iOS 18.4 will primarily focus on Siri
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.
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.
