iOS 11 Release Date Features: Highlights From Latest iPhone OS At WWDC 2017

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple on Monday officially unveiled iOS 11 details, the latest update to its long-running mobile operating system. Along with the expected under-the-hood updates and tweaks, the operating system also offers several notable new features. Here are the biggest takeaways from WWDC on iOS 11, which is slated to release this fall:

Siri

Siri has had a substantial head start on other virtual assistants since its launch in 2011 but hasn’t really garnered the attention paid to newer competitors like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.

Read: Apple Virtual, Augmented Reality Developer Support Coming To iOS, macOS

iOS 11, however, looks to bring some significant upgrades to Siri. At WWDC, Apple showcased a handful of new features for the virtual assistant. Some of these are more cosmetic: along with an adjusted female voice, you’ll be able to change Siri to a male voice. Other features are more technically impressive as Apple demonstrated Siri’s live translation feature. Onstage, Apple quickly translated a sentence from English to Chinese — at launch, the feature will include translation support in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Apple also made a point of emphasizing bigger goals for Siri and iOS, highlighting its planned expansion of the SiriKit developers kit to make it easier to integrate Siri on an individual app level. The move ties into Apple’s goal of improving Siri’s machine learning functionality and its ability to understand your preferences and dislikes, as virtual assistants like Siri have struggled to understand more contextual and detailed requests.

Payments

Apple is finally getting into the micropayments space. Through its Messages app, you’ll be able to send and receive money from other iOS users. Payments can be validated with Touch ID and the service will also come with the Apple Pay Cash virtual card for transactions.

The service was rumored to be in the works earlier this year and represents Apple’s latest attempt to bolster its Apple Pay service. Apple Pay, which allows you to tie a payment card to your iPhone, was the company’s bid to enter the payment space, but it’s only been a modest factor among iPhone users and retailers. With its new user-to-user payment feature, Apple Pay will be going up against competitors like Venmo in a bid to make itself more useful to users.

Control Center Refresh

It’s a smaller update, but Apple also plans to redesign the layout of its Control Center for iOS 11. Instead of the horizontal tiers that previously separated icons and functions, the new operating system will feature a more spread out layout that’s a clear change in direction.

Car Notifications

Apple will encourage users to avoid using their phones while driving. You can enable a safety mode that temporarily will disable notifications while you’re driving, and it can be disabled if you’re just a passenger.

Read: Apple HomePod Speaker Powered By Siri Revealed At WWDC 2017

Files App

As hinted before WWDC, Apple unveiled an official file management app for its new iPad Pro. Through the app, users will be able to manage files from cloud services like iCloud, Box and Google Drive, and have them all synced on a single device. The app is a bid from Apple to further make the iPad Pro a device that can be used as an alternative to a traditional laptop.