Apple’s iOS 18 Update: Siri AI Lets You Control App Features with Your Voice

Leaks about Apple’s plans for its operating systems have started to come out with two weeks left until the 2024 Worldwide Developer Conference. The newest news comes from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who says that Apple will add advanced artificial intelligence to Siri in iOS 18, which should greatly increase its abilities.

The report says that Siri will be able to handle any command in any app. At first, only Apple apps will be able to use the feature, but it will eventually support hundreds of different commands. If there’s something you can do in an app by tapping the screen, it sounds like you’ll be able to ask Siri to do it for you as well. Furthermore, Siri should be able to open specific files, move notes between folders, send or delete emails, open a certain publication in Apple News, email a web link to a contact, and summarise a news story for you.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard that iOS 18 will change how Siri works. In 2017, a blog on Naver said that the company would make Siri a “killer AI app for accessibility across Apple’s vast array of devices.” The blog also said that Siri would get a makeover at WWDC 2024 and come out at the same time as the iPhone 16. Siri will only be able to manage one command at a time at first. In the future, Apple wants to let users chain together more than one command. For example, they might want to record a meeting and then send a summary of the meeting to a coworker with just one command. According to the report, this update won’t be ready until at least 2025. It should be included in iOS 18, though.

Apple’s AI Ambitions and Siri’s Competitiveness

Apple’s been trying for years to catch up with other digital assistants. Since then, however, OpenAI and Google’s AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, have completely surpassed Siri. Apple’s changes to Siri bring it closer to AI, but we need to see how it works first to know if the changes are big enough to make Siri competitive again.