Your voice may be your passport, as a certain Robert Redford picture once asserted, but two macOS apps in our spotlight this week view your voice as a way to get more things done on your Mac. We’re talking transcription apps with two apps that take very different approaches to what you can do with vocal recognition and AI.

But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.

Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.

Vox Dictum

I record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.

Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.

I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.

As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.

Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.

Bonfiyah

Like Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.

Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.

Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.

Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.

Letterboxx

Letterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.

With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.

You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.

Echo Photo Album

I don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.

You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.

You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.

Chess Peace

All work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.

The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.

The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.

For the most part, I’m going to focus on Mac apps with these columns, because that’s where the action seems to be these days. But iOS remains a vibrant platform, too, and every now and again, we’ll look at some of the interesting apps being created for iPhones and iPads. This is one of those now and agains.

Want to see your app included in a future round-up? Get in touch at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and you just might make the cut.

Kickabout

The World Cup is just a memory now, but if you’re missing the daily infusion of soccer (or football, depending on what part of the globe you’re reading this from), Kickabout brings the action back to your iOS device in a very condensed form.

Kickabout will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever gathered around a foosball table in a rec room, with a look that will bring a smile to the face of Subbuteo tabletop football aficionados. You take charge of an 8-player team, with players only free to move about certain areas of the pitch. (No length-of-the-field Maradona-esque wonder golazos for your squad.) You use your finger to drag your players around, swiping any which way to boot the ball toward the goal as you look to rack up the most goals in each 2-minute match.

Goals and shots off the post earn you points, which translates to tickets that you cash in to collect various national teams, from the U.S. all the way to newly minted world champion Spain. You can also buy gear, including stands for your virtual stadium. It’s a fun element that adds to Kickabout’s replayability as you try to assemble your own World Cup field.

Kickabout has both single-player and dual-player modes, though I found the latter to be a little cramped for my iPhone 17 screen. I imagine head-to-head matches are much more enjoyable on the iPad. Still, Kickabout offers plenty of fun even for single players, as you try to master the game’s different difficulty levels.

Kickabout is free to download, and a $3 in-app purchase gets rid of any ads.

Undolly

The Photos app has a built-in tool to weed out duplicate images, but if you find yourself taking a lot of photos, Undolly brings a whole suite of tools that promise to bring order to your iOS device’s photo library. Besides getting rid of duplicates, the mobile app also lists large videos taking up space in your library, rounds up any screenshots you may have stashed somewhere and keeps tabs on other potential space-takers like RAW, timelapse and animated images.

The value of Undolly will depend heavily on how you use your photo library. For instance, I take a lot of screenshots for articles that I don’t always remember to delete, and the app helped me track down some that were three to five years old. I also appreciate Undolly’s swipable comparisons of similar shots, so you can see for yourself whether the images differ enough to keep. Undolly’s algorithm also rates images by their framing, quality and expressiveness of subject to better help you determine the shots that deserve a place in your library.

While it’s free to download initially, you will have to subscribe to Undolly to use its features, with a free three-day trial letting you get the lay of the land. After that, a monthly subscription costs $4, while annual and lifetime payments go for $15 and $40, respectively.

VWLSS

Nearly five years after Wordle first appeared, we’re still living in a golden age for daily word puzzles. Add VWLSS and its daily serving of mobile word play to the pile, though there are some unique iPhone elements that could help this free offering earn a place in your regular rotation of gameplay.

You have eight words to guess, each tied to a specific category and with all the vowels stripped out. It’s up to you to figure out the actual word, which you can do either by typing in the answer or using a handy speech feature. I prefer talking to typing, though I’m still sore that my guess of “Bob Barker” in the game show hosts category was misheard as “Bob Parker.” Revenge will be mine tomorrow, I guess.

