Apple's new Siri can read your screen, sort your email and more

Apple's rebuilt assistant, called Siri AI, can now read what is on your screen, sort your email and turn a photo of a schedule into calendar events. Lifehacker says many of its most useful features are easy to miss because they sit in settings menus. They arrive with iOS 27 and macOS 27, Apple's newest software for iPhone and Mac.

What changed

For years, Siri was good for timers, calls and texts, and not much else. Siri AI runs on Apple's own models, which work on the device and on Apple's servers. Lifehacker's reviewer found the answers short, to the point and actually useful. The new features also show up across the system, not just in the chat.

Settings worth changing

• Silent Response: in Settings > Siri > Responses, Siri always answers in text, even if you spoke.
• Automatically Send Messages: same menu, and it removes the extra confirmation step for texts.
• Voice: Settings > Siri > Voice lets you change the pace and use an Expressivity slider for a brighter tone.

Expressive Voice is limited to newer hardware: iPhone 17 Pro or newer, iPhone Air, or a Mac with an M3 chip or newer and at least 12GB of memory. Siri still asks before risky actions like deleting mail, which the reviewer finds useful.

Tools that save time

Highlight text on an iPhone, tap and hold, and choose Ask Siri. On a Mac, Ask Siri is the first right-click option. You can then ask about what you see, such as where a cafe in an Instagram photo is, or where a movie scene comes from.

• Calendar: point the camera at a schedule or take a screenshot, then tap Add to Calendar to add events one by one or all at once.
• Mail: ask Siri to find emails about your flights and send them to your accountant, or to archive all Walmart emails from last month.
• Photos: in Edit, go to Tools > Clean Up and switch from Auto to High Quality to remove objects, shadows included.

What to know first

Mail tools work once your device finishes indexing your local mail. High Quality Clean Up is processed on Apple's servers through what Apple calls Private Cloud Compute, so expect a short wait. Everything above needs a device running the new software. The source article lists ten tips, and only part of the list is covered here, so details on the rest, including Camera Control, are not known.