Apple will host this year’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) from June 3 to June 7 in San Jose, where it will make major announcements on the software part of its ecosystem. Last week, 9to5mac listed the improvements that are expected to make way in iOS 13, and the same media outlet has now published the improvements that are expected to come in Apple’s AI assistant Siri and other key services.
9to5mac reports that the Cupertino-based giant is expected to bring new Siri actions that developers can adopt in their apps. These actions, or intents as Apple calls them, include media playback, search, voice calling, event ticketing, message attachment, train trip, flight, airport gate and seat information. The news outlet also said that there will also be some improvements in Marzipan – Apple’s cross-device development kit.
Developers who will be porting their iOS apps to the Mac will have access to new APIs that allow their UIKit apps to integrate with Mac-specific features such as the Touch Bar and menu bar. UIKit apps on the Mac will also be able to open multiple windows, the media report said. It is also claimed that Split View apps that will be ported from iOS will have the ability to be resized by dragging the divider and its position reset by double clicking the divider, just like it is done in native Mac apps.
Further, the Augmented Reality use cases on Apple’s platforms are touted to get “significant improvements” this year. The improvements include new Swift-only framework for AR and a companion app that lets developers create AR experiences visually. For game developers, the OS is said to support controllers with touch pads and stereo AR headsets.
Other areas of improvements include a new framework that is claimed to give developers more control over the Taptic Engine. There’s also new functionality for developers to include link previews in their apps, similar to those that appear in iMessage conversations, 9to5mac said. NFC is also reported to be getting major improvements.
There is also a mention of “a new version of CoreML,” that is speculated to let developers update their machine learning models on-device. Currently, models have to be pre-trained and they are static after deployment. The new version is said to allow apps to change their behaviour as their models learn from user actions.
Apple is expected to unveil iOS 13, tvOS 13, macOS 10.15 and watchOS 6 on June 3, during the WWDC keynote address. First, the betas will be released and stable version should release in September.