Siri AI headlines new announcements by Apple

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference has long been the place where new ideas for how your iPhone might work would be announced, new features to their “iOS” operating system would be rolled out, and innovations in software are applauded by the broader developer community.

Two years ago, though, at the height of the initial Artificial Intelligence hype cycle, Apple spent a large part of their announcement revealing their AI plans, called “Apple Intelligence”.

While many of their plans were then rolled out to Aussie consumers in early 2025, Apple’s “Personal Context” plans are still, to this date, missing from the devices of their users.

Personal Context was, to be fair, the most exciting part of Apple’s 2024 announcements, allowing your phone to understand your life in a deeper way than ever, to help you in more meaningful ways.

If you’re wondering what time your mum’s flight arrives, it could find that from a previous text message thread, even though you never stored that information in a calendar, things like that. However, those features never eventuated.

Today, at their Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California, Apple took steps to steer their ship back on course with the expectations of the market, which, in simple terms, feels Apple are being left behind by AI challengers.

Instead of an event showcasing hundreds of new features, Apple narrowed their focus into three areas - firstly on making Apple devices run faster, load apps faster, and generally perform better.

Read more

UK lawmaker says she is suing Elon Musk's company over fake Grok bikini images

Then there’s Trust and Safety, in which they revealed a range of deep extensions of their parental controls on Apple devices. The new features will allow parents to manage more of their kids’ time on Apple devices, even scheduling certain times of the day to get particular apps working, and adding in approval to browse new websites.

Additionally, Apple devices will block inappropriate images from being sent or seen by kids, as well as any other harmful content or images.

But the third area - Apple Intelligence - will be core to the success of this event, both with consumers and the stock market.

What was announced today feels very similar to what was announced two years ago; however, the company showed real-time demos to showcase the ideas, like using the new Siri AI to answer real-world questions like when a sporting event is on.

Personal context, though, is key to the success of this AI. It allows you to ask Siri a question, perhaps about something you were told in a message from a contact some days ago. Siri AI can find that information and bring it to you.

Apple was keen to point out that their billion-dollar deal with Google does not mean Apple users are sharing their data with Google’s cloud; instead, Apple is using the powerful Google Large Language model but running it on devices and in their secure private cloud.

This level of privacy is unique to Apple, something they were at pains to point out.

Voice Assistant Siri is the oldest of the assistants in the market, yet Google and Amazon’s assistants have become far stronger and more useful. This new Siri AI, if delivered as demonstrated, makes it a strong contender for making AI useful for everyday people, right on the device they use now.

Apple’s update to all their software for iPhone, iPad, watch, and Macs will go into testing from today, with a public test likely in July, and a roll-out to all Apple devices in September.

Trevor Long travelled to the US as a guest of Apple.