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In the latest iOS 18 preview, Siri gets a little shine. The entire phone actually glows around the edges when you summon Siri.
The Welcome screen reintroduces you to the virtual assistant when you enable Apple Intelligence, an early version of which is now available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in a developer beta. You’ll know Siri is listening when the edges of the screen airy up, making it pretty obvious that something else is happening.
Siri’s huge AI update is still a few months away. This version includes significant improvements to language understanding, but future updates will add features like screen awareness and the ability to take actions on your behalf. Meanwhile, the rest of the Apple Intelligence feature set unveiled in this update feels like a party waiting for the guest of honor.
That said, the improvements to Siri in this update are useful. Double-tapping the bottom of the screen will bring up a recent way to interact with the assistant: via text. It’s also much better at parsing natural language, waiting more patiently for hesitations and “uh-huhs” as I go through questions. It also understands when I ask a follow-up question.
Beyond Siri, it’s an Easter egg hunt of sorts, with bits and pieces of Apple Intelligence sprinkled throughout the operating system. They’re in the Mail app, with a summary button at the top of each email. And wherever you can type and highlight text, you’ll find a recent option called “writing tools” with AI correction, writing suggestions, and summaries.
“Help me write something” is pretty standard for generative AI these days, and Apple Intelligence does it as well as anyone. You can make your text more genial, professional, or concise. You can also create summaries of your text, or synthesize it into bulleted lists of key points or a table.
I find these tools most useful in the Notes app, where you can now add voice recordings. In iOS 18, voice recordings finally come with automatic transcriptions, which is NO Apple Intelligence feature, because it also works on my iPhone 13 Mini. But Apple Intelligence will let you turn the transcript of your recording into a summary or checklist. This is helpful if you just want to casually associate notes while recording and list a few things you need to pack for an upcoming trip; Apple Intelligence turns that into a list that actually makes sense.
These writing tools are tucked away out of the way, and if you’re not looking for them, you might miss them entirely. The more obvious recent AI features are in the Mail app. Apple Intelligence displays what it considers critical emails in a tab that sits above the rest of your inbox, marked as priority. Below the emails, it displays a compact summary instead of the first line or two of text you’d normally see.
There’s something charming about the AI’s earnest attempts to summarize promotional emails, trying to helpfully extract details like “Backpacks and lunchboxes ship for FREE” and “Organic white nectarines are sweet and juicy, and in season now.” But the descriptions in my inbox were precise—helpful in a few cases, harmless in the worst case. And the emails that were given priority status were actually critical, which is promising.
The search tool in the Photos app now uses AI to understand more complicated requests. You can ask for photos of a specific person wearing glasses or all the food you ate in Iceland, all in natural language.
Despite the airy show, Siri is more or less the same as always
His Very good. The results come back quickly and are usually reliable. It found the photo I had in mind of my kid with the stupid glasses, although it also showed photos of him and someone otherwise he wore glasses. Still, I think it’s a feature that people will get used to right away and won’t think twice about using – intuitive and obviously useful.
But despite the airy show, Siri is the same as it always has been. She remains largely a “let me Google this” machine. The biggest updates are expected to come in future updates, when Siri will be aware of what’s on your screen and can take actions in apps for you. In theory, you’ll be able to let Siri pull information from messages and turn them into calendar events, or pull information from emails without having to dig through your inbox.
That’s what excites me the most, and all the pieces of Apple Intelligence that have been available so far could be the building blocks for a better Siri. Apple’s AI can understand the content of an email or a photo. Similarly, Siri can better understand how people speak. For Apple Intelligence to work, Siri needs to connect the dots.
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