At the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple introduced iPadOS 27, which will add more AI features to the system that powers its iPad and iPad Pro tablets.
In addition to long-awaited improvements to Siri’s personal assistant, the main improvements to the iPad operating system focus less on adding major features and more on streamlining your daily tasks. Many of these enhancements are being added across Apple’s product line, from iPhones to Macs.
It includes an extension to Spotlight that brings the system-level search feature compatible with Spotlight on macOS and new Siri AI features, the ability to assign tab organization in Safari to AI, and a way to create automation in the Shortcuts app by writing or speaking requests using natural language prompts.
Apple is expected to release the developer beta of iPadOS 27 today, and the final version will ship in September or October if the company follows its traditional release schedule.
Obvious search gets Siri a boost
Spotlight, the search bar that appears when you swipe down from the center of the iPad screen, is due to the wisdom in iPadOS 27, to be closer to the features that are present in MacOS. In addition to finding apps, files and documents stored on the device, the new Spotlight search will let you type in natural language requests for Siri AI to process. Apple also says it has reorganized the index of what’s on your device, and new information is indexed much faster.
It’s also a place to ask Siri to do something with information, like fetching the latest weather and adding calendar appointments. Siri’s Visual Intelligence can be activated by taking a screenshot or by pointing the camera at objects around you.
Let AI organize your tabs in Safari
How much time do you spend trying to track down a website tab in Safari that you’re sure you have open but can’t find it? It is very easy to accumulate a lot of tabs when shopping or researching articles. The new tab organizing feature in Safari, which will be used on all Apple devices, is designed to organize you, making it easier to display tabs more quickly.
It’s similar to the Use Stacks feature in macOS, where document icons on the Desktop are organized into groups based on file types such as images or PDF documents, or other criteria such as modification date.
Create Shortcuts without feeling like you’re building flowcharts
The Shortcuts app on iPad, iPhone and Mac is a powerful way to automate actions, but it still requires you to think like you’re building scaffolding. That makes sense for a concept-based app — for example, take a photo, resize it to 2,048 pixels and save it as a highly compressed JPEG. But that approach, ironically, made building shortcuts laborious and time-consuming.
In iPadOS 27, building on the natural language capabilities of Siri AI, you’ll be able to have more conversation about what you want Shortcuts to do.
You may need to get a new iPad to run iPadOS 27, however
Apple made a big deal about maintaining support for iOS 27 all the way back to 2019’s iPhone 11, but that doesn’t apply to the iPad line. To use the latest operating system, you will need one of the following models:
- iPad Pro (M4 and later)
- iPad Pro 12.9‑inch (4th generation and later)
- iPad Pro 11‑inch (second generation and later)
- iPad Air 13-inch (M2 and later)
- iPad Air 11-inch (M2, M3, and M4)
- iPad Air 11-inch (4th generation and later)
- iPad (A16)
- iPad (9th generation and later)
- iPad Mini (A17 Pro)
- iPad Mini (6th generation and later)
Be sure to check out all the latest news from the conference on CNET’s WWDC live blog.