Get Siri to rearrange a meeting in 2024, and you’ll get a web search for “meeting” and a shoulder shrug. Get Siri to do that in 2025, and you’ll get an apology. That’s why it’s fair to say that when Apple took the stage last week and announced that Siri handles 2.5 billion queries a day, it left me less excited than suspicious. After two years of delayed launches, it’s understandable why you’d feel that way. However, it does appear that “Surprise and Shine” wasn’t merely a demo. It looks as if Apple might indeed launch the assistant that it promised, built into a foldable phone that we didn’t expect to see quite yet. This is how the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone Duo look right now.
Also read: iPhone Duo: 3 things that look cool, one thing doesn’t make sense
Burying Siri in a search bar just wasn’t the right way to go about things for a phone trying to be intelligent. Now, Siri AI is its own application, where your conversations are synced across all your iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Make an inquiry on the screen cover of the Duo and continue the conversation later on your Mac. Pin the threads you’ll need later. This is just a minor tweak, but a very important one nonetheless.
And here’s another one that will definitely hit the news for all the wrong reasons. Siri Recap leverages ambient listening to convert a chat session, a group discussion, an email, a parent-teacher conference into a title, a summary, and selected quotes that can be reviewed in scrollback format. It can also pull context from your texts like a recipe your mom sent. Apple says no audio is stored, and it’s all end-to-end encrypted. Handy? Possibly. A feature that needs an excellent privacy explanation before being released? Yes, absolutely.
Also read: Apple Event 2026: iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and other key announcements
Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro’s first advertised AI function is not a filter; it is a witness. With Apple Reference Image, your phone signs the sensor data from your photo upon pressing the button to capture the photo, and then uses Private Cloud Compute to create an unchangeable copy next to your changeable photo in the Photos app. Consider this like a negative film in the age of deepfakes. And with C2PA compatibility and the upcoming SynthID watermark, Apple is creating its own receipt for the reality of your photos.
Smart focus tracking is the new act to watch. It employs on-device AI technology that allows keeping track of your subject even if they leave the frame and come back. It may seem like a small feature, but if you’ve tried shooting a child or a pet who simply won’t stop moving for more than half a second, you know better. This is the most recent upgrade to a camera that spent the last two years becoming an editing studio. Spatial Reframing gives you the ability to change the angle and zoom level of your image even if it’s already been taken. Extend crops a picture back and enlarges its borders. Clean Up is able to detect larger objects and more complicated scenes than before. Image Playground creates photorealistic pictures based on the description you provide, and Image Wand transforms your doodle in Notes into a meaningful picture. Point a camera at anything, and Siri’s Visual Intelligence will recognize it, provide nutrition information about the food and turn a loyalty card into a Wallet pass without having to type anything. And these are no longer individual features.
The other change is that Siri AI takes action within applications based on what you are currently doing, like editing a recently sent message, adding a song to a playlist while driving, and accessing a confirmation number from Mail when talking to an airline on the phone. None of this requires a screenshot or a search; it only requires Siri understanding your current situation.