Siri on your iPhone running iOS 18.1 may look different, but it still works the same

If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 model, you can access Apple Intelligence when updating to iOS 18.1. This includes a new look for Siri, with a beautiful edge-lit animation.

However, the new animation does not mean that Siri’s intelligence or capabilities have meaningfully improved. Here’s exactly what’s new .. and what you have to keep waiting for.

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

If you don’t have Apple Intelligence activated on a supported device, Siri will retain its old orb-like appearance. If you have Apple Intelligence, you get an eye-catching new design including an edge-lit animation which adapts in response to the sound of your voice.

What’s new in Siri right now

The new design is the main upgrade available to customers right now, but there are a few behavioural changes too. Firstly, along with the new appearance, you can now double-tap on the home indicator to launch Siri interface with a presented keyboard, so you can smoothly Type to Siri – for when you are in situations where it is more convenient to type, rather than speak. Apple Intelligence also has an improved voice synthesis engine to make it sound more natural.

Secondly, Siri is more capable at understanding garbled or mis-spoken queries. For instance, if you stumble over your words mid-sentence, Siri is less likely to get confused and understand your actual intent. If you say something like ‘What’s the weather in Spain, no I mean France?’ you should get results for weather in France, rather than Spain.

Thirdly, Siri is more knowledgeable about the user manuals for Apple’s products. That means you can ask Siri with Apple Intelligence questions about how to achieve things on your device, and it will be able to present a list of steps based on Apple’s official documentation.

But the important takeaway is do not see the new shiny Siri and expect to be able to ask all sorts of questions to Apple’s voice assistant that you couldn’t before. Aside from how-to tutorials about Apple’s products, Siri is really no 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 that update, you will be to enable ChatGPT integration at a system level. Siri will then be able to fallback to asking ChatGPT when it otherwise doesn’t know the answer to your request. That means a lot more types of trivia and world knowledge queries will be successfully routed to ChatGPT, rather than an unhelpful 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 opt-in.

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

That update will include Siri being able to draw on personal context using data on your device to answer new types of questions. That should mean Siri will be able to look at data sources like your message conversations, emails and calendar events to naturally answer questions like “When is my flight” or “What was that book that Jane recommended?”.

iOS 18.4 will also include Siri integrations with a whole bunch of new in-app actions, and onscreen awareness capabilities. That means Siri will functionally be able to do more, like if you are 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 are looking at a conversation in Messages about a group activity with dinner plans, you’ll be able to say “call the restaurant” and Siri will extract the phone number from the chat and initiate the phone call on your behalf.

Conclusion

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

Apple’s consumer marketing has certainly not helped set the right expectations for the public, with one of the first Apple Intelligence ads demonstrating Siri features that aren’t arriving until sometime next year.

There is also a very strong argument that they should have withheld the (very noticeable) new design until some of the significant new functionality was also shipping. 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 that manner.