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 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 Center 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.

Yes, and it was built in Spanish first. It also speaks English, and in automatic mode two recognisers run at the same time on the device: the one that understands with more confidence wins, so you can change language halfway through a conversation.

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. Settings, under Account, Delete account removes your conversations, your memories, your routines, your skills and your devices. You can also export all of it first, in one file.

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.

Only 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: a group invitation is a code that works once, and Nia writes it for you in WhatsApp or Messages.

Yes, in seven places: the Home Screen widget with your next event, the Control Center control and the Action button, Siri and Shortcuts, the Live Activities in the Dynamic Island, Spotlight search, the share sheet in Photos and the notifications for a finished job.

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: dictation, the wake word, translating a text and reading a receipt. The model lives on the server, so understanding a request needs a connection.

Yes, on the Plus plan. Nia compiles the steps, signs the file and opens Apple's import sheet. You press "Add Shortcut", and until that moment the shortcut does not exist, and the card says so above the button, instead of taking it for granted.

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.

Yes, on the Plus plan. A routine fires at a given time, when you arrive somewhere or on a system event. And a job ("tomorrow at eight, find me flights to Rome") runs on the server and the answer reaches you as a notification, with the phone in your pocket.

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, no card. Plus costs €12.99 a month, or €10.83 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 €29.99 a month, or €24.99 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.