Frequently asked questions

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 Center and on the Action button. What Nia is for is what happens after the sentence, not the sentence.

ChatGPT and Gemini are AI chats: they talk very well, but from their apps they do not create events in the iPhone's Calendar or set system reminders or alarms. Nia turns what you say into actions in those apps, and it runs on Google's Gemini models. The full comparison is in Siri, ChatGPT, Gemini and Nia, row by row, and one at a time in Nia vs ChatGPT and Nia vs Gemini.

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.

In 19: Spanish, Catalan, English, French, Italian, German, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Thai, Korean, Hindi and Arabic, plus the variants for Mexico, the UK, Australia and Canada. The screens follow your iPhone's language, and Nia answers in the language you speak to it, with a native voice. In automatic mode it listens for your iPhone's first two languages at once, so you can switch language halfway through a conversation. You can also fix one.

Almost all of it. The result card carries an undo button when the action can be undone: an event created, a reminder, an alarm, a routine, something you have just saved. When it cannot, as with an email already sent or a photo deleted, the card does not offer a button that would be lying.

On the Plus or Pro plan, yes. You can say "remember that I am allergic to shellfish" and it will take that into account the next time it looks for a restaurant. Everything it remembers sits on one screen where you can search it, edit it, delete entries one by one or delete the lot. And if you say a password out loud, Nia does not save it: it works out that it is a credential, writes nothing and asks you what to do.

Yes, and without writing to anyone. At the bottom of Settings, "Delete account" deletes everything Nia keeps for you: what it remembers, your conversations, your errands, your saved voices, your documents and your place in every group. Before that, if you want, on Plus or Pro you can export all of it in one file from Settings, under Memory, with "Export my data"; on the free plan, ask for a copy at help@niapersonal.com.

A voice notice is only sent when you turn radio on and hold to speak. There are no public channels and nobody can turn listening on for you. A notice lives in memory for about thirty seconds so it can reach people who chose to listen. If someone reports it, it is kept for thirty days so it can be reviewed. There is no end to end encryption and Nia does not identify anyone by their voice.

On the phone, and only when it is needed for what you asked: working out who you are calling or who you are writing to. Your address book is not uploaded to any server, not even to find out which of your contacts use Nia; what does travel to the model is the name and number of the contact you pick, to prepare the message. A group invitation is a code that works once, and Nia writes it for you in WhatsApp or Messages.

Yes, in six places: the Home Screen widget (the medium one shows your next event), the Control Center control and the Action button, Siri and Shortcuts, the Live Activities in the Dynamic Island, Spotlight search and the share sheet in Photos.

Yes, on the Plus plan. You connect the account in Settings, under Integrations, and Nia reads your Google Calendar alongside the iPhone calendar as a single diary with no duplicates, summarizes your Gmail inbox, sends real emails and searches Google Drive by name and by content.

Yes, on the Plus plan: HomeKit and Matter. On, off, brightness, temperature and scenes. If it cannot find the lamp you named it tells you, instead of guessing and switching something else off.

Gemini, on the server, which is the only place in the system that talks to the model: there is no key inside the app. The turn also carries Google search for what happened today, reading of the links you paste, code execution for sums and charts, and search across your own documents.

The parts that run on the iPhone do: the wake word, dictation when your iPhone supports your language offline, translating a text and reading a receipt. The model lives on the server, so understanding a request needs a connection.

Not yet. Nia can compile the steps of a Shortcut, but Apple only imports signed files and signing is not switched on yet; if you ask, the card tells you before you tap. What it does do, on the Plus plan, is run the Shortcuts you already have by name.

A Nia group is not a chat: it is a board of intentions that each member's Nia knows how to carry out. Someone proposes a dinner and, when the others accept, the event is created by each person's own calendar on their own phone. The shopping list, jobs given to someone by name, polls, shared documents and voice radio all work inside the same private group. Nothing is written on another person's phone unless their phone writes it.

Yes, and it saves them to a "Nia" album in your Photos. The free plan comes with three images in HD; Plus gives 25 a month and Pro 60, with a few of them in 4K. If you give it a reference photo, you can be in the image yourself. And Nia Studio, the editor, removes objects and people, changes the background and restyles, with the masks computed on the iPhone itself.

In the Photos app on your iPhone, in an album called Nia. There is nothing to download and no separate gallery to look in: they appear in your camera roll like any other photo, and from there you share them, edit them or delete them like the rest.

Not on its own. iOS requires its own confirmation prompt every time an app wants to delete something from the camera roll, so Nia does not do it without you: it tells you where the image is and you delete it yourself from Photos. What it does delete without asking is what you do not want inside the image, which is another matter.

No. Nia is an iPhone app and half of what it does, meaning EventKit, HomeKit, AlarmKit, PhotoKit, Shortcuts and Health, is iOS. A version that could not touch any of that would not be Nia.

Partly, on the Plus plan. A routine fires at a given time or when you arrive somewhere: an alert reaches you and the action runs when you tap it. What would run on its own on the server, the jobs, is not switched on yet.

An iPhone with iOS 18 or later and an account. You can sign in with Apple, with Google or with your email. The free plan does not ask for a card.

There is a free plan with 5 commands a day and 3 images in total, no card. Plus costs $11.99 a month, or $10 a month if you pay for the whole year, and takes you to 60 commands a day, memory, routines and the wake word. Pro costs $24.99 a month, or $20.83 a month paid yearly, and adds 300 commands a day, video, Apple Health and voice with no cap.

One turn of conversation: you ask for something and Nia answers, even if it used three tools inside. Asking what you have tomorrow is one command. Having it create the event, set a reminder and write to Marta, all in the same sentence, is one command too.

Yes. The subscription is managed from your App Store account and you cancel it there in two taps. When the period ends you go back to the free plan without losing your conversations.

Yes. Open the photo in the Photos app, press share and choose Nia Studio: the photo arrives in the studio and you work on it there. You can also just ask out loud, and it takes the last photo in your camera roll or the one you point it at.

No. Nia always saves a new version and leaves the original untouched, so you can go back to it whenever you want. Inside the studio, every step can also be undone and redone, and there is a control to compare before and after on the photo itself.

It is alike in the part you notice most: you tap what you do not want in a photo and it disappears, and the cutout is computed on the iPhone itself. Two things are different. The first is that you ask Nia out loud, in the same conversation where you ask it for anything else. The second is that it does more: it generates the image from scratch, replaces the background with a new scene, changes the style, crops for social media and puts text on it. And when a cutout comes out rough, the card says so instead of hiding it.