Apple gives Siri an AI makeover

Siri got a makeover at Apple’s WWDC 2024 in Cupertino, courtesy of the tech giant’s overarching generative AI push this year, called Apple Intelligence.

Siri is now more natural, more relevant and more personal — and it has a new look, including a revamped icon. The assistant pops up with a glowing light that wraps around the edges of your device’s screen.

Thanks to Apple Intelligence, Siri can now handle stumbles in speech and better understand context. You can now also type to Siri, and it can answer questions about how to use your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Soon, Siri will become even more capable with onscreen awareness. For example, if a friend sends you their address, you’ll be able to ask Siri to do something like “add this address to contact card” and it’ll take care of it (assuming the feature works as advertised).

Siri will also have the ability to take action in and across apps, so you can ask Siri to “make this photo pop” and then “add this photo” to another app. That’s thanks to the new App Intents API, which allows devs to let Siri take actions in their apps, and the upgraded Siri’s awareness of personal context including messages, calendar events, files and photos.

The capabilities are quite deep. Apple gave the example of Siri finding a photo of your license, extracting your ID number and entering it into a web form for you.

It’s not clear when, exactly, we can expect to see many of Siri’s more powerful features land on devices. And Apple Intelligence will only be available on iPhone 15 Pro and devices with M1 or newer chips. Hopefully we’ll learn more as WWDC continues.