Apple unveils ‘Siri AI’, new features

Apple has introduced Siri AI, the long-awaited evolution of its personal digital assistant, which promises an experience similar to ChatGPT baked into the iPhone, Mac, iPad and more. Launching in beta later this year, the new assistant will be able to draw on personal information to answer questions, see what’s on a user’s screen, and fetch new data from the internet. It will also be accessible in its own app, syncing previous conversations across devices using Apple’s iCloud.

The announcement came as part of a raft of new features unveiled for the company’s 2027 software systems at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in California, which also included new child safety options, an equaliser setting for AirPods, AI upgrades for Photos, Safari and Image Playground, and new smart home capabilities.

Underpinning almost all the new features are the company’s latest Apple Foundation Models, which were built on Google Gemini technology following a high-profile agreement between the tech giants made early this year. Like all Apple Intelligence features, the company said, its latest technology was custom-built and designed to run only on devices or in super-secure cloud environments. Apple continues to put privacy forward as a key differentiator in its AI products, reiterating that user data is never stored or made available to Apple at any point in the process.

The market’s response to the latest announcements was tepid, with a stock gain of more than 3 per cent soon fizzing to close 1.9 per cent lower on Wall Street. Apple has been under pressure from investors to close a perceived gap in artificial intelligence features. The AI-powered Siri, alongside many other generative features, was first announced by Apple years ago, but the combination either failed to eventuate or arrived in stunted form.

At the conference, Apple’s software engineering boss, Craig Federighi, said the features were worth doing properly and carefully.

“Truly helpful AI must be centred on our users’ needs, deeply integrated into the products they rely on every day, grounded in personal context, and built with privacy at every step,” he said.

“With useful features for browsing the web, expressing creativity, editing photos and so much more, today marks a big step forward on our journey to integrate powerful AI into the core of our platforms and make our products even more personal and useful.”

Demonstrations of the new version of Siri showed natural back and forth conversation and a knowledge of user’s information stored in text conversations and calendars. On iPhone, a new animation in the Dynamic Island at the top of the device shows when Siri is thinking, and a swipe down gesture at the top of the screen gives easy access to chat with the assistant. On Mac, the chatbot will be integrated into Spotlight Search. Combined with Apple’s Visual Intelligence and Siri’s new ability to take screenshots and camera views as input, the result appears similar to Gemini’s capabilities on Android phones.

In the dedicated Siri app, Apple showed new text and image generation capabilities, the ability to analyse files, and much-improved voice dictation. Siri AI will be available as a beta in Australia later this year, and will initially be available only in English. Apple said the improved chatbot was not coming to iPhones in Europe owing to local legislation, and was not planned for China at all at present.

Elsewhere, Apple Intelligence is being used to add more AI features to many of the apps included with Apple devices, with the new features scheduled to launch with this September’s OS updates:

• Safari will be able to organise your tabs into topics, watch a website to notify you of changes and create new extensions if you describe them. Apple’s AI will be able to sign in to services on your behalf and automatically change your passwords to make them more secure.
• Photos will get new editing tools that allow users to reframe and even adjust the angle of images after they’re taken. The Google-like Clean Up tool is also getting an upgrade. Photos will now be labelled with an invisible SynthID watermark so they can be identified as AI-edited.
• Image Playground will be overhauled to enable the generation of photorealistic images. Previously, Apple has limited its generations to cartoon-like images only. Users will be able to make edits by describing them, generate any aspect ratio, apply images to wallpapers or contact images and more. These images will also be SynthID labelled.
• The Messages and Phone apps are getting context-specific suggestions similar to Google’s Magic Cue. This could include prompting users to turn information into a reminder or note, or surfacing confirmation codes or reservation details from your data when calling a business.

Outside AI, Apple also promised various performance updates for its operating systems, including faster app loading, quicker AirDrop transfers and better switching between Wi-Fi and mobile internet. It is also adding a slider to change transparency levels in its divisive Liquid Glass visual design.

Finally, Apple is reinforcing some of its parental controls and child safety features. This seemed aimed at getting ahead of increased regulation in the space, given most of the announcements covered features that Apple has had for a long time. The new operating systems will make it simpler to set up child accounts, allow kids to ask permission to browse blocked sites, and optionally ensure that every new contact added to a child’s phone is approved by a parent or guardian.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.