With two weeks to go until the 2024 Worldwide Developer Conference, leaks regarding Apple’s plans for its operating systems have begun pouring out. The latest comes from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who reports that Apple will upgrade its digital assistant Siri in iOS 18 with advanced artificial intelligence that should significantly expand its capabilities.
According to the report, Siri will be able to handle any command within any app. The feature will initially be limited to Apple’s own apps but will support hundreds of unique commands. It sounds like if there’s something you can do in an app by tapping on the screen, you’ll be able to ask the AI-enhanced Siri to perform the task for you as well.
More specifically, Siri should be able to open individual documents, move notes between folders, send or delete emails, open a specific publication in Apple News, email a web link to one of your contacts, and summarize a news article for you.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard rumors about a Siri overhaul in iOS 18. Last fall, a blog on Naver said that the company would transform Siri into a “killer AI app for accessibility across Apple’s vast array of devices.” The blog also predicted the revamp of Siri would be unveiled at WWDC 2024 and that it would launch alongside the iPhone 16.
At first, Siri will only be able to handle one command at a time. Eventually, Apple wants to allow users to string multiple commands together, such as recording a meeting and then sending the summary of the meeting to a colleague with a single request. The report suggests this upgrade won’t be ready until 2025 at the earliest, but it should be part of iOS 18.
Apple has been playing catch-up with other digital assistants for years, but companies such as OpenAI and Google have now completely lapped Siri with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. Revamping Siri will help to bring Apple into the AI era, but we’ll need to see it in action first to see if it’s a big enough upgrade to make Siri competitive again.
