Today at its World Wide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a major update to its virtual assistant, Siri. Along with the iOS upgrade, you’ll get a new and improved Siri to answer your questions on your iPhone 5. Now Siri is more powerful and can be either male or female!
Siri in iOS 7 gets a new look, a new sound, and new capabilities. It features a redesigned interface that fades into view — on top of whatever’s on your screen. A more natural speech pattern — in a new female or male voice — is even easier to understand. Siri is faster at answering questions and checks more sources, such as Bing, Wikipedia, and Twitter. And it takes on extra tasks, like returning calls, playing voicemail, controlling iTunes Radio, and more.
Siri now acknowledges she’s hearing you, with “audio waves [that] move across your screen, letting you know Siri is listening and processing your request.” Also, Siri will now use Wikipedia and Twitter to try to help answer your queries.
You can do all of your searching within the Siri app, with no need to go into a second app to see your results: “If you have questions, Siri has answers. And you’ll see them right on the screen. Even web search results from Bing. So you won’t be pulled out of Siri and into Safari just to see the same list.”
Siri looks like she (or he!) will be a lot more useful for iPhone owners after this update!