On Monday, Apple announced that virtual personal assistant Siri is to appear on the Mac with the release of macOS Sierra. With this freshly-announced version of the Mac operating system now available in beta for developers, it’s possible to glean a greater insight into how Siri can be used on a Mac.
As MacRumors reveals in a new hands-on video, on a Mac, Siri can be brought up by clicking on an icon in the menu bar or dock or typing a keyboard command. However, with its interface limited to a window on the display’s right-hand side, Siri can be a highly discreet but functional productivity assistant; it can, for example, fetch files upon requests like “Find me the documents I opened on Tuesday” without taking you away from apps you’re currently using.
We would love to see this kind of interface brought to the iPad, where Siri instead takes up the entire screen when called upon. This makes much better sense on iPhones, which come with smaller screens and, unlike iPads, are not being increasingly pushed by Apple for professional use.
The Mac version of Siri was among Apple’s many exciting announcements at its lead WWDC 2016 keynote – you can read much more about that in the just-released issue #242 of AppleMagazine.
