Apple Newsroom yesterday:
This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing
Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find
what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and
more. For example, users can ask Siri to find a restaurant
recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel
confirmation number from an old email, or pull up photos with
friends and family from a recent trip. And personal context
understanding extends to third-party apps when developers
integrate with Spotlight.With even more systemwide app actions, Siri AI lets users get
things done across apps, like drafting an email from scratch, or
editing and sharing a set of photos. Using onscreen awareness,
Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s
screen. For example, if a user gets a text about a potluck with
friends, they can brainstorm with Siri on what to bring and then
add a recipe to the Notes app.In addition, Siri AI can use broad world knowledge to get
up-to-date information from the web on virtually any topic and
generate a helpful answer, such as when and where to see the next
solar eclipse, or when a musician is coming to town. Users can
extend almost any response from Siri into a rich conversation and
ask follow-up questions.
I like the name “Siri AI”. “New Siri” wouldn’t have legs because eventually this won’t be new. This should be the dividing line between Siri as we know it and Siri as it should be. The demos I’ve seen so far (I still don’t have access on my iOS 27 testing device) are impressive. Well, impressive compared to old Siri. They’re table stakes for generative AI. But Siri AI is the only system that can draw upon your personal data in the apps on your devices, and perform actions based on the app intents supported by the apps on your devices. It is in some ways less capable than ChatGPT or Claude, but in other ways has more potential. It’s a very different approach and I think it’s the right one for Apple.
They need to execute, they need to prove this can scale, and most of all, they need to get third-party apps on board with App Intents and App Schemas. But it seems like they’re doing all of that. This is not a done deal but it is very realistic.
