As part of its iOS 18 updates coming this fall, Apple plans to launch at least some of its new Apple Intelligence AI service. According to the latest Power On weekly newsletter from Bloomberg"s Mark Gurman, some of the Apple Intelligence upgrades for its Siri voice assistant, which first launched in 2012, will also arrive this fall, including a new user interface design and integration with OpenAI"s ChatGPT chatbot.
However, Gurman reports today that the bigger Siri updates will be arriving in 2025. That will reportedly include allowing Siri much more direct access to Apple"s iOS apps. Gurman writes:
That means you can ask Siri to, say, edit a photo and then ship it off to a friend. It also will have the ability to understand what you’re looking at on your display, helping Siri determine what you want to do based on the context.
The bad news is we will still have to wait a while before those features become part of Siri. Gumran reports that a beta of these new features will launch for iOS developers in January 2025. The full launch for the public will be a part of the iOS 18.4 release, which will reportedly happen sometime in the spring of 2025.
Apple is not the only company planning to upgrade its older voice assistant for the new AI age. Amazon is also reportedly working on a more advanced version of its Alexa voice assistant which launched in 2014. In September 2023, Amazon created a brief demo of its Alexa assistant that could access an AI Large Language Model.
More recently, unconfirmed reports claim Amazon may officially launch the upgraded Alexa with its AL LLM this September. It added that the company could charge between $5 to $10 a month to access the AI-based Alexa. So far, there"s been no word if Apple could do the same with an AI-boosted version of Siri.