Latest Siri With Apple Intelligence: Promising Update For Apple's Voice Assistant

JAKARTA - Apple has released its first look at Apple Intelligence, which includes a major update to Siri, their longstanding voice assistant. While it's still early, let's see how Siri gets updates and what features are still looking forward to.

Siri, Apple's flagship voice assistant, is now getting a highly anticipated update through Apple Intelligence. This update is part of iOS 18.1 beta, which is expected to come in October. Although many new features are not yet available, this update provides an early view of future improvements.

Siri's New Appearance: Siri now has a fully new look. Unlike the previous small glass orb, Siri now displays a colored animation that appears from the edge of the phone screen. This animation can be seen on the iPhone, iPad, and when using CarPlay, moving as if it became a screen visualizer. If you call Siri with a side button, animation will spread from the upper right corner, while if using a voice or keyboard, animation appears from the edge of the screen.

New Ability in Understanding Context: Siri is now better at understanding context and can maintain the context between questions. For example, if you say, "Check the weather for tomorrow, actually, check for Tuesday in Cupertino," Siri will only give the right answer.

This is different from the old version of Siri which provides a range of weather information. The new Siri can also handle more complex requests, such as adding the Cleveland Guardians match schedule to the calendar after asking for the schedule.

New Keyboard: Now, Siri also supports the typing feature. By double-tapping at the bottom of the phone screen, the keyboard will appear to type questions with Siri. You can easily move between typed and spoken questions.

Product Knowledge: Another new feature is Siri's ability to answer questions about Apple products. For example, you can ask "how to send a message later?" or "how to fix a photo when someone flashes?" Siri will give step-by-step instructions. However, some questions, such as "how to record an omeprazole for today," still need improvement in context understanding.

The Features Still Waiting: Although new views and features have been introduced, many features are expected to remain unavailable. Siri will soon gain screen awareness to take action based on what you see and understand the personal context by withdrawing information from the calendar, messages, emails, and others. Integration with other ChatGPT and LLM will also increase Siri's knowledge.

Apple Intelligence and Siri's upgraded update are scheduled to come with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 this fall. While Siri still has some flaws, the improvements there show a promising direction towards a more sophisticated and personal voice assistant.