iOS 18: Siri to gain extensive knowledge to trigger individual app functions, powered by AI

Siri is expected to be at the center of a host of AI-related enhancements coming to iOS 18. Now, thanks to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, we have fresh information on some of the specific upgrades coming to Apple’s intelligent assistant.

Siri’s new AI-powered capabilities

Gurman reports:

The new system will allow the assistant to control and navigate an iPhone or iPad with more precision. That includes being able to open individual documents, moving a note to another folder, sending or deleting an email, opening a particular publication in Apple News, emailing a web link, or even asking the device for a summary of an article…It will be limited to Apple’s own apps at the beginning, with the company planning to support hundreds of different commands.

Currently Siri is programmed to only provide a limited set of functionality based on app intents and the Siri shortcuts system, but this new Siri system appears poised to have more extensive knowledge and control of an app’s inner workings.

Presumably, this change will lead to a lot fewer occasions of having you ask Siri to complete a task and finding it has no idea what you’re talking about. A more intelligent Siri that can understand natural language for a much wider array of commands sounds like the Siri we have always expected but never quite got.

Siri will finally handle multiple commands at once…but not yet

Gurman also outlines a future enhancement Apple has planned for Siri that won’t quite be ready by iOS 18’s launch: support for chaining multiple commands together at once.

At the start, the new Siri will handle one command at a time, but Apple has plans to to allow users to chain commands together. For example, they could ask Siri to summarize a recorded meeting and then text it to a colleague in one request. Or an iPhone could theoretically be asked to crop a picture and then email it to a friend.

Again, this sort of multiple-command support is the kind of feature users have long hoped for from Siri, but that Apple hasn’t been able to provide before. It sounds like the transition to an LLM-based Siri is going to be able to check lots of the boxes of what users expect from a modern digital assistant.

Are you looking forward to a new, AI-infused Siri? What do you hope it will provide? Let us know in the comments.