Annotate

Between Notes and the still-new-to-iOS Preview app, you’ve got more than a few built-in tools for marking up documents and images on your iPhone or iPad. The Annotate app looks to expand on that with 17 tools that allow you to crop, blur and add notes to your heart’s content. If you find yourself making a lot of the same annotations, the app lets you create and save templates and there are shortcuts for watermarking and auto-redacting faces and phone numbers.

You can download Annotate for free and export up to five annotated photos and documents. After that, you’ll need to make a one-time $10 payment to use the app. Annotate works well enough on my iPhone, though I suspect iPad users will get more out of using this app’s many features on their larger-screen devices.

Just ahead of WWDC 2026, Jason Snell noted that he gets a lot of pitches about Mac apps, attributing the sudden boom in macOS offerings to vibe coding aided by artificial intelligence. Regardless of how apps are getting built — be it with AI tools or the more conventional developer kits that Apple offers — it’s certainly true that a lot more macOS apps seem to be popping up, extending the capabilities of your hardware. And some of those apps deserve a little extra attention.

And that’s what I’m hoping to do with these app spotlights for Six Colors. We’ll profile some interesting new apps for the Mac (and maybe the odd iOS offering every now and again), and explain why you might want to give it a download.

Do you have an app you’d like to bring to my attention? Simply drop me a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and we’ll take it from there.

With that housekeeping out of the way, here’s what I’ve been downloading lately.

Park Shelf

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for most of us, our Mac screens are an unholy mess. Open windows clutter up the view, adding another layer of complication to multitasking. An app called ParkShelf from Digital X Design looks to bring some order to the chaos with a handy place for storing open windows instead of placing them in the dock or relying on your Mac’s App Switcher to jump between windows.

Instead, ParkShelf features a floating bar you can position anywhere on your screen (though there is an option to pin it to a specific area if you prefer). That way you need to call up a particular window, it’s just a matter of heading over to where you’ve stashed it in ParkShelf and summoning what you need. The rest of the time, you’ve got a clean, uncluttered workspace so that you can focus on the task at hand.

I’ve been trying out the free version of ParkShelf, where you can store up to three different windows at any one time. For unlimited storage, you’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Pro version. In addition to the unlimited storage, the Pro version also gives you the ability to customize a hot key that sends an open window into ParkShelf’s waiting arms. (In the free version, option-P serves as the default hot key.)

For my purposes, ParkShelf works best when I’m focusing on a specific project. If I’m on a writing assignment, I can use the app to stash a window of notes, a browser page I’m using to research the topic, and data sheets in PDF form while I type away in my text editor. When I need anyone of those windows, I can turn to ParkShelf to look something up, but otherwise, those windows are out of sight and out of mind.

I’d like it better if I could store multiple web pages or notes, but ParkShelf seems to treat each app as its own window. For instance, even when I have web pages open in Safari for multiple windows instead of tabs, ParkShelf stores the whole kit and caboodle. Still, the free version of Park Shelf is certainly worth trying out if you’re looking for a way to better manage all the open windows on your screen.

Other apps

• ScrollPods lets you control scrolling on a Mac by tilting your head. The free utility works with 3rd-gen AirPods as well as any AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and Beats Fit Pro models. Install the app, turn on a switch, and a tilt of your head lets you scroll through emails, web pages and other windows. Mastering just the right tilt takes a little bit of practice, but this is a pretty clever accessibility tool that takes advantage of an accessory you probably already have on hand.

• Sleepr is a $5 app that serves as a sleep timer that lives in your Mac’s menu bar and lets you time shutdowns after 15-, 30-, 60- and 120-minute intervals; you can also have your Mac go to sleep at a very specific time. The 3.0 release adds Liquid Glass support, recurring bedtimes that automatically start themselves, a floating alert that can even appear over full-screen apps, and a live menu bar countdown.

• Senqu Image Converter is a $5 image utility that lets you convert among JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and PDF files. The recent 1.2 update added the ability to drop images onto a preset in the full window for instant conversions, while dropping a file now immediately starts the conversion process using current settings.

