Apple says its advanced Siri AI can take the stress out of party planning (myself included) that we find ourselves overwhelmed with when hosting social events.
As announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the advanced Apple Intelligence (enhanced with some help from Google’s Gemini AI models) is designed to help you synthesize ideas, take action across multiple applications and ask questions that require personal context or current Internet knowledge.
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 work across apps like Messages and Reminders to become your personal AI assistant. This would make a special party planner.
During the WWDC keynote, Justin Titi, Apple’s senior director of intelligent systems engineering, asked Siri AI on iOS about the opening weekend of the World Cup. Then, Siri AI suggested dishes from Brazil and Morocco for a watch party focused on that game, found the dessert their daughter had just mentioned in the messaging app, pulled all those dishes to get a complete menu and sent that menu to some group chat to see if its members went to the watch party.
Apple’s Justin Titi demonstrates on 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 difficult tasks out of party planning by telling you when certain events will happen, giving you menu suggestions, searching your device to answer personal questions and sending a party invite.
Speaking of invitations, there’s a new version of Apple’s photo app, Image Playground, which uses Apple Intelligence to transform your photos. Since the app runs on private cloud computing, images are never stored or shared.
Leslie Ikemoto, director of Apple’s installation experience, explains that you can use Image Playground to generate a birthday party invitation by taking a photo of your friend from your photo library and editing it to include a birthday cake with a simple description. You can then refine the image further — by adding candles to the cake and even changing your friend’s dress to match the party theme — by defining changes you like or using gestures.
Image Playground helps create a mystery themed birthday party invitation from a person’s photo.
For those struggling to create or edit photos, Apple Intelligence takes the guesswork out of it, so you can focus on the more fun aspects of party prep. Personally, I prefer to save that time and effort in cooking.
All the steps of planning a party can now be done using Apple Intelligence, down to the smallest detail: write and optimize the invitation message in Messages or Mail, and add and organize a calendar event based on the context of the invitation.
If I could avoid all the frustrating parts of party planning, I would. Starting this fall, with the development of Apple Intelligence, I will.
