Siri Gets Smarter

Perhaps the most significant part of Apple Intelligence is the one thing we’ve been awaiting for years — significant improvements to Siri.

It’s ironic how far behind the curve Siri has fallen, considering that Apple’s voice assistant beat Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant to market by at least three years. That’s not to say that Apple’s competitors are fantastic by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some significant ways in which they’ve lapped Siri.

The good news is that Apple seems to have pulled out all the stops this year in its determination to fully realize its original vision for Siri. If today’s demo is anything to go on, the voice assistant will become much more competent at recognizing what we’re saying and letting us engage in more natural conversations.

This includes things like being able to continue a conversation with follow-up questions, such as scheduling a trip somewhere after asking about the weather or getting directions to a location that you’ve just looked up on Wikipedia. However, Apple Intelligence can now dig deeper into your apps to let Siri piece together relevant information from multiple sources, so you could ask Siri when a friend is arriving on a flight, and it will automatically find the travel confirmation in your email and then look it up in a flight tracking app. You could then follow up by asking it to arrange an Uber to take you to the airport.

New “App Intents” will also let you ask Siri to do things inside your apps, such as enhancing a photo in the Photos app or adding someone’s address from Messages to Contacts with a simple and natural request. That last part is thanks to a new on-screen awareness feature that will let Siri analyze and use information that’s already on your screen.

Searching will also become much more natural, with the ability to filter down to things that were previously impossible. For example, you can ask Siri to show you pictures of your daughter outside in a red dress to get just the images you’re looking for.