iOS 18.2 officially left beta testing today, and includes a bunch of new features including Australian language localisation for Apple Intelligence. While Aussie vs US english might make you think of 'S' vs 'Z', and a sudden influx of the letter 'U', I figured we should see just how local the new Siri can get and ask some epitomely Australian questions.
First up, I asked it to find the nearest servo. Web results showed me a range of petrol stations in a 6km radius. Ok, check!
Next I asked for a bottle-o, resulting in the device running an Apple Maps search for businesses with the specific "Bottle O" name. While technically I would call this a pass, the search ignored a range of bottle shops in the area that would have done the trick just fine without the brand name.
If Siri can't help get the drinks for the BBQ, maybe it could help with the food supplies. When asked "Where can I get some snags for the barbie?" the web results showed some Redbubble merch, and a Quora query asking what that phrase even means. Using Chat GPT however, I did get a vague answer about popping down to the local supermarket to check out the different flavours - although the 'u' was missing.
Finally, when I asked Siri "are you here to fuck spiders", I got a sad ba-bum tone and a message that read "Sorry, I don't understand." To be honest, neither do I.
Language models historically aren't that great at cutting through vernacular other than 'proper' english. Linguistic variations tend to be overlooked in training data, which can lead to some entertaining results in the best case, and racial disparity at the other end of the spectrum. Siri not understanding "smoko" is good for a laugh, but not comprehending African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a larger issue. Over time, and with more varied training data, Siri will get better at our Australian-isms (and any other language sets), but for now expect results to be a bit patchy if you go full okka.
Alongside localisation, the real hero features of this update come from on-device Apple Intelligence. These include;
Genmoji: Custom, AI generated emojis.
Image Playground: A generative image tool able to create stylised images based on concepts and descriptions.
Visual Intelligence: Apple's take on Google Lens, which is only available on the iPhone 16 range.
Writing tools has also expanded to allow users to 'describe your change' to edit text. Prompts like "make this more entertaining", or "make this more formal", can be used to update body text in the Apple Mail app, and across other third party apps.
Find My sharing is also available, allowing users to temporarily share the location of an AirTag to those outside of the Apple Ecosystem.
The iOS update can be downloaded in Settings, and users will need to enable Apple Intelligence seperately in the Settings app to get access to those features.
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