This week, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.1, which includes some Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence features. In their current form, some of them already seem useful, writes The Verge, but the most important ones will debut later – and the main one promises to be the radically wiser voice assistant Siri.
Image source: apple.com
A major update to Siri AI will be released only in a few months – the AI assistant will learn to understand what is on the screen and will be able to perform actions on behalf of the user. For now, Apple has limited itself to minor changes: speech recognition has improved, the assistant has become better at parsing natural language and now allows the user to stammer, and the possibility of dialogue in text format has appeared. When Siri is active, the edges of the phone’s screen are illuminated, but the assistant’s capabilities so far are mostly limited to turning to Google to search for information.
The most important innovations concern working with text. The previously existing function of transcribing voice recordings in Notes has become much smarter: for example, Apple Intelligence breaks a person’s speech into semantic units and can create lists – this is useful, for example, when listing things that the user wants to take with him on a trip. In one case, the AI even compiled a table. Text tools, including writing, editing, and summaries, are unobtrusive and the user can easily skip them.
In Mail the changes are more noticeable. A block has appeared on the main page of the application, which displays emails considered by the AI to be the most important – as practice has shown, they are really important. The main inbox list shows not the first lines of incoming letters, but their text summaries. More often than not, this innovation turns out to be truly useful, and in the worst case, simply harmless. The summaries of advertising letters seemed somewhat funny.
In the Photos application, search queries in natural language now work – the AI actually finds photos from the gallery based on the description, although sometimes it malfunctions and suggests something unnecessary. Probably, in the future, the function will be constantly used in everyday life, since it works intuitively and simply.