One of the main differences is the new on-screen gesture you can use to summon Siri. While methods like long-pressing the power button or saying “Hey Siri” remain, the way you tap or swipe your finger on the screen to bring up the assistant has changed. Instead of double-tapping the bottom of the screen to tap Siri, you now swipe up from the top center, just like you would have had to swipe down for Spotlight search in the past.
I don’t know about you but I welcome the removal of the double tap gesture, which I almost never used. This mainly hampered my endless scrolling and gaming. With this new move, I think Apple got rid of the annoyance and simply turned Spotlight into a Siri-infused search bar.
Once called, you can speak out loud to Siri or type into the interface. Besides, I’ve seen this gesture on iPhones and iPads, and on the latter the animation is quite delicious. As I slowly swiped my finger from the top of the screen, a black droplet oozed out and followed my finger until I finished the swipe. Then the Spotlight search bar appeared with the words “Search to Ask”. A split second later, a second panel appeared below, containing suggestions for recent apps, actions, and searches.
You’ll see the interface wherever you invoke Spotlight Search, whether by pressing the Search button on a Magic Keyboard connected to your iPad, swiping down from the top of the screen on an iPhone, or using the Command-Spacebar keyboard shortcut on a Mac.
After you get a response in the search window, you can drag it down to expand it and see more of Siri’s response. There’s also an “Ask Siri” bar at the bottom to continue with follow-up questions. You can tap the double-arrow icon at the top right of this floating panel (which you can resize and drag to position it over other apps), and it will take you to the Siri app.
Of course, one of the biggest differences for Siri is the new app, where your past conversations and queries are stored. Apple won’t record your every command to Siri here. So you won’t see entries for “set a timer for 5 minutes” or “what’s the weather today”. The idea is that things that look like one-off exchanges don’t need to be kept, and Apple will make the behind-the-scenes decisions about what you might want to see again in the Siri app.
The layout here is familiar, with each conversation contained in a card that is given a title based on the topic of your conversation. Where applicable, such as in a query about the world’s best PGA golfers, the card also has a photo on its cover. On the demo devices I saw, there were many maps with titles like “San Francisco Parks for Kids,” “New York Buildings Over 1,000 Feet” or “Timeline of Dog Domestication.” Above each title was a time or day, and the cards appeared to be sorted in reverse chronological order.
Finally, another change to how you access Siri is context menus. These are the menus that appear when you long-press something on an iPhone or two-finger-click something on a Macbook. For now, you’ll see a new Ask Siri option at the top of this menu in macOS, while the Ask Siri option is at the bottom of the context menu in iPadOS. This is something that will most likely change by the time the public beta arrives, or when Siri AI is rolled out generally.
I’d also like to point out that Apple has added a few new ways to use visual intelligence on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. You could still access Visual Intelligence by long-pressing the camera control button or action button if you programmed it that way. But with Siri AI, the camera app itself will have a new Siri mode. You view it the same way you would switch from Photo to Video modes in Portrait mode, that is, by sliding the options at the bottom of the viewfinder until you land on “Siri.”
On Mac, there are two new keyboard shortcuts. One of them is Command-Shift-Space, which basically looks at your entire screen and suggests things you can do with it. In one demo I saw, a person opened an attached program for a summer of activities, and after triggering the shortcut, a glowing outline appeared around the program and three tiny bullets appeared at the bottom, giving you the option to “Ask Siri,” run a “Picture Search” or “Add to Calendar.”
The other keyboard shortcut is Command-Shift-Six, which essentially does the same thing as the other, but it defaults to a selection cursor so you can manually indicate where on your screen you want Siri to look.
One final note on the changes to Siri: gone is the multi-colored light effect that appears around your screen or the pulsing orb that represents the assistant. In its place is a more grayscale, monochrome color palette and a somewhat metallic effect to the orb. I don’t have a strong preference for one or the other, but it’s certainly a visual indication that this version of Siri is different from the last.