My Apple TV has started yelling at me. Or at the very least, the Disney+ app on the Apple TV is now clamoring for my attention.

It used to be that when I fired up Disney Plus on my Apple TV, I could browse for something to watch in relative peace. But at some point, an update must have come along that caused the app to break its previously inviolable vow of silence. Because now, when I hover over the thumbnail for a particular movie or show, a preview starts to autoplay.

It doesn’t matter if it’s the latest Avatar picture or something from Pixar or even a Hulu original that now lives in Disney’s app — one moment of hesitation, and a preview plays until I move on to the next thumbnail and the cycle begins anew. New season of The Bear? Preview. An Indiana Jones picture? Preview. X-Men ’97? A particularly angering preview that doesn’t even feature Gambit, for crying out loud.

Disney’s Apple TV app is not alone in blasting previews whether I want them or not. In the land of streaming services, you are dealing with an attention economy, and the purveyors of streaming apps have decided the only way to command that attention is to shout as loud as possible. Hence, nearly every app from every streaming service of note turns on auto-playing previews by default, no matter how you feel about them.

And make no mistake — I feel that auto-playing just about anything is an assault on my senses. When I am trying to decide what to watch, I want to pause on a thumbnail and maybe glance at the information a bit without having to hastily scroll away once audio and video playback begin. Maybe I want to have a conversation with a family member about whether this is a program we both might enjoy without having to shout over some Na’Vi chittering at me about some sort of trouble brewing on Pandora.

The good news is that Apple TV apps have a setting for turning off autoplay previews so that you can go back to browsing through a streaming catalog in blessed silence. But there’s bad news, too — each app seemingly puts that setting in a completely different place, and it’s up to you to hunt down where that might be.

Should Apple impose some order on tvOS apps and require some degree of standardization when it comes to autoplay settings? Or should it go one step further and tell developers not to turn on that feature by default so as to spare the eardrums of paying customers? It’s not for me to say, even though the answer is emphatically yes to both questions.

But I fear my wisdom will fall upon deaf ears — and not just because they’ve already been deafened by all those autoplaying previews. So instead, I can do the next best thing, which is share the hard-won knowledge I have on how to turn off autoplay features in all the big streaming apps that might be living on your Apple TV.

Please don’t thank me. The silence is reward enough.

Apple TV

Apple’s TV app will start to preview content from the Apple TV streaming service if you let it. That’s certainly Apple’s right, but maybe I don’t want to hear about Your Friends and Neighbors each time I launch Apple’s app.

To make Apple TV shut up about the new season of Ted Lasso, go to the Settings app and select Accessibility, followed by Motion. Toggling off Auto-Play Video previews should, in Apple’s words, control whether you allow “video content to auto-play in apps like TV.” In my experience, though, the only app this setting seems to control is TV itself. For third-party apps, you’ll need to dive into settings on your own.

Tubi, HBO Max, but not really Paramount+

Tubi has among the easiest autoplay settings to disable, which is good because it also has the most annoying autoplay behavior. Tubi not only starts to play a preview if you momentarily pause while browsing through its vast library, but if you let that preview reach its conclusion, the movie or show will immediately start playing. For heaven’s sake, Tubi, your entire raison d’etre is to let me comb through the back alleys of your content to let me find something obscure to watch — stop ruining this for me!

Anyhow, with Tubi, all you have to do is head to the app’s settings where you select Video. There, you can disable autoplay to your heart’s content. See? Simple.

The story is similar for HBO Max and Paramount+—sort of. On HBO Max, choose Settings and then under the Playback tab, you can turn off a whole variety of autoplay features. In Paramount+, the Settings icon is hidden at the far bottom left of the screen, but if you just keep moving down through the side menu, you will end up selecting the Settings icon and can get where you need to go. All the Autoplay settings are under the Video tab.

