Apple says its upgraded Siri AI can take the stress out of party planning for those of us (myself included) who find ourselves overwhelmed when hosting social events.
As announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, an upgraded Apple Intelligence (improved with some help from Google’s Gemini AI models) is designed to help you brainstorm ideas, take action across multiple apps and ask questions that require personal context or current online information.
Launching in English later this year on Apple Intelligence-enabled devices, the conversational Siri AI will have its own dedicated app that works across devices, so you can ask a question on your iPhone and continue the conversation on your iPad. But it will also act across apps like Messages and Reminders to become your AI personal assistant. This could make it an exceptional party planner.
During the WWDC keynote, Justin Titi, Apple’s senior director of intelligent system experience engineering, asked Siri AI on iOS for the schedule of the World Cup‘s opening weekend. Then, Siri AI suggested dishes from Brazil and Morocco for a watch party centered on that match, located a dessert their daughter recently mentioned in the Messages app, pulled all those dishes together for a complete menu and sent that menu to a specific group chat to see if its members were up for a watch party.
Apple’s Justin Titi demonstrates on an iPhone how Siri AI can be used to plan a World Cup party menu.
That’s just one example, but it shows that Siri AI can take the most tedious tasks out of party planning by telling you when certain events will occur, giving you menu suggestions, searching your device to answer personal questions and even sending the party invite.
Speaking of invites, there’s a new version of Apple’s AI-generated image app, Image Playground, that uses Apple Intelligence to transform your images. Since the app runs on private cloud compute, images are never stored or shared.
Leslie Ikemoto, Apple’s director of input experience, explains that you can use Image Playground to generate a birthday party invite by taking a photo of a friend from your image library and having it modified to include a birthday cake with a simple description. You can then refine the image further — adding candles to the cake and even changing your friend’s outfit to fit the party theme — by describing the changes you’d like or using touch.
Image Playground helps create a mystery-themed birthday party invite from a person’s photo.
For those who struggle to create or edit images, Apple Intelligence also takes out that guesswork, so you can focus on the more fun aspects of preparing for a party. Personally, I’d rather save that time and effort for cooking.
Every step of party planning can now be executed using Apple Intelligence, down to the most minute details: writing and perfecting the invite message in Messages or Mail, and adding and editing the calendar event based on that invite’s context.
If I could avoid all the frustrating parts of party planning, I would. Starting this fall, with Apple Intelligence’s improvements, I will.
