When Apple integrated the Siri digital assistant into its iPhone 4s 13 years ago, it was hailed as a new era for smartphones. Of course, it was a funny novelty as much as it was a genuine help in those early days, but Siri did end up popularising speech as a way to control your devices.

Yet over the next few years, it was thoroughly overtaken in capability by Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.

Now, with many devices being upgraded with generative AI chatbots, Apple is preparing to catch up. When it unveils its iPhone 16 next week, it will do so in the context of a leap in its natural language interface the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2011. Here’s what you can expect.

Apple Intelligence will be integrated throughout iOS 18 on the new iPhone, as well as on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro.

Apple has set a date of September 9 (or early September 10, AEST) for its annual iPhone reveal event, with the invitation this time featuring the teaser text “it’s glowtime”. That potentially is an indication that Siri and Apple Intelligence could be more a focus of the event even than the iPhone 16 itself, given the voice assistant will have a new glowing visual effect when summoned in iOS 18.

We got a first look at Apple Intelligence when it was revealed at the Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this year, but expect next week’s event to go for a hard sell on why the software matters for iPhone in particular. If rumours are true, the intelligence features won’t all be present in iOS 18 on the day the iPhone 16 launches, and will instead be........

© The Age