Unfortunately, while Paramount+ will let you turn off “autoplay video,” that setting does not stop previews from autoplaying. Instead of letting you do that, Paramount+ gives you the option of holding down the center button on any preview to enter an “immersive preview mode” where they made the whole plane out of the preview. Frankly, yet another reason to give anything with Paramount’s imprimatur on it a wide berth.

Netflix

If Tubi is the easiest app for managing autoplay annoyances, then Netflix may be the worst. That’s because you can’t do it from the app on your Apple TV.

Instead, you need to head to Netflix in your web browser of choice, where you select your profile icon, followed by Account. From there, you select Edit Settings followed by Playback Settings followed once more by Autoplay Controls. There’s a box called Autoplay Preview While Browsing on All Devices — uncheck that and make sure to save your preference. Autoplay should be just a filthy memory the next time you access Netflix on your Apple TV.

Peacock and Disney Plus

I’m lumping these two services together because they put their autoplay controls in the exact same place. That’s not to say that the setting is easy to find, though, as both Peacock and Disney do a bang-up job hiding the control where you would least expect to find it.

In either app, go to the screen with your account profiles and click on the edit icon for the one you want to adjust. On Peacock, under Autoplay Preferences, you’ll see a toggle for Autoplay Trailers. For Disney, the Playback and Language Settings section has Background Video and Background Audio toggles; turning off the former takes care of both, while adjusting just the latter means that video previews will play silently.

Does the fact that this setting lives in the user profiles for both Peacock and Disney Plus mean that you’ll have adjust playback controls for each profile in your account? Indeed, it does!

Amazon Prime Video

Near as I can tell, Amazon Prime Video is the rare streaming app that doesn’t autoplay previews as you’re rummaging through its library of shows and movies. At the very least, nothing autoplays when I’m in the app, and whether that’s because of the overall Apple TV settings I’ve adjusted or something with Amazon itself, I’m satisfied with the result.

So well done, Amazon — I take back some, but only some, of the horrible things I’ve said about you.

When Amazon Prime Day gets underway this Tuesday (June 23), it will be the first time in nearly a decade that I’m not involved in some tech site’s effort to go all out with coverage around the online retailer’s multiday sales event. In recent years, my home base on the West Coast has meant late-night shifts posting about deals, updating constantly shifting sales prices and otherwise pointing out discounted doodads to readers. But none of that’s happening this year, after I was unceremoniously laid off a few months ago.

Being unemployed stinks for a number of reasons. Missing out on Amazon Prime Day coverage isn’t one of them.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good deal, and certainly helping your readers save some money on something they’re looking for falls well within the remit of a consumer technology writer. But few of the offers you’ll see on Amazon Prime Day qualify as good deals. And whatever bargains that are to be found are generally lost in the firehose of inconsequential price cuts on second-rate merch. Amazon Prime Day has become the living embodiment of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, to the point where if Oscar Wilde were alive, he’d be pointing at his computer monitor like he was in the Leonardo DiCaprio meme.

And yet, you wouldn’t know this by perusing the majority of tech websites this week, which will spend the next few days turning themselves into an extended, unpaid advertisement for Amazon’s sales event. As I write this sentence a few days ahead of Prime Day’s actual kickoff, some sites are already touting the deals you can snap up right now. And I guarantee you that once Prime Day wraps up on June 26, you will see stories about the Prime Day deals you can still get. Why, it’s almost as if Prime Day is a made-up construct and prices on goods routinely fluctuate!

Look, I don’t begrudge websites getting in on this Prime Day racket, particularly any websites that might want to employ me at any point in the future. The fact of the matter is, websites gotta make money somehow, and if one of those ways turns out to be affiliate revenue—i.e. the percentage of money a site can collect when you click through a link to an online retailer—more power to them. But the downside to that is a lot of deal alerts on items that aren’t really bargains at all, so much as they’re Amazon trying to offload merchandise to make way for the next product cycle.

