Even as Apple embraces AI in iOS 18, it’s working to improve users’ ability to get answers in a more traditional way: through Search in focus feature. Spotlight Search is already accessed by swiping down in the middle of the home screen, which helps iPhone users discover things on their device and on the web — the latter as an alternative to using Google Search. With iOS 18, Apple is making it easier for users to discover content within their apps using natural language — or “semantic” — queries.
Already, Spotlight was able to search for content in developer apps, but it would only return results when the search terms matched exactly. With this year’s addition of semantic search capabilities, people will be able to search for content in apps using search terms that have similar meanings, Apple told developers at WWDC 2024 this week.
With the Spotlight core framework, developers can donate content they want to make searchable through Spotlight, which is stored in a private directory on users’ devices that other apps can’t access. With the new semantic capabilities, Spotlight’s understanding of developers’ content will be greatly improved, as users will be able to search for content within apps in their own way. These types of search queries leverage machine learning models that are downloaded to the device and run in the app process and can be loaded or unloaded at any time, Apple said.
Additionally, as Spotlight search is used, developers can help improve their app’s search results ranking over time by sending signals to Spotlight when an iPhone owner interacts with one of their results.
For example, if someone searched for a specific local hiking trail, semantic search capabilities could find results related to the user’s search query using entities it understood, such as trail location or specific keywords, even if were not in the path name and did not match exactly. Additionally, the developer can set higher priorities for some of their content as needed. This allows them to do things like mark a track that a user has saved as a favorite to rank higher in search results.
The end result is that the person searches for a specific trail using a natural language query in Spotlight, finds the trail they want more easily through these enhanced results, and can then tap on a result to be taken directly to the trail page in the developer’s hiking trails application. This update also helps Siri better understand an app’s content, Apple noted.
While not as exciting as a Siri or ChatGPT AI integration, this type of under-the-hood update will provide an improved experience for iPhone users who turn to Spotlight to find information from their apps — or even those that use Spotlight as an alternative to web search.
