iOS 18 Will Give Siri Much More Control Over Your Apps Apple’s already been teasing up that artificial intelligence will be a big focus at WWDC 2024, and just a few days after confirming the timing of its special event for June 10, 2024, we’re getting another report on what some of those announcements might be.
Details have been leaking out in the weeks leading up to the event, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has news of one we haven’t heard of yet. Siri, he claims, will be able to perform almost any function within apps. The feature is said to be coming in an iOS 18 update early in 2025.
Siri, which has been built into every iPhone since the iPhone 4s and found on countless other, will likely be getting a major upgrade. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is now reporting that Siri will be able to control various elements of an application on an iPhone, likely rolling out with iOS 18.
However, the new capabilities will go further. Apple will purportedly use AI to analyze what users are doing and automatically enable Siri-controlled features. Initially, it will be limited to Apple’s own apps, but it will support hundreds of different commands.
Letting Siri control iPhone and iPad apps is reportedly Apple’s core focus, and something Siri has been lagging far behind at when compared to Google Assistant on Android phones. It’s unclear how the technology will work exactly, but a recent demo from Microsoft showed how its GPT-4o-powered Copilot assistant could watch the screen to do things like give tips on how to play Minecraft.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that Apple will focus on handling many AI requests on-device. It could process simpler commands on the iPhone while fetching more complex requests from the cloud.