Getting Started With Siri AI In macOS Golden Gate

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to get started with Siri AI in macOS Golden Gate.

So a big part of the new macOS Golden Gate is Siri AI. This is the new version of Siri that actually  uses a large model ChatBot at its core so you can actually Chat with Siri in a way you couldn't before when it was more or a voice assistant and not really using modern AI. 

Now if you've got a compatible Mac you can use this. Actually all Macs that are compatible with Golden Gate can run Siri AI. But there are a lot of restrictions depending on your region and language. So if this isn't working for you it is probably due to that. Check Apple's website for compatibility notes. 

There are a lot of different ways to interact with Siri AI, some familiar and some new. One of the main ways to do it is using the Button in the Menu Bar here. Now that button replaces the Spotlight Button and the Siri Button in the Menu Bar. They are combined now. So when you actually click it you get a combined Search or Ask Menu that you can type into. So you can use this as you used Spotlight in the past. All of the Spotlight functions work on it. As a matter of fact if you move your pointer here you'll see the four parts of Spotlight and you can simply search for Files, do math calculations, ask for weather, and all that stuff that worked in Spotlight before. But you can also type a Prompt and ask Siri something just like you would ask another ChatBot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. 

There are other ways to do this as well. If you go into System Settings and then you look for Siri here on the left you can also switch requests to include Siri or Hey Siri. Also note here in Settings you can select the Language. Then the voice that Siri will use to respond to you and the choices you get depend on the language you choose. Then Responses. Whether you always just get an on screen response or you get a spoken response. So I'm going to stick with typing so you can see exactly what I'm asking Siri here in this tutorial. 

Let's start with something really basic. Let's just ask for information. So Siri AI can work just like other ChatBots. You can ask for information and it will respond with what it has in its model but also reaching out to the internet to get more information, do some research for you. So let's do something like this. (typing a prompt). Here I'm just going to press return and get a response. So I get this little working animation here and it will say various things as it gets me a result, and it gets me a response right here still in this kind of Spotlight interface. So I can read the results here. It gives me links to the sources of information if it needed any. It will include pictures. It will include lists, tables, all sorts of stuff in the response. At the bottom I can give a Thumbs Up if I want to say that the answer was really good. A Thumbs Down if it didn't get it right. I can Share the response in a variety of different ways. I can click on the three dots buttons for other options such as Copy. 

But I can also go down here to the bottom and just continue the conversation just by typing something else, like that. Then I get a result and I can continue the conversation here. 

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But this isn't the only interface that you can use to talk to Siri. There's another one that is important to know about. Let's launch Siri all by itself. You can see the app is just called Siri. This will bring up the full window for the App which has a sidebar here that shows me all my conversations. So it keeps a history of my conversations here. I can move on and ask other questions and I can always go back to this one and then do a followup question if I want. In System Settings and then in Siri you have the ability here to set how long questions are kept, but you can delete any conversation you want by Control Clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking on it. You can Rename the conversation so you can maybe find the conversation in the future a little easier. Open it and it's a window like you saw it was before in it to the top if it is something you think you will be coming back to soon, and just delete it right now. You can also view this left sidebar as a grid here or a list. 

Now asking AI for information isn't new. It's been around for a few years now in other AI products. What's different with Siri, is Siri is run primarily on your Mac so it has access to your stuff, your information in apps like Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail, Messages, even some files are available to it. So, for instance, I can ask it something that involves my Calendar, like this. (typing question). It is going to check my Calendar and come back with an answer. You can see it is even prompting me to see to see if I want to look into some flights or picking a specific week. I find that it works exceedingly well looking in your email. So let's try this prompt which is not going to mention email at all. (typing prompt.) So yeah here if found without me mentioning to check email or messages or anything, it found an email message from a friend that mentions that they may want to go to Costa Rica. Let's start a new conversation here. So I'm just going to ask it for a summary of my daily Sales Spreadsheet. I'm not going to give it a specific file name though I know it is close to that. I'm not going to tell it where to look or anything. So I find that with Files it is really good a knowing what is there and maybe giving you a summary like this. But it is really not good at giving you a details of what's inside it. So it's really only useful for searching for things and maybe a little beyond that. 

It does look in the Notes App but it is a little inconsistent as to whether or not it decides to do that. For instance if I ask this question (typing question). I'm not telling it about this note I've got from a meeting where there is some next steps and Sarah is supposed to be doing something. I'm just going to make it ambiguous here and see what it comes up with. In this case it actually found it. It says according to your development meeting notes and it tells me what Sarah is supposed to do. That's exactly right!  Except that it seems about half the time I run it, it reports that it can't find anything in my email or messages about this. However a 100% of the time when I told it to look in Notes for that, it should look in my meeting notes, it found it. I just had to give it a kind of clue. 

