Apple's Siri is improving its AI. How it affects travel planning

13-06-24

• Generative AI goes straight to the iPhone. Right now it helps a little with travel, but that's just the beginning.

• Siri will soon be able to help users plan trips. Not complicated tasks like booking flights-yet-but AI-enhanced Siri will be able to pull context from different apps to plan dinner in time for an event or share flight information in real time. 

• For more complicated questions, Siri will connect with ChatGPT. 

These were among the many travel-related announcements Apple made Monday at its Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company shared updates to iOS 18, the Vision Pro VR headset, Apple Watch, and more.

Apple said it is focused on integrating AI into all of its operating systems with the announcement of Apple Intelligence.

“Thanks to the capabilities of Apple Intelligence, this year marks the beginning of a new era for Siri,” said Kelsey Peterson, director of machine learning and AI, during the event.

With the AI update, Siri will be able to access details from all Apple-owned apps on the device. This means a user can ask for details about an upcoming booked flight, and Siri will cross-reference flight information from an email or text with real-time flight tracking information to provide the most up-to-date arrival time. Siri could also find the plans for a lunch reservation made via text, and then tell the user how long it would take to drive from the airport to the restaurant. 

Siri will be better at natural language conversations, even if the user gets it wrong. And improved memory means it will better answer questions based on the context of previous questions, which wasn't possible before.

For more complicated questions, Siri will connect with ChatGPT. Users will be able to ask Siri anything they can ask ChatGPT, including travel planning information, for free and without an account. Paid ChatGPT users will be able to connect their accounts and access premium features through Siri. Apple has not shown how it works with specialized ChatGPT chatbots such as Kayak's.

"There are other AI tools available that can be useful for tasks that rely on extensive knowledge of the world or offer specialized domain expertise. We want you to be able to use these external models without having to jump between different tools, so we're integrating them directly into your experiences,” said Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, during the event.

The iOS 18 operating system for iPhone, iPad and Mac gets a host of new travel features this fall. 

• The Maps app incorporates a new feature to help users with their hikes. The app incorporates topographic maps with trail networks and hiking routes, including all 63 U.S. national parks. The maps can be saved to the user's phone and viewed offline, and include turn-by-turn voice guidance. Users can also create their own routes through the app.

• Thanks to the iPhone 14's satellite connectivity capability, users can send and receive text messages via iMessage or SMS even without service. 

• The updated event ticket design includes venue maps and an event guide with restaurant recommendations. 

• In what Apple considers its biggest photo update, the app can automatically create albums for individual trips and save them in a new Trips section. 

That includes plans for more immersive videos: 180-degree, high-resolution videos with spatial audio, meant to make the user feel like they are in the location of the video. There will be an extreme sports series in collaboration with RedBull. Other upcoming films cover wildlife, adventure sports, tourism activities and aerial views of destinations. 

For professional content creators, Blackmagic Design is launching a special camera for making immersive videos, and Canon is launching a new space lens for the EOS R7 camera.

That includes plans for more immersive videos: 180-degree, high-resolution videos with spatial audio, designed to make the user feel like they are in the video location. There will be an extreme sports series in collaboration with RedBull. Other upcoming films cover wildlife, adventure sports, tourism activities and aerial views of destinations. 

For professional content creators, Blackmagic Design is releasing a special camera for making immersive videos, and Canon is releasing a new space lens for the EOS R7 camera.

The headset can also turn normal photos into three-dimensional space photos.

Vision Pro will soon be able to be used on a moving train, not just airplanes. Meta announced similar plans this year for its own Quest headset.

The new operating system for the Apple Watch incorporates multiple travel-related features:

• A new translation app, which uses AI for voice recognition and translation. 

•  Life updates for events and third-party apps like Uber.

• An alert to warn the user before it rains.

• A new translation app, which uses AI for speech recognition and translation. 

• Life updates for events and third-party apps like Uber.

• An alert to warn the user before it rains.