How To Use the Combined Spotlight And Siri AI Menu In macOS Golden Gate

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how the Spotlight Menu has changed in macOS Golden Gate. So almost all Mac Users are familiar with that is called the Spotlight Menu or some people just call it Spotlight. It's when you use Command Space and it brings up a menu, really a prompt or field that you can type into and you can do things like search for an app to launch, search for a file, and lots of other functionality. Previous to macOS Golden Gate this gave you access to lots of different functions that fell under the umbrella Spotlight. The term Spotlight actually refers to the entire indexing and search ability built into macOS. Searching not only for files but in apps like Mail and Notes and other things. The menu that you bring up with Command Space, that was called the Spotlight Menu although Apple rarely refers to it like that and most people call it Spotlight. 

So now in macOS Golden Gate you actually get a different looking prompt. It's got a darker background and it shows the words SEARCH or ASK and it is actually now a combination of Spotlight like before, and also Siri. Previously we had two separate areas where you prompted each thing. You had Command Space where you bring up a Spotlight Search and you had a separate button keyboard shortcut to bring up Siri and the ability to ask Siri something. Now they are merged into one. As a matter of fact if you look in the Menu Bar instead of seeing the little magnifying glass for Spotlight and a little Siri icon for Siri, you just see this one button here and that brings up this menu or prompt. The Search or Ask function.

Now all Macs capable for running macOS Golden Gate are capable in using this Siri AI at some level. You can actually turn it off and go back to just have Spotlight functionality there. So if you go into System Settings and you go down to Siri, the last item here at the bottom, is of course Turn Off Siri. Now this turns off all the Siri AI functions which means you've moved a lot of functionality from your Mac by turning this Off. But in addition to that this button here will go back to the old Spotlight button and the Spotlight menu will work kind of as it did in macOS Tahoe only having those Spotlight functions and no ability to prompt Siri. This will also be true if you are in a region where Siri AI doesn't work. I'm not quite sure how it looks for you and it probably will change over time with various versions of macOS Golden Gate but you wouldn't have access to Siri AI obviously if you can't turn it on. 

So this menu whether you use Command Space or whether you click here, it lets you type something just like the Spotlight Menu used to in the past. So you can search for a file just by typing something that you know is either in the name of the file or the contents of the file, and then you click on one of the results. You can arrow down to go to a different result if you wanted to. You can press Return to open it up. You can use Command R to go to a location for that file so that it opens up a Finder window pointing to that folder. You can even use the Spacebar for Quick Look to see the contents of a file without actually opening it, and you can even do things like dragging a file right from this menu to move it to a new location or attach it to an email or however you want to use drag with a file. 

But you could also use this exact same menu here to prompt Siri AI and ask something either for it to take an action or just to get information, like this. You can press return and it is just going to recognize that it's an AI prompt and it is going to respond just like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini would. In fact you can even followup here asking more within this same little window here that now has grown to show you the contents there. You'll also see images, maps, and other things in this window if the response includes that. It will even show you sources and such right here. Give you thumbs up and thumbs down and all of that. A little three dots menu here to copy all the text and you can attach to your response to this a photo or file or switch to Voice Mode here. Now this is just one of many ways to prompt Siri AI. 

Another is to use the Siri app that is now part of macOS in Golden Gate. As a matter of fact this button here at the top right will take you to the Siri AI app and bring up a window showing just this conversation. Or if you launch the Siri app all on its own you'll actually see all of your conversations here including ones you started using the Search or Ask Menu. You can refer back to them. You can continue right here and so on. Now this Search or Ask Menu can do all of the things the Spotlight Menu did before. So, for instance, a lot of people used this to launch apps and you can do the same thing here. You can just type the name of the app there, just a few characters, until you see the first item, press return, as a really quick way to launch apps. Notice also when you move your Pointer with this menu up here it gives you this little submenu here with keyboard shortcuts and it shows that you can click here to just search for applications or use Command 1 to jump to that mode. You can also get to that same place by clicking on that little Apps Icon in the Dock. It is the same destination, just two different ways to get there. In fact you can assign your own keyboard shortcut for this mode by going into System Settings and then down to Keyboard and then Keyboard Shortcuts. Then go to Spotlight and you'll see how you can activate and then assign a keyboard shortcut to show apps. 

