If you have one iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 model, you can access Apple Intelligence when you update to iOS 18.1. This includes a new look for Siri, with a beautiful edge-lit animation.

However, the new animation doesn’t mean that Siri’s intelligence or capabilities have improved in any meaningful way. Here’s exactly what’s new.. and what you’ll have to keep waiting for.

Updates to Siri are part of the Apple Intelligence rollout. Apple Intelligence is available on supported iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers with the latest version of the operating system. In the current iOS 18.1 version, your device language must be set to US English to access these features. Support for more English languages ​​is coming in iOS 18.2, and more international languages ​​will be supported in 2025.

If you don’t have Apple Intelligence enabled on a supported device, Siri will retain its old globe-like appearance. If you have Apple Intelligence, you get an eye-catching new design including an edge-lit animation that adapts to the sound of your voice.

What’s new in Siri right now

The new design is the main upgrade available to customers right now, but there are also some behavioral changes. First, along with the new look, you can now double-click the home indicator to launch the Siri interface with a featured keyboard, allowing you to conveniently type to Siri—because when you’re in situations where it’s more convenient to type, rather than speaking. Apple Intelligence also has an improved voice synthesis engine to make it sound more natural.

Second, Siri is more capable of understanding garbled or misspoken questions. For example, if you stumble over your words mid-sentence, Siri is less likely to get confused and understand your actual intent. If you say something like “What’s the weather in Spain, no, I mean France?” you should get results for weather in France, rather than Spain.

Third, Siri is more knowledgeable about the user manuals for Apple products. This means you can ask Siri questions with Apple Intelligence about how to achieve things on your device, and it will be able to present a list of steps based on Apple’s official documentation.

But the important thing is not to see the shiny new Siri and expect to be able to ask Apple’s voice assistant all kinds of questions that you couldn’t before. Aside from how-to tutorials on Apple products, Siri really isn’t any smarter — yet.

When can we expect Siri to improve?

The first improvements to Siri will come with the release of iOS 18.2, which is expected in December. With that update, you will enable ChatGPT integration at the system level. Siri will then be able to fall back to asking ChatGPT when it otherwise doesn’t know the answer to your request. This means that many more types of trivia and world knowledge questions will be sent to ChatGPT, rather than an unhelpful list of Google search results. You don’t need a paid account to use the ChatGPT integration in iOS 18.2, but you must explicitly sign up.

The next big jump in Siri’s capabilities is slated to arrive officially sometime “in the coming months,” or unofficially as part of iOS 18.4 in the spring, according to the latest rumors.

That update will include Siri being able to draw on personal context using data on your device to answer new types of questions. That should mean Siri will be able to look at data sources like your messaging conversations, emails, and calendar events to natively answer questions like “When’s my flight” or “What was that book Jane recommended?”.

iOS 18.4 will also include Siri integrations with a whole bunch of new in-app actions and on-screen awareness features. This means that Siri will functionally be able to do more, like if you look at an image in Photos and say “make it pop,” Siri will be able to automatically trigger photo editing actions.

Similarly, Apple promises that if you’re looking at a conversation in Messages about a group activity with dinner plans, you’ll be able to say “call the restaurant” and Siri will extract the phone number from the chat and initiate the phone call on your behalf.

Conclusion

Siri looks better and sounds better today. But you’ll have to be patient until the more meaningful new features roll out. You also shouldn’t expect iOS 18.4 to be a panacea; the updates are concentrated on personal context-related questions, and many things you ask Siri today where it fails, like asking to control multiple HomeKit accessories in a single request, will likely still fail.

Apple’s consumer marketing certainly hasn’t helped set the right expectations for the public, with one of those first Apple Intelligence ads demonstrates Siri features that won’t arrive until sometime next year.

There is also a very strong argument that they should have withheld the (very noticeable) new design until some of the significant new functionality was also shipping. In particular, Type to Siri almost prompts the user to interact with it like a chatbot, with the presentation of the empty text field. But Siri simply isn’t capable of responding that way.