We have exclusively discovered how much iOS 18 and macOS 15 will upgrade Siri and improve everything you do. Here’s what the new-and-improved Siri will be able to do.
We have exclusively discovered how much iOS 18 and macOS 15 will upgrade Siri and improve everything you do. Here’s what the new-and-improved Siri will be able to do.
In one of our earlier exclusive reports, we said that Siri would get a big upgrade. We explained that the company’s virtual assistant would be able to open and edit specific photos, set the device wallpaper, and so on.
Since then, AppleInsider has received the exact details of Siri’s new functionality, as well as prompts Apple used to test the software. Coming from people familiar with Apple’s AI initiative, this new info gives us our most detailed look yet at the virtual assistant’s new in-app capabilities.
Although one might expect the virtual assistant only to follow direct instructions and orders like «Open Safari,» Apple has tested a wide variety of different prompts for the new AI. Many of these prompts contain «natural» language, as would be spoken by a real human being.
This means that Apple’s test prompts often contain descriptions of what the user is trying to do, along with some arguably superfluous details.
Instead of containing only direct commands like «Show me pictures of my cat,» the company’s testing prompts mention that the user wants to make a blog, or that they’re feeling lazy/nostalgic in some instances.
In doing so, Apple wants to get its AI accustomed to natural language, speech patterns, sentence structures, and instruction types Siri is likely to receive from end users — some of whom may not be all that familiar with new technology.
What core apps are going to get enhanced Siri featuresSiri improvements in Apple Books
Through Siri, users will be able to open specific books or sections of the app, flip through book pages, and so on.
These features will ultimately assist users who may be unfamiliar with the app’s user interface or who have difficulty navigating through the UI. Siri will make it significantly easier to find things like the audiobook store or the user’s PDF files and downloaded books.
Within the Books app, Siri will be able to:
Siri improvements in Camera
Siri’s ability to control device cameras will make it a lot easier to take photos and videos. Users could tell Siri to set their camera to a certain mode, and set a timer.
This could potentially benefit users who are unfamiliar with the various options and settings within Apple’s default Camera application. It would also give users the option to easily switch between the front-facing and rear cameras through Siri commands.
With the Camera application, Siri will gain the ability to:
Siri improvements in Keynote
Siri’s new Keynote-related features will benefit users in the education, marketing, or business sectors. Through Siri, users will easily be able to see who edited a Keynote presentation and will be able to make changes of their own.
Educators and students will now have the option to insert audio, images, and video via Apple’s new-and-improved, LLM-powered virtual assistant. Based on what we’ve heard, researchers and analysts will likely find this feature useful, as it would make the creation of presentations significantly easier.
In Keynote, Apple’s new-and-improved visual assistant will gain the ability to:
Siri improvements in Mail
Apple’s Mail application will get a significant overhaul this year, as we revealed in our exclusive report on Project BlackPearl. The company will enhance its built-in email app with machine learning, which will allow it to automatically classify emails based on their text content.
This means that Mail will be able to separate emails into categories such as Commerce, News, Promotions, Social, Transactions, and Other. Siri will be able to use the information to perform different actions within the app.
For instance, Apple’s AI-powered virtual assistant will be able to identify emails with promo codes, or those from a specific company and label them as junk.
Siri will be able to perform a variety of actions within Mail, all of which will streamline email communication. With Siri, users will have the option to reply to all senders of an email.
For instance, users could say something like «Reply to everyone on this email with the body text ‘Yes, I’ll be there.'» The virtual assistant will also have the ability to forward emails, block email senders, and much more.
In the Mail app, Siri will be able to:
Apple’s Mail application is also getting a feature known as Smart Replies, through which users will be able to send off an AI-generated response to an email. Apple’s response generation is handled by the on-device Ajax LLM and cloud-based processing in more complex situations.
All of this is sure to benefit business users and members of large companies, who routinely deal with massive amounts of emails.
