iOS 18 will give Siri more control over apps

Apple is planning a major update to Siri with a focus on artificial intelligence, which would allow Apple's assistant to control certain functions and applications with voice commands.

A new, improved Siri is expected to arrive next year as part of the iOS 18 update.

According to Bloomberg, the update will allow Siri to analyze your phone's activity while automatically turning on Siri-controlled features. You'll only be able to use Siri to control functions in Apple-made apps to begin with, but the company plans to support "hundreds" of commands.

Siri will reportedly only be able to process one command at a time. However, Apple will eventually allow Siri to perform multiple tasks with a single request, such as asking Siri for a summary of a recorded meeting and then sending it to a friend, according to Bloomberg.

Samsung promised something similar back in 2017 when it introduced its Bixby assistant, but the assistant remained only a pale shadow of what was promised. Perhaps this will change with the introduction of artificial intelligence Galaxy AI, which could spice up what's going on in the brain of Samsung's assistant.

It's unclear exactly how Apple's Assistant technology will work. We can help to some extent with Microsoft's recent introduction of the Copilot assistant, which is powered by the latest GPT-4o language model. It can watch the screen, analyze what we are doing and suggest improvements.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Apple would focus on handling many of the AI requirements on the device, meaning the phone would use local resources. It could process simpler commands on the iPhone while pulling more complex requests from the cloud. OpenAI is also rumored to have struck a deal with Apple, but this has yet to be confirmed.

Other rumors include that Apple could add the ability to analyze and summarize text in messages. The company is also said to be planning to introduce artificial intelligence transcription into voice memos and notes, similar to what we can do now on Samsung phones.

Apple's WWDC conference is just around the corner. It will take place on June 10, and we will surely learn some juicy information then.