it on your own documents first, specifically the ugly ones: the thermal receipts and the handwritten notes, because that’s where apps separate. Any app that looks good on a clean A4 printout is telling you nothing.

And ignore the headlines saying Europe lost Visual Intelligence. Europe didn’t get an expanded version of it. That’s worth knowing and it isn’t worth panicking about.

I build Textora. Facts about Apple’s plans above are taken from Apple’s own pages, checked on August 7, 2026; email support@textora.app if something has changed.

Sources: Apple Newsroom, June 8, 2026 · Apple Intelligence