iOS 18: These Apple intelligence features won’t be ready until 2025

Apple is not expected to introduce its most important Apple Intelligence features in September, when iOS 18 sees a release. Instead, many will come along with a Siri revamp in an upcoming iOS 18 update that will be introduced in 2025.

That doesn’t mean Siri won’t get some improvements when iOS 18 first launches. According to BloombergMark Gurman, Siri in iOS 18 will still have some “new bells and whistles” in September, including a new interface that shines a light around the edge of the screen, richer natural language capabilities that will allow Siri to understand you even if you stumble with your words, a greater knowledge of Apple products to power support on the device and a Type to Siri option for entering questions via text.

But according to Gurman, we’ll have to wait until next year to see Apple’s most significant improvements to Siri. An iOS 18 update in 2025 should bring the following improvements to Apple’s virtual assistant:

• Personal context: Siri will have the ability to pull from your photos, calendar events, Messages and other apps to inform answers to questions. Apple gave an example of a person asking when their mother’s flight was landing, which Siri figured out based on recent text conversations and emails.
• Semantic indexing: Apple Intelligence creates a semantic index on the device to store data obtained from the emails, images, websites you visit, and apps you use.
• Application control: Siri will be able to control all the individual features in apps for the first time, expanding the range of functions the personal assistant can perform. Siri will be able to do things like open specific documents, move a note from one folder to another, delete an email, summarize an article, email a web link, and open a page special news on Apple News.
• On-screen awareness: With on-screen awareness, Siri will be able to understand and take action on user content in more apps over time. For example, if a friend sends a user their new address in Messages, the recipient can say, “Add this address to their contact card.”

Like these Siri improvements, Apple Intelligence features will initially only support US English, and support for other languages ​​and regions won’t arrive until 2025.

AI updates come later in 2024

Gurman notes that some of the Mail app’s new AI features won’t be ready until “later in 2024.” These include a redesign that can group emails into categories such as newsletters, announcements and purchases. Swift Assist, a new programming companion for Xcode that uses cloud-based artificial intelligence models, is similarly not expected to arrive until the end of the year. Siri integration with ChatGPT may also miss the initial release, though Gurman thinks it should be ready later in 2024, based on the language Apple has been using in its marketing materials.

Going by the timelines of past releases, these features will likely arrive in an iOS 18.1 or iOS 18.2 update around October or December.

Despite the missing improvements, the initial version of Apple Intelligence will continue to offer a host of features, according to Gurman. It will use AI to prioritize notifications and provide quick summaries of your alerts and text messages. The software will also have the ability to digest web pages, voice notes, meeting notes and emails. Additionally, it will introduce new writing tools, image generation and custom AI-generated emojis called Genmoji.