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With the iPhone 16 reveal just around the corner at Apple’s “Glowtime” event on September 9, the biggest talking point about the next best iPhone will likely be Apple Intelligence integration rather than a hardware upgrade.
Apple’s AI features are expected to play a starring role in the marketing of the next-generation iPhones, but customers will have to wait until iOS 18.1 arrives later this year to get a taste of what Apple Intelligence can do.
While we won’t have to wait long to try out Apple Intelligence after the launch of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, some of the biggest features we’re all eagerly awaiting won’t arrive until 2025. The biggest of which is Siri 2.0.
With that in mind, we explore what the next-generation Siri will look like and why you should be excited to use the AI-powered voice assistant when it launches next year.
Siri2.0
First, here’s a quick rundown of the expected launch of Apple Intelligence, according to top insiders like Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The first features of Apple Intelligence, such as proofreading, summarizing, call recording, Clean Up and other handy tools, will come as part of iOS 18.1, which is scheduled to launch later this year, possibly in October.
This means that iPhone 16 owners won’t get any of Apple’s Intelligence features on day one of their iOS 18 phones. That’s a shame, but since iOS 18.1 is now in beta, it hopefully won’t be long before your entire contact list can send AI-generated responses to AI-generated questions using Genmoji over iMessage.
In iOS 18.1, Siri gets an overhaul with a sleek new design that appears on the edges of your iPhone and pulses as you speak. It looks beautiful, and you can also double-tap the bottom of your device to “Type to Siri” when speaking aloud, which is handy. From my testing, Siri is definitely improved in iOS 18.1, but it’s nowhere near as smart as the Siri Apple showed off at WWDC in June.
For that version of the voice assistant, which we’re calling 2.0, Gurman suggests it will “enter developer beta testing in January and then be released to the public around spring — as part of an iOS 18.4 upgrade that’s already in the works.”
The wait for a smarter Siri will be worth it
At WWDC, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi demonstrated an example of Siri’s AI capabilities, pulling information from an event poster to determine if he could reschedule his meeting and still attend his daughter’s theater performance. Apple Intelligence was able to figure out who his daughter was and what event it was for, as well as contact those involved and create new calendar events.
It was really impressive stuff, and it was all possible thanks to the major improvements made to Siri, which made the voice assistant your own personal on-device assistant. Apple made a big deal about Siri leveraging the ability of Apple Intelligence to read personal context, interact with what’s on your device’s screen, and act wiser than we’ve ever seen before. Siri will ultimately, much like Gemini on the latest Google Pixel 9 phones, become the cornerstone of Apple Intelligence on Apple devices going forward.
But until Siri 2.0 comes out next year, Apple will have to realize that Siri, which was included in iOS 18.1 and given a beautiful design, is not the voice assistant we were promised.
Otherwise, the launch of Apple Intelligence could prove to be a disappointment, as users try AI on iPhones for the first time and quickly discover that, aside from a few nice new features, it’s not quite the AI-driven future.
