Apple is quietly working on a real game changer: an upgraded version of App Intents that could finally make Siri the true hands-free voice controller of your iPhone.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Here’s what the new App Intents will mean: With nothing but your voice, you’ll be able to tell Siri to find a specific photo, edit it, and send it off. Or comment on an Instagram post. Or scroll a shopping app and add something to your cart. Or log in to a service without touching the screen. Essentially, Siri could operate your apps like you would — with precision, inside their own interfaces.
If Apple nails this, it’s not just a nice ease-of-use upgrade — it’s the fulfillment of the vision Siri promised nearly 15 years ago. And it’s the key to Apple’s next hardware developments. The company’s upcoming home devices (a smart display set for next year and a tabletop robot after that) will rely on this tech to function naturally…
[T]he Siri delay has rippled through the company’s other product plans. It’s already led to the smart display being pushed back an entire year…
The plan now is to ship the feature alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily…
This isn’t just about making Siri smarter. It’s about giving Apple’s ecosystem a new, voice-first interface. If the company is actually able to bring it to market (and that’s a gigantic if), it could potentially be a hit that many users didn’t see coming.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s not so much a game changer for the iPhone, iPad, or Mac, but for devices that have no other or limited means of input, like HomePod, Vision Pro, future smart glasses, even Apple Watch, it would be transformative.
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“It’s not so much a game changer for the iPhone, iPad, or Mac”
strong disagree.
not only would it be a game changer for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, that is exactly where it would be THE game changer.
essentially you would be interacting with one AI agent to take any kind of action you wanted.
an iPhone with an AI agent you could talk to, naturally, like an assistant, who simply takes action on anything you can imagine that’s doable on your iPhone at your verbal command is what the new AI device OpenAI is building with Jonny Ive is aspiring to be.
They will have to build their own OS and smartphone. Neither OpenAI nor anyone else will ever have access to iOS at the system level. That is Apple’s key advantage in this whole AI craze. They control the devices (especially mobile) that most people will access AI on. ‘Apple Intelligence’ is actually quite accurate since the focus is what you can do on your Apple device and even though it’s much delayed it’s Apple’s monopoly ecosystem so it’s more important to get it right than rush it out. They’ll never let anyone in aside from chatbots that provide information but don’t control anything.
See the “Knowledge Navigator” for a preview. I hope. This could at least be a step in that direction.
At WWDC, Apple programmers used to highlight their work as progress towards the Knowledge Navigator. With today’s LLMs and really good voice recognition, the goal might finally be attainable.
This “project” better be well on the way and not a snippet of what’s proposed.
Apple has no matches left with false dreams and linking it to a false dream (Siri) is more than dangerous.
In fact, APPL should have announced when ready…”download ready tomorrow at noon.”
What title should have been; “What Siri was Meant to Be All Along”
Sounds like someone at Apple had an epiphany that they should have had from the beginning. I always thought that being the voice controller for iOS was the original intent of Siri. What exactly was Siri meant to be as a competitor to Google Assistant and Alexa? Did they actually intend for Siri to be the inferior of the bunch till their ‘new’ announcement?