By Radhika Rajkumar, Senior Editor, / June 8 at 1:49 p.m. ET
Mike Rockwell, VP of Siri engineering, said “we’ve rebuilt Siri with powerful AI at the core,” introducing Siri AI, a blend of Siri and Apple Intelligence.
Users can access the new Siri by saying “Hey Siri” as always, but now it will be a “profoundly more capable assistant” you can converse with, including via a new dedicated Siri app. It’s in Spotlight on MacOS, and Visual Intelligence is here too.
In a demo, Rockwell showed Siri drawing on current public information to answer a question about a local concert, with the answer displayed on Rockwell’s home screen. With on-screen awareness and using personal context, Siri can identify a location from a photo you’ve pulled up and answer follow-up questions related to the location, including directions, for which Siri opens Apple Maps to display.
For the last demo, Rockwell told Siri to share only select photos featuring certain people in a family group chat. Another demo showed Siri handling more than one-off tasks, going from request to request to plan a watch party the way you’d use ChatGPT or Gemini, echoing some of the capabilities Google showed Gemini Spark handling at I/O last month.
These demos showed the revamped assistant doing “the things you’d expect Siri to do,” as Rockwell put it.
