Everything Nia does on your iPhone

Nia is an AI voice assistant for iPhone. You speak to it or type to it in plain language and it actually does things on your phone: create events in Calendar, set reminders and alarms, find places, generate images, read your Gmail, turn the lights on or leave you a WhatsApp message written and ready. It is not a chat that explains how to do it: it is an assistant that does it.

Siri is the system assistant and it wins on one thing: it listens with the iPhone locked and the app closed, because it runs on a coprocessor no third party app can reach. Nia wins on the rest: it understands a long sentence with several conditions, remembers what you tell it, chains several actions in one turn, searches Google, reads your documents and gives you routines and jobs that run on their own. And when it cannot do something, it says so, instead of opening a web search.

Not entirely, and that is on purpose. Siri is still the way in when the phone is locked: you can say "Hey Siri, ask Nia what I have tomorrow" and Siri answers with Nia's answer without opening the app. Nia also lives in the widget, in Control Centre and on the Action button. What Nia is for is what happens after the sentence, not the sentence.

No. The wake word "Hey Nia" is switched on by hand in Settings, with its battery warning, and it only works with the app open or with background audio mode on. With the app closed, Nia does not listen, and that is not a fault: iOS does not allow it to any app other than Siri. While it is listening, the orange microphone indicator is on, as it should be.

Dictation and the wake word are recognized on the device itself. What travels to the server is the text of what you said, so the model can understand it. Group radio is the exception: when you turn it on and hold to speak, the voice notice travels to the server to reach people in that group who turned their listening on. Reading a receipt, translating text, Nia Studio masks and your location also stay on the phone, with location rounded to a kilometre before it leaves.

It leaves it written and open, and you press send. That is not a decision Nia makes: iOS gives no app a way to send a WhatsApp message, send a text or make a call on your behalf. Nia resolves the contact in your address book, writes the message and opens the app on the right conversation. It will never tell you it has sent it.