Once upon a time, Siri kind of felt like artificial intelligence. Apple brought that feeling full-circle with a slew of AI enhancements to the voice assistant at WWDC.
During Apple’s largely software-focused keynote on Monday, the company revealed a number of new things that Siri can do as part of the new “Apple Intelligence” initiative. Broadly speaking, Siri now has the capability to do specific actions within specific apps using voice commands in ways it couldn’t before, theoretically thanks to AI. Like everything else with Apple Intelligence, you need an iPhone 15 Pro (or newer), or an iPad or MacBook with at least an M1 chip inside of it.
WWDC 2024: New Siri features announced
Credit: Photo
Apple’s presentation was fast and furious, with very little time spent on any of these individual updates.
The big updates to Siri include:
If you make a mistake mid-command and immediately correct yourself, Siri will recognize the correction
Conversational context, meaning Siri will remember what you’ve previously asked about during a conversation and incorporate that into responses
Describe a device feature you don’t know the name of and Siri will bring it to you
On-screen awareness, so it can do things like add an address that’s on your screen to someone’s contact card
Automatic photo enhancement using commands like “make this photo pop”
Share a summary of your meeting notes in an email
“Personal context,” meaning Siri knows details about you that are stored in text messages, notes, etc.
If Siri believes ChatGPT can answer a prompt better than Siri can, it will ask if you want to use ChatGPT instead
Again, Apple’s presentation was extremely cursory, so we don’t have detailed specifics on how all of these features work just yet. But AI is coming to Siri, whether you like it or not.
