Nia features: 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 at something no app can match: it listens with the iPhone locked and the app closed, because it runs on a coprocessor no third party app can reach. With Siri AI, which arrived with iOS 27, it also understands long sentences, chains actions and searches the web, for now in beta, in six languages, on iPhone 15 Pro or later and outside the European Union. Nia does that in 19 languages, on any iPhone with iOS 18 and in the EU too, and on Plus and Pro it remembers what you tell it and answers about your PDFs. And when it cannot do something, it says so.

Not entirely, and that is on purpose. Siri is still the way in when the phone is locked: you say "Hey Siri, ask Nia", Siri asks what you want to know and reads you 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.

When your iPhone supports your language offline, dictation stays on the phone; when it does not, Apple transcribes it on its servers, as with keyboard dictation. The wake word is only ever detected on the iPhone. Of what you say to Nia, the audio does not reach its server: the text does, so the model can understand it. There are three cases in which audio does leave the phone. Group radio: when you turn it on and hold to speak, the voice notice goes through the server to reach the people in that group who turned their listening on; it lives in memory for about thirty seconds, and if someone reports it, it is kept for thirty days. Telling apart the voices in a meeting you record: that audio goes through Nia's server to the Google model that works out who is speaking. And an audio file you attach in the chat: it travels with your message to the model, so it can listen to it. 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.