Why you should sit out Prime Day

With all the noise surrounding Amazon Prime Day, it’s going to be tempting to head over to that site and load up your virtual cart with all manner of marked-down gizmos. While I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, my humble suggestion would be to… maybe not do that? I don’t know the particulars of your current life situation well enough to be handing out blanket advice. Maybe you really need a new robot vacuum cleaner, in which case, hey, this is your time to shine.

But for most of us, Amazon Prime Day is probably something best viewed at a distance with our eyes shielded to prevent permanent damage. Here’s why:

• Amazon has sales all the damned time: To the extent that Prime Day has ever been something to get hyped up for, it’s been diluted by the fact that Amazon is just going to turn around and have an identical sale a few months from now. For the last few years, Amazon has held Prime Deal Days in October, and that’s followed up shortly by the usual round of price cuts for Black Friday and holiday shopping. The price cuts you’re seeing now will likely return in short order.

• A lot of the discounted items are clearance sales by another name: Prices on some Apple gear will drop this week — in fact, some things like AirPods and Apple Watches may already be available at a notable discount. But that’s because Apple likely will be rolling out new versions of those devices in the fall, and Amazon doesn’t want a lot of outdated inventory on hand. Hey, if you want a pair of AirPods Pro 3 for less than what you’d normally pay and don’t mind missing out on the new features Apple is rumored to be adding to the next-gen model, go ahead and click that Buy button with my best wishes. Just be aware as to why the price might be that low.

• Do you really feel like giving Amazon more of your money?: Jeff Bezos may not be involved in the day-to-day operations at Amazon, but he’s still the executive chairman of the company; more to the point, he profits handsomely from Amazon’s ongoing success. And whether it’s throwing a hey-look-at-me wedding last year or running a major American newspaper into the ground or bankrolling documentaries lauding the First Lady, he’s not really putting that wealth to good use. You may disagree, in which case, load up on those discounted Ring doorbells and Echo Dots to your heart’s content, but I try to send as little money to the real-life version of LuthorCorp as possible.

Oh, you’re ignoring me? Well, at least do this

As good as these reasons are to give Prime Day a pass, I know that some people reading this are already making a beeline toward Amazon. Fair enough — just follow a couple of good practices to get through this shopping event with a minimum of fuss and/or muss.

• DO use a price comparison tool: Make sure that whatever deal you’re seeing on Amazon is actually a good deal by turning to the price-comparison tool of your choice. For me, that’s CamelCamelCamel, where you can enter an Amazon product number¹ into the site’s search field, and you can see how a product’s price has been trending — including whether it’s hit an all-time low.

• DO look for coverage that treats Prime Day skeptically: When it comes to Prime Day, less is more. I tend to find the most helpful articles are the ones that are more selective in their approach to Amazon’s sale, as they acknowledge that most of the deals on offer are pretty crummy and really only highlight worthwhile picks. I tend to find that the Wirecutter site of The New York Times handles this sort of thing pretty well. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed several articles to Wirecutter as a freelance writer, though I’ve never been a part of any Prime Day coverage with that site.)

• DON’T go on a shopping spree. You see something you want that happens to be on sale at a good price? Great, pick it up. Maybe add a second item to your cart if it also fills a need. Anything more than that? No sir — down that path lies madness. Amazon is counting on you to get deal crazy and take a lot of smart speakers off its hands. Don’t give it the satisfaction.

I’m never going to see Prime Day pop up on my calendar without getting a sad, faraway look in my eye. But that doesn’t mean you have to feel the same way. Like many things in life, Prime Day is best dealt with in small doses, if at all. Together, we can get through this thing.

Siri’s long-awaited overhaul made its public debut today during Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote, as Apple outlined its vision for a more capable version of its virtual assistant that’s powered by a new generation of Apple Intelligence.

From now on, Apple’s foundation models are being blended with Google Gemini to create the new heart of Apple Intelligence. The result, Apple executives say, will be AI features that are aware of your context, including what’s on your screen, with a personal assistant in the form of the rebranded Siri AI that’s more responsive to your needs.

