Apple's WWDC 2024 in Cupertino saw the company get a refresh of Siri, part of a comprehensive generative AI push the company is calling Apple Intelligence this year.
Siri is now more natural, more relevant and more personal, with a new look and refreshed icon. The assistant now pops up with glowing lights around the edge of your device's screen.
Thanks to Apple Intelligence, Siri can handle conversational stumbling blocks, better understand context, and now you can type to Siri to answer questions about using your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Soon, Siri will have even better screen recognition capabilities, so if a friend sends you an address, you can ask Siri to “add this address to my contact card,” for example, and Siri will do it for you (assuming the feature works as advertised).
Siri also has the ability to take actions within and across apps, so you can ask Siri to “highlight this photo” and then ask another app to “add this photo.” This is thanks to a new App Intents API that lets developers ask Siri to take actions within their apps, and an upgraded Siri that is aware of personal context like messages, calendar events, files, photos, and more.
The features are quite extensive: Apple gave the example of Siri finding a photo of a driver's license, extracting the ID number, and entering it into a web form.
It's not clear exactly when many of Siri's more powerful features will arrive on devices, and Apple Intelligence is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and devices with M1 or later chips, so hopefully we'll know more as WWDC progresses.