If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 model, you can get access to Apple Intelligence when you update to iOS 18.1. This includes a new look for Siri with a beautiful, edge-lit animation.
New animations don’t mean Siri’s intelligence or capabilities have improved significantly, though. Here’s what’s new… and what you’ll have to wait for.
Siri updates are part of the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence is available on supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers running the latest version of the operating system. With the current release of iOS 18.1, your device’s language must be set to US English to access these features. Support for more English locales will come in iOS 18.2, and more international languages will be supported in 2025.
If you don't have Apple Intelligence enabled on a supported device, Siri will retain its old spherical look. If you have Apple Intelligence, you'll get a sleek new design that includes a glowing edge animation that adapts in response to the sound of your voice.
What's new in Siri right now
The new design is the main update available to customers right now, but there are a few behavioral changes, too. First, along with the new look, you can now double-tap the Home indicator to launch the Siri interface with a keyboard presented, so you can seamlessly type to Siri — in situations where you’re more comfortable typing than speaking. Apple Intelligence has also improved the voice synthesis engine to make it sound more natural.
Second, Siri is better at understanding garbled or mispronounced queries. For example, if you accidentally stumble over a sentence, Siri is less likely to get confused and more likely to understand your true intent. If you say something like “What’s the weather like in Spain, no, I mean France?” you should get results for the weather in France, not Spain.
Third, Siri is better at understanding user manuals for Apple products. This means you can ask Siri with Apple Intelligence questions about how to accomplish something on your device, and it will be able to provide a list of steps based on official Apple documentation.
But the important takeaway: Don't look at the shiny new Siri and expect to be able to ask Apple's voice assistant all sorts of questions that you couldn't before. Beyond tutorials about Apple products, Siri hasn't actually gotten smarter — yet.
When to Expect Siri to Improve
The first improvements to Siri will arrive with the release of iOS 18.2, expected in December. With this update, you'll need to enable ChatGPT integration at the system level. Siri will then be able to fall back to the ChatGPT prompt when it doesn't know the answer to your query. This means that many more types of trivia and knowledge-about-the-world queries will be successfully routed to ChatGPT rather than Google's useless list of search results. You don't need a paid account to use ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.2, but you do need to explicitly opt in.
The next big leap in Siri's capabilities is expected to officially arrive sometime in the coming months, or unofficially as part of iOS 18.4 in the spring, according to the latest rumors.
This update will include the ability for Siri to use personal context, using data on your device to answer new types of questions. This should mean Siri will be able to look at data sources like your messages, emails, and calendar events to naturally answer questions like “When is my flight” or “What book did Jane recommend?”
iOS 18.4 will also include Siri integration with a range of new in-app actions and screen awareness capabilities. This means Siri will be able to do more functionally, such as if you’re looking at an image in Photos and say “make it pop,” Siri will automatically be able to trigger photo editing actions.
Similarly, Apple promises that if you’re looking at a conversation in Messages about a group event with dinner plans, you’ll be able to say “call the restaurant,” and Siri will pull the phone number from the chat and initiate a phone call on your behalf.
Conclusion
Siri looks and sounds better today. But you’ll need to be patient until more significant new features arrive. You also shouldn’t expect iOS 18.4 to be a panacea; The updates focus on personal contextual questions, and many of the things you ask Siri to do today that it can't handle, like asking it to control multiple HomeKit accessories in one request, are likely still not going to work.
Apple's consumer marketing certainly didn't help set the public's expectations, with one of the first Apple Intelligence ads showing off Siri features that wouldn't be coming until next year.
There's also a very strong argument that they should have held off on the (very noticeable) new design until some of the big new features were released. In particular, Type to Siri almost invites the user to interact with it like a chatbot by displaying an empty text field. But Siri simply isn't capable of responding that way.
