iOS 18.4 Beta 1 is imminent, set to bring improvements to Siri

AppleInsider

It now seems likely that Apple is gearing up to roll out its next beta, this time designed to offer significant improvements for its voice assistant.

iOS 18.4 will primarily focus on Siri

Apple continues to slowly roll out Apple Intelligence, with the first features appearing in iOS 18.1. These included Writing Tools, system wide summaries, and Photos cleanup.

With this next beta, Apple will begin testing a handful of new features centered around Siri. This includes an app intent system that will let Siri have on-screen context for commands. Apple has already asked developers to begin work on the new feature in iOS 18.2.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman announced the upcoming beta on Threads on Friday:

"I expect iOS 18.4 beta 1 to be released between the middle of next week and early the following week. So it's coming fairly soon."

Apple is also gearing up to expand Apple Intelligence to support more languages in iOS 18.4. The update should add support for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

There's a good chance that we'll see the Unicode 16 update, which is set to bring seven new emoji characters, including root vegetable, face with bags under eyes, shovel, harp, splatter, leafless tree, and fingerprint.

Apple released iOS 18.3 to the public in late January. The newest updates were centered around expanding Apple Intelligence features, including improving Visual Intelligence, addressing notification summary concerns, and enabling Apple Intelligence by default.



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sparkled

Gee I wonder if they will ever get around to fixing the constantly-flawed “Apple Music” widget which absolutely does not work correctly, ever…….  Try it!

ssfe11

I find Apple Music outstanding and easy to connect with all my Apple devices. I luv it

cheesefreeze

sparkled said:

Gee I wonder if they will ever get around to fixing the constantly-flawed “Apple Music” widget which absolutely does not work correctly, ever…….  Try it!

Irrelevant to this post 

chasm

sparkled said:

Gee I wonder if they will ever get around to fixing the constantly-flawed “Apple Music” widget which absolutely does not work correctly, ever…….  Try it!

I've had it on my iPhone for a long time, the Apple Music widget has always worked just fine.

applepoor

Might consider trying a beta again. at a *.4 level.  Otherwise, I am getting too old to mess with doing Apple's trouble shooting....

jellybelly

I my impatient-self would prefer to Siri be updated significantly before releasing even a beta, rather than updates in drips and drabs over many releases.   If it is significantly improved out of the gate, it will get better coverage and word-of-mouth. 

However, it may need to come out in stages in public usage, so that usage can give feedback and anonymous data to keep improving it.   I’ll take that to get a really handy and enjoyable Siri.   

In that case, I urge patience from all of us, rather than trashing minor improvements. The teams at Apple want Siri to work for us and to please us as much as we do—perhaps more so as they see the potential in the prototypes, no matter how hard it is to get it right. It will come.  

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." —Lao Tzu