If a iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 On the model, you can access Apple Intelligence when updating to iOS 18.1. This includes a new look for Siri with a beautiful edge-lit animation.

But the new animation doesn’t mean Siri’s intelligence or abilities have improved in any meaningful way. Here’s exactly what’s new.. and what you should expect.

Updates to Siri are part of the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence is available on supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers running the latest operating system version. In the current iOS 18.1 version, your device language must be set to US English to access these features. More English locale support will come in iOS 18.2, and more international languages ​​will be supported in 2025.

If you haven’t enabled Apple Intelligence on a supported device, Siri will retain its old globe-like appearance. If you have Apple Intelligence, you get a stunning new design with edge-lit animation that adapts to your voice.

What’s new in Siri right now

The new design is the main upgrade currently available to customers, but there are a few behavioral changes as well. First, aside from the new look, you can now double-tap the home indicator to launch the Siri interface with the keyboard offered; so you can seamlessly Type to Siri – whenever you’re in situations where it’s more convenient to type instead. rather than talking. Apple Intelligence also has an improved voice synthesis engine to make sound more natural.

Second, Siri is more capable of understanding garbled or misspoken queries. For example, if your words stumble in the middle of your sentence, Siri is less likely to be confused and understand your true intentions. If you say something like ‘How is the weather in Spain, no I don’t mean France’. You should get weather results in France instead of Spain.

Third, Siri is more knowledgeable about user manuals for Apple products. This means you can ask Siri questions about how to accomplish things on your device with Apple Intelligence, and it will provide a list of steps based on Apple’s official documentation.

But the big takeaway here is to not see the shiny new Siri and expect to be able to ask Apple’s voice assistant all kinds of questions that you couldn’t before. Aside from how-to tutorials on Apple products, Siri isn’t smarter yet.

When should we expect Siri to evolve?

The first improvements to Siri will come with the release of iOS 18.2, expected in December. With this update you will be able to enable ChatGPT integration at the system level. Siri will then be able to go back to asking ChatGPT when it doesn’t know the answer to your request. This means that many more types of information and world knowledge queries will be successfully directed to ChatGPT rather than a useless list of Google search results. You don’t need a paid account to use ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.2, but you do need to sign up explicitly.

According to the latest rumors, the next big leap in Siri’s capabilities is scheduled to arrive as part of iOS 18.4, either officially “in the coming months” or unofficially in the spring.

This update will include the ability for Siri to leverage personal context, using data from your device, to answer new types of questions. This means Siri can ask “When is my flight” or “What was the book Jane recommended?” That should mean it can look at data sources like your message conversations, emails, and calendar events to naturally answer questions like:

iOS 18.4 will also include Siri integrations with a number of new in-app actions and screen awareness capabilities. This means Siri can do more functionally; For example, when you look at an image in Photos and say “make it stand out,” Siri will automatically trigger photo editing actions.

Similarly, Apple promises that when you’re looking at a conversation in Messages about a group event with dinner plans, you can say “call the restaurant” and Siri will pull the phone number out of the conversation and start the phone call. on your behalf.

Solution

Siri looks and sounds better today. But you’ll have to be patient until more meaningful new features become available. You also shouldn’t expect iOS 18.4 to be a panacea; The updates focus on questions of personal context, and many of the things you ask Siri today where it fails, like asking to control multiple HomeKit accessories in a single request, will likely still fail.

Apple’s consumer marketing certainly didn’t help set the right expectations for the public. First Apple Intelligence ads It shows off Siri features that won’t arrive until next year.

There’s also a very strong argument that they should keep the (very noticeable) new design until some important new functionality is also released. In particular, Type to Siri invites the user to interact like a chatbot with the presentation of the empty text field. However, Siri does not have the ability to respond this way.