Siri

Incoming phone calls aren’t the only things that will no longer take over the whole screen. Siri has also been completely redesigned so that when you call up your virtual assistant, it will appear with a new compact design in the form of a floating Siri bubble at the bottom of the screen.

If you’re asking Siri to do something that doesn’t require any informational response, like opening an app, she’ll just go ahead and do it. Otherwise, banner notifications that slide down from the top of the screen will be used to show information rather than a full-screen display.

On iPadOS, the new compact Siri design goes a step further, with results appearing above the Siri avatar in the bottom-right corner for easy reference. It feels a bit like shades of the old Microsoft Clippy, but there’s no doubt it’s going to be a far better user experience (and unlike the annoying talking paperclip, Siri will still only speak when spoken to).

Also, as with every new iOS version in recent years, Apple is improving Siri’s intelligence, which will allow support for more complex questions, sending audio messages, and running speech-to-text dictation directly on-device rather than sending it to the cloud, providing faster performance, better accuracy, and most importantly, better privacy.