Developers will get the first crack at seeing what’s new with Siri and Apple Intelligence, as Apple releases developer betas of this year’s software updates — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27 — starting today. Public betas will follow in July, with the full releases arriving in the fall as they usually do.

Of course, not every iPhone and iPad owner is going to have access to Siri AI right away. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, announced during the keynote that the updated digital assistant won’t ship to EU countries with the rest of iPadOS 27 and iOS 27 in the fall, as EU regulators want other virtual assistants to have the same access to users’ private data that Siri gets. That’s a hard no for Apple, which insists that user data remain private. There’s no timeline on when Siri AI might hit the EU.

But that’s for Apple and the regulators to hash out. Here’s an overview of what Apple announced during the WWDC keynote and what it means for your iPhones, iPads, Macs and more.

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

Apple says it rebuilt the architecture for its AI features using those new foundation models, with Apple Intelligence able to understand speech as well as text and images. It can draw on the personal context stored on your device, recognize what’s on your screen and pull from external information available on the web. As before, Apple Intelligence operates on your devices as well as servers via Private Cloud Compute, and all your AI interactions are kept private, even from Apple.

One note about on-device actions, though: only recent hardware will be powerful enough to run what Apple describes as its most advanced on-device model. That means the iPhones released last fall, any M4-powered iPad or M3-powered Mac with at least 12GB of unified memory and the M5-based Apple Vision Pro.

Siri is accessible from anywhere on your device, and you can summon the assistant with the usual “Hey Siri” vocal command. iPhone users will be able to activate Siri with the side button on the phone or with a swipe down from the Dynamic Island; another swipe can expand Siri’s answer to get a more detailed response. iPad and Mac users can interact with Siri AI from the Spotlight tool as well as systemwide context menus.

Siri AI will be available on the Apple Watch, too, letting users start a conversation with an assistant or continue one started on another Apple device via a new Smart Stack suggestion. In addition, the changes coming to Siri and Apple Intelligence will extend to CarPlay and AirPods.

A new Siri app will debut on Apple devices this fall, giving you a place to access past conversations with Siri; you can also start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your Mac.

Some of the examples Apple showed off during its WWDC keynote featured Apple executive Mike Rockwell asking Siri about an upcoming concert, with the assistant pulling the dates from the web. Follow-up questions let Rockwell ask Siri about the ticketing process, set a reminder to buy tickets at the appropriate time and play music from the artist. All of this was done in a conversational style, without the hassle of having to repeat the artist’s name.

Other demos of Siri AI showed how the assistant can now help you plan things, pulling a schedule of World Cup matches, formulating a menu of possible meals for a watch party centered around a specific match that also included recipes shared via Messages, and generating and sending out an invitation to the party. It’s worth noting that at each step, Siri has you confirm actions, and you can leap in and edit things should Siri get them wrong.

Siri AI also features improvements to the expressiveness of its voice — imagine the assistant emphasizing certain words or striking a more excited tone to reflect the message it’s reading to you. You have the ability to adjust that expressiveness as well as the pace of Siri’s voice.

Siri AI will be limited to English initially, but Apple plans to add support for other languages in short order.

Siri features in apps

There’s more to Siri AI than just a new app, though, as many features are being integrated and enhanced in other apps. Visual Intelligence is integrated directly into the Camera app, for example, with a Siri mode to show the assistant exactly what you’re seeing. Point your iPhone’s camera at a plate of food, and you can pull up nutritional information or capture an image of a bill to split it with friends, all while paying your share via Apple Pay. Those Visual Intelligence tools will be available on the Mac and iPad as well as the iPhone.

Writing tools are getting a boost with this Apple Intelligence revamp, as you can ask Siri to draft documents for you. Apple suggests that this is just a starting point for a draft that you would then elaborate on, and as a writer who balks at the idea that any AI feature can handle writing on my behalf, I should certainly hope so. I’m far more intrigued by a promised feature in which you can ask Siri to give you feedback on writing.

