Developers can start working on things that will make Siri smarter

App Intents will allow developers to feed screen data to Apple Intelligence

Apple’s latest betas for iOS 18.2 and the rest support developer testing of the new app intent system that will eventually make Siri more context-sensitive in a later version.

Users who excitedly upgraded to public release from iOS 18.1 to access Apple Intelligence We were disappointed to find that Siri didn’t change much, other than the new glow animation. Some features exposed for WWDC are still not available, but developers can begin support today.

According to developer documentation released by Apple, developers can test the app intent system to make on-screen content accessible to Siri and Apple Intelligence. Simply put, this means that users will be able to send everything active on the screen to AI for analysis.

Even this beta implementation represents a limited version of what was promised for Siri. So no, you won’t be asking for information about your mother’s arrival at the airport using data from iMessage and Mail, but this is a step in that direction.

Here’s a short list of examples provided by Apple.

Browser: A person can ask Siri questions about a web page.

Document Reader: A person can ask Siri to give an opinion on a document.

File management: A person can ask Siri to summarize the contents of a file.

Mail: A person can ask Siri to provide a summary.

Photos: A person can ask Siri what to do with an object in a photo.

Presentations: A person can ask Siri to suggest a creative presentation title.

Spreadsheets: A person can ask Siri to provide an overview of spreadsheet data.

Word processor: A person can ask Siri to suggest additional content for a text document.

Users can already submit content to ChatGPT via Siri and request actions on that content. For example, the unordered list above was created by ChatGPT using a Siri request made from a screenshot of Apple documentation.

However, the new app intent system will allow users to take a more direct approach. For example, in iOS 18.2 beta 2 you can already share the content of an entire web page with Apple Intelligence.

Users may soon start seeing these actions in third-party apps, but the full app intent system won’t launch until at least iOS 18.4. according to rumors. This release is expected in the spring and should breathe new life into Siri by combining Apple’s on-device information with generative technologies.