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You can also still search for files, like I showed. So you can just by the name or the contents of the file but you can also type the name of the app, like for instance TextEdit here, press Tab and it accepts that as the type of file to search for. Then you can search for name or contents and only get files of that type. You can do the same thing by clicking on one of the little slugs right here, like this, and you see you get to the same place. 

Another mode you can get into is the Actions Mode, or Command 3, and this gives you all these different actions depending on the apps you've installed. So the apps themselves can tell the System they have certain actions that they perform and you can go and select one of these, search for one of them. Like I can search for Calendar here and I get things related to Calendar like Add New Calendar, Add New Event. I can assign short keys to it. So I can say Any C for a new Calendar event and then when I type Any C, you can see how it comes up with that first. You can also create your own Actions using the Shortcuts App. 

A 4th mode here, which you can access with Command 4, is to look at your Clipboard History. So these are things you previously copied to the Clipboard. It keeps a history of them. You can just click on one to insert it or use the button to the right here to make it the current clipboard. 

Another interesting thing here about combining these two things, Spotlight Search and Siri AI, into one menu is there is a lot of crossover, particularly when you're searching stuff. For instance, say you wanted to find a file but you weren't sure of either the name or the contents of the file. You can actually ask Siri AI about this and it will look for it in an intelligent way. So it doesn't actually have to have those words. So you can do something like this. It is going to find this file. This is a Pages document with some sample text in it where I was very careful never to include the words History of Canada in it. It's got a different title. It doesn't ever say History of Canada in any heading or even in the text. Yet that's what the document is about. So you can see how asking Siri AI, it was able to figure this out and get me to this document. Or you can do something like this. Notice I'm not asking for my next dentist appointment. I'm asking for my last one. I want to find out. You can see there was some suggestions there but Siri AI is actually going to listen to what I said and it is going to come up with the right answer. You can do that with lots of information you've got in your Contacts, in Notes, and Calendar, and your files, and so on.

So while Spotlight is basic search and also a pretty intelligent search, Siri AI can actually go beyond that, or kind of super intelligent search of your stuff to find things. Of course, you can go the next step with Siri AI and actually have it do things as well. You see how it is actually going to make the calendar event for me. 

Now I should also mention that the Search or Ask menu does all of the things that Spotlight did before in the same way. So, for instance, did you use it for math calculations. Well you can still do that the same way you did before and get an answer there. You can still ask for Weather the same way you did before. Or look up flight information, or sports scores, or dictionary definitions. Now you're going to get all sorts of results and somewhere down here there will be a dictionary definition or the word, but just like before you can use Keyboard Shortcuts. Command L works. That's an old keyboard shortcut. A newer one is Command D and you can see it jumps right to the dictionary definition. A Return now will actually take you to the Dictionary App. 

One of my favorite uses for the Spotlight Menu and still now with the Search or Ask Menu is the ability to start web searches. It's so convenient I even use it while I have Safari right there on the screen. So you type what you want to search for, forget the results and just use Command B and it will just launch Safari and search for that. Also another feature that was new in Tahoe and still works is the ability to see your history for all of this. So just bring up the menu, Command Space, and then use the Up Arrow and it shows you the last thing that you used the searcher asked the menu for. Keep going up and up and up and up to see something and then a return will repeat that request. 

Now there are settings for Spotlight separate from Siri. So go into System Settings and look for Spotlight. Just like before you get this huge list that Spotlight can return as results. So if you want to turn something Off you can. A lot of stuff will fall under Show Related Content here. So you try that On or Off if you like. You've got the Search History that I talked about before and you can actually clear it out right there. All the way at the bottom here you've got more results. I think the really important thing here is that Apple did things right. For all of the previous functionality you can do with the Spotlight Menu you can still do right now in exactly the same way, with exactly the same number of key strokes. There is no additional things you need to do to, say, search for files, launch apps, do calculations, all of that. It works the same. You can just ignore Siri AI and do all of those things exactly as how you did them with macOS Tahoe. You just have the additional functionality that you could type out a prompt and press Return and then it will simply ask Siri for a result. 

So this doesn't change how things work if you used the Spotlight Menu a lot before. Just keep using it the same way as you did. You've just now got additional Spotlight AI prompting as part of this menu. In addition the Spotlight Indexing Engine is all new in macOS Golden Gate. They rewrote it. So hopefully a lot of problems that people have experienced in the past with not being able to find files, not working at all, taking up a lot of system resources, hopefully that will all be over for now and Spotlight will work very smoothly. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.