But Siri also knows what it is that you're looking at on your screen. It knows what the front-most window is and what the contents are so you can actually ask it about that. You can use words like "this" and it just knows that this is what you are looking at on your screen. So for instance if you are looking at a webpage, like this one, and you just want to add this to your calendar you know that how a lot of times a webpage and the calendar links. You download a file and you have to go through a bunch of steps to get to the calendar. But I can click here and just bring up the Search or Ask Menu and just ask it (typing). I'm not telling it what this is. I'm asking it to kind of figure out it is, what I'm currently looking at. So you can see here it is going to work and it is pretty quickly going to figure you must be talking about this event right here on this webpage and it creates it. It has a nice little link there so I can click on it and go to the Calendar and see that event. 

Or here's an example of where I'm working in a completely different app. One that is not necessarily really hooked into Siri AI. But this is what's on my screen. It's a slide and I'm thinking it's a little light. I've got room for more information here. Let's try to see if Siri  can help me out. So I'm asking it to kind of understand what's on this slide and actually come up with more information. So I've got this little article that's generated that I can read, just for me to read and try to maybe figure out what else I can include here on this slide. Another thing about Siri AI on your Mac, not only can it look at apps like Mail, Notes, Calendar, and so on to get information from them. But it can also interact with them. We saw how it added a Calendar event. You can do even more than that. So it's going to look here on the Calendar and it's going to come up with my next doctor's appointment. Okay. So now I recognize that and I want to change that. So it looked up the phone number. The interesting thing was the phone number was actually in the Notes field for that event. So it wasn't something where there was a contact or it was specifically put as a phone number for that event. It was in the Notes. So it figured out what the phone number is and I can call right from this. Now, let's say I've made that phone call and I've changed that appointment for the next day. So it's going to make that change. It's going to ask me to confirm. Now I've changed it without having to go into the Calendar and fiddle around with the information for that appointment. 

Let's go back to the conversation we were having about Costa Rica. Remember we were talking about inviting this person along with us. So let's ask them. You can see here it switches to the Mail App and composes an email message here for exactly what we want. It remembers the context that we were talking about Costa Rica in February and that you mentioned you might be interested in going. So I can go in here and edit this if I want or just send it. 

Plus a combined Siri-Spotlight Menu and the Siri App aren't the only places where you can interact with Siri. It also appears in app often where you type text. So, for instance, here in Pages if I go to type and I move my Pointer over the Cursor I get a little Siri button. I get right with Siri here. So I can ask it to write something for me. I could also ask it about the text that's in the document. So, for instance, since I can ask it questions like (typing) and you can see I just get an answer here. It's not actually going to write. It's called Write With Siri. But you can use it for many more things than writing. 

You'll also find the button for Siri often in Toolbars App. Not all the time but in some apps it's there. So here in Pages I've got it right there. You can see it brings it up in the same place so I could ask for something else like (typing) and you can see here I get a nice summary. This is a pretty long document and it did it pretty quickly. 

You can work with Safari. So I've got just a sample web form here and if I'm going to write in this field, you can see I've got this little button right here, and I can Write With Siri. In some cases you may not get a button or anything like that but you can always Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on something and Ask Siri is usually the first item now in the Context Menu. So for instance for this file here I can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and then use the Ask Siri field here and it will look at that document and try to give me an answer. 

So you've got a lot of different ways to use Siri AI. You've got these Spotlight and Siri Menu from the Menu Bar. Or using Command Space. You've got this Siri App. You've got buttons in App Toolbars. You've got the ability to Write With Siri even if it's asking a questions about the content. You've got the Context Menus for most things on your Mac. All of this goes back to the Siri App here. So you can see even the things that I asked outside of the Siri App, they're listed here on the left so you can always go back to see the information there, use it kind of as temporary storage for going back to the information to read it again, or continue the conversation by asking something. You also got in here the Plus Button to add photos or files to the prompt. Here of course the main thing is to normally type. But you can also dictate a prompt in the app. The Search button here allows you to search through all your conversations. So once this list gets pretty long you can quickly jump to something that you asked about days or even weeks ago. 

There are a lot of other ways Siri AI works on your Mac. For instance you can write Browser extension. You can write Shortcuts. You can search your Photos Library. All sorts of other things like that. But for just getting started to integrate Siri AI more into your workflows, learn the Siri App and try different things with whatever the tasks you need to accomplish throughout the day. I'll have more videos in the future that have to do with more specific things that Siri can help you out with. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.