Additional writing tools coming to anywhere you can type include automatic proofreading — hope it proves more reliable than autocorrect — and the ability to recognize who you’re sending messages and texts to and adapt the tone to correspond to the recipient.

Photos gets a number of AI-powered image-editing tools, such as an enhanced Clean Up feature that promises better fill-ins when you remove distracting objects or people. An extend tool expands the background on shots, while a spatial reframing feature lets you change the perspective of the photo after you’ve taken it.

Safari now taps into Apple Intelligence to organize all those open tabs by topic, while a Notify Me feature uses your natural-language instructions to monitor changes in web pages — say an item going on sale — and alert you when it happens. Passwords can change passwords on your behalf, while Shortcuts taps into the vibe coding fad by letting you describe a shortcut to auto-generate it.

Apps like Messages, Calendar, Mail and Phone better understand context to offer up more useful one-tap suggestions. For instance, if you’re in a Message conversation where someone asks you for a specific photo, the Siri assistant should be smart enough to generate a suggestion that finds and sends the photo on your behalf.

You can also expect an update to Image Playground that will add support for more styles as well as new ways to modify and tweak anything created by Apple’s image generation tool. A welcome change will be the ability to create images in more formats, such as landscape. And the app figures to be better integrated with contact posters and wallpapers for your iPhone. Note that image generation will be among the Apple Intelligence features that come with a daily limit, as those capabilities are being offloaded to servers; you will be able to bolster your access through iCloud Plus subscription plans.

Platform improvements

Apple Intelligence dominated the WWDC keynote, but it’s not the only change Apple has planned for its software. Apple is promising a number of system improvements across its various operating systems. “Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re taking the features you’re already relying on and making them better,” Federighi said.

That includes system optimizations that speed up things like app launches, content loading and AirDrop transfers. Older iPhones can count on a new CPU scheduler to make sure tasks run more efficiently; as a result, iOS 27 will run on the same devices that support iOS 26.

The most anticipated changes, though, are likely to be promised enhancements for Liquid Glass, the new interface Apple rolled out across its platforms last year. Not everyone was a fan of the new look for the various OSes, and Apple took some of that feedback to heart. Liquid Glass changes promise more readable menus thanks to better diffusion for complex content, and there will now be a slider in Settings to adjust the look between fully clear and fully tinted.

Apple is also promising more uniform toolbars, with color returning to the icons in sidebars so that it’s easier to see which menu item is active. Icons are getting new layers that should make them look sharper and more defined.

Refined parental controls

Capturing the zeitgeist of society’s growing unease about how much access kids have to technology, Apple spent a chunk of the WWDC keynote reviewing trust and safety issues with its software, including new child safety tools formulated with feedback from experts.

To that end, Apple is expanding upon the Ask to Buy feature that lets parents approve App Store downloads with a new Ask to Browse tool. That lets parents view a website a child is trying to access and determine if it’s age-appropriate. A similar feature lets parents approve who their kids can connect with in Messages and other communication apps. The Communication Safety feature that already detects and blurs nudity in Messages and FaceTime will do the same when it detects gore or violent images.

Apple highlighted Time Allowances that manage when kids can access certain apps and for how long. Screen Time is getting a redesign to better highlight how kids are using their devices and what apps they’re accessing the most.

More to come

Part of the fun of WWDC keynotes is seeing what new features weren’t highlighted during Apple’s presentation. More of those details should come out in the coming days as people get their hands on the developer betas and have more of a chance to go over Apple’s supporting documents.

Both Jason Snell and Dan Moren are on the ground in Cupertino getting up-close looks at Apple’s planned software updates and Apple Intelligence changes. Expect more reports from them today and throughout WWDC, as we make sense of what Apple has in store for our devices the rest of this year.