Apple’s Siri has received its most significant upgrade to date with the launch of iOS 18, including enhanced ChatGPT capabilities through a new partnership with OpenAI. This development brings deep integration with supported iPhones, iPads, and Macs, marking a substantial evolution in the voice assistant’s functionality.
Announced at WWDC 2024, the new version of Siri is powered by Apple Intelligence, featuring advanced functionalities such as ‘on-screen awareness’ to improve app interactions. Apple has declared that “this year marks the start of a new era for Siri,” and the demonstrations at the event certainly support this bold claim.
Siri’s visual interface has been redesigned, now opening with a glowing light around the edges of the screen instead of the usual symbol. Enhanced language comprehension capabilities allow for more natural conversations with Siri. Additionally, users can now interact with Siri by typing questions, accessed by double-tapping the bottom of the screen, and seamlessly switch between voice and text inputs. Siri can also provide assistance on how to use various features of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If Siri cannot answer a question, it can connect to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 model for free, without requiring a ChatGPT account, and with assurances that user information will not be logged.
One of Siri’s most useful new features is its on-screen awareness. For instance, if you receive a new address from a friend via Messages, you can simply tell Siri to “add this address to his contact card,” and it will update automatically. Siri is now capable of performing “hundreds of new actions in and across apps,” making it a much more powerful assistant.
Another demonstration showed Siri’s ability to manage photos. By asking Siri to “show me my photos of Stacey in New York wearing her pink coat,” it will retrieve those images, and with a command like “make this photo pop,” Siri can edit the photo. Siri’s deeper integration also extends to personal data, such as accessing photos, calendar events, files, messages, emails, and even hotel bookings or concert tickets stored in PDFs.
Apple ensures that the new Siri features are protected by robust privacy measures, utilizing a combination of on-device processing and the Private Cloud Compute, which uses Apple servers running on Apple silicon.
However, the new Siri features will be available only on recent Apple devices. Most of the advanced capabilities, powered by Apple Intelligence, will be accessible on iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, or iPads and Macs equipped with M1 chips or later.
For those who own these newer devices, or are planning to get the upcoming iPhone 16, the beta version of Apple Intelligence and the new Siri will be available “this fall,” which translates to a release window between September and November. While Apple’s presentations of the new Siri were impressive, it remains to be seen which features will be available immediately when iOS 18 is officially released.
The updated interface, enhanced conversational abilities, and the option to type questions to Siri, along with the capability to ask about on-device features, will be available from the start. However, features like on-screen awareness and Siri’s use of personal context will be introduced gradually over the next year. This substantial upgrade positions Siri closer to its original vision of being an all-knowing voice assistant, a promise made when it was first launched 13 years ago.
