SAN JOSE, Calif.—Apple announced iOS 11 at its annual developers conference today, revealing details on what changes will come to your iPhone or iPad in the near future. Some of the updates include a new app drawer for finding iMessage apps and stickers, new integrations for Apple Pay, a Siri translation beta, drag-and-drop for iPad, and more.

iMessages

Apple's Craig Federighi dove into the software update at the conference keynote and demoed a bunch of new features coming in iOS 11, including a redesigned app drawer for iMessage apps and stickers. The current drawer is pretty sparse, so the company redesigned it to make compatible apps and sticker packs more discoverable in iMessage. All your messages will also be automatically synced to iCloud to optimize storage on each of your iOS devices.

iMessages is also getting Apple Pay in a new way: the contactless payment system will have its own iMessage app in iOS 11 so you can pay people directly within your messages. You can use TouchID to authenticate payments and money transfers, and any money you receive through Apple Pay in iMessage will go to your Apple Pay cash card.

Siri

The "proactive" nature of Siri we saw in the watchOS 4 announcement continues with Siri in iOS 11. Federighi showed off some of the new machine-learning capabilities of SiriKit in the iOs update, including on-device learning about topics that are pertinent to each user. For example, Siri will be able to suggest sending your location in a message to a friend, or making a calendar event based on something you looked up using Safari. Features like these are reminiscent of Google's Assistant, which already provides contextual answers and suggestions based on your questions and the activities you perform on your device.

Siri is also getting a translation beta and a new male voice. With iOS 11, you'll be able to ask Siri how to say a phrase in a different language, and it'll pump out a translation for you. At launch, the beta will support English translations to Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with more languages to come later. The voice is particularly interesting since Apple demoed it saying the same word three times with different intonations. The company briefly explained the deep learning used to make this voice more natural and expressive than other Siri voices that came before it.

Photos and Memories

In addition to the promise of better low-light photos with iOS 11's updates, the software update will bring a new Memories feature to iOS photos. Machine learning can identify different kinds of "memories," or situations that you may want to keep track of, like birthday parties, graduations, and more. This goes along with enhancements to Live Photos, which will allow you to capture a different still from within a Live Photo. That could be helpful if you take a still photo but a better shot is lying within the few seconds that replay as a Live Photo. You can also make loops of Live Photos, which string multiple GIFs together to make creative moving images.











HomeKit and Control Center

Apple added a speaker category to HomeKit that lets you add and control smart speakers using the company's new AirPlay 2 protocol. The company also added multi-room audio support for iOS, so you should be able to separately control speakers that live in different rooms and play unique music on each if you please. Since speakers are a totally new category for HomeKit, you'll have to wait for audio manufacturers to make AirPlay 2-compatible speakers before you can use the new feature.

A couple UI changes are coming to the Control Center as well. Instead of three separate pages you swipe through, the Control Center packs everything onto one page in iOS 11. Nothing is eliminated from the Control Center, but Apple strategically placed all the shortcuts in the Control Center into differently-sized squares. You can tap on icons in those squares to do things like turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and you can use 3D Touch to access more information and advanced settings.