If you have a iPhone 15 Pro Or iPhone16 model, you can access Apple Intelligence when updating to iOS 18.1. This includes a new look for Siri, with beautiful edge-lit animation.

However, the new animation does not mean that Siri’s intelligence or abilities have improved significantly. Here’s exactly what’s new…and what you should expect.

Siri updates are part of the Apple Intelligence rollout. Apple Intelligence is available on supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers running the latest version of the operating system. In the current version of iOS 18.1, your device language must be set to US English to access these features. Support for more English languages ​​is coming in iOS 18.2, and more international languages ​​will be supported in 2025.

If Apple Intelligence is not enabled on a supported device, Siri will retain its old orb appearance. If you have Apple Intelligence, you get an eye-catching new design that includes edge-lit animation that adapts in response to the sound of your voice.

What’s new in Siri right now

The new design is the main upgrade currently available to customers, but there are also some behavioral changes. First of all, along with the new look, you can now double-tap the home indicator to launch the Siri interface with a featured keyboard, so you can type smoothly on Siri – when you find yourself in situations where it is more convenient to type, rather than speak. Apple Intelligence also has an improved text-to-speech engine to make it more natural.

Second, Siri is better able to understand garbled or poorly worded queries. For example, if you stumble over your words in the middle of a sentence, Siri is less likely to get lost and understand your real intention. If you say something like “What’s the weather like in Spain, no, I mean France?” » you should get results for weather in France rather than Spain.

Third, Siri is more familiar with Apple product user manuals. This means you can ask Siri questions with Apple Intelligence about how to achieve things on your device, and it will be able to present a list of steps based on official Apple documentation.

But the takeaway is not seeing the shiny new Siri and expecting to be able to ask Apple’s voice assistant all kinds of questions that you couldn’t ask before. Aside from hands-on tutorials on Apple products, Siri isn’t really getting any smarter yet.

When to expect Siri to improve

The first improvements to Siri will come with the release of iOS 18.2, expected in December. With this update you will be able to enable ChatGPT integration at the system level. Siri can then ask ChatGPT if it doesn’t know the answer to your request. This means that many more types of trivia and world knowledge queries will be successfully routed to ChatGPT, rather than a useless list of Google search results. You don’t need a paid account to use the ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.2, but you do need to explicitly sign up.

The next big leap in Siri’s capabilities is expected to arrive officially “in the coming months”, or unofficially as part of iOS 18.4 in the spring, according to the latest rumors.

This update will allow Siri to leverage personal context by using data from your device to answer new types of questions. This should mean that Siri will be able to look at data sources like your chats, emails, and calendar events to naturally answer questions like “When is my flight” or “What was that book recommended by Jane?

iOS 18.4 will also include Siri integrations with a whole bunch of new in-app actions and screen awareness capabilities. This means that Siri will functionally be able to do more, like if you look at an image in Photos and say “bring it up”, Siri will be able to automatically trigger photo editing actions.

Likewise, Apple promises that if you view a conversation in Messages about a group activity with dinner plans, you’ll be able to say “call the restaurant” and Siri will pull the chat’s phone number and initiate the phone call on your behalf .

Conclusion

Siri looks and sounds better today. But you need to be patient until new, more significant features are rolled out. You shouldn’t expect iOS 18.4 to be a panacea either; updates are focused on questions related to personal context and many things you ask Siri today where it fails, like asking to control multiple HomeKit accessories in a single request, will probably always fail.

Apple’s consumer marketing certainly hasn’t helped set the right audience expectations, one of the first Apple Intelligence ads demonstrating Siri features that won’t arrive until next year.

There is also a very strong argument that they should have held off on the (very visible) new design until some of the important new features were also available. In particular, Type to Siri almost invites the user to interact with it like a chatbot, with the presentation of the empty text field. But Siri is simply not capable of responding in this way.