Ask Apple’s Siri AI to suggest an outfit for an upcoming business meeting, and it can check your calendar before Glance pulls up the looks. Tell it you are “tired but want to keep going”, and Mood Dial for Apple Music lines up a station to match. Ask it to explain a diagram in your handwritten Noteshelf notes, and it reads your writing to answer. Siri AI understands what is on your screen, draws on personal context and takes actions inside apps. We spoke to the Indian teams behind the three apps about working around Siri AI.
Glance: From intent to outfit in one conversation
Glance is a shopping app that learns a user’s style from a selfie and generates tailored outfit ideas across phones, TVs and other screens. With Siri, a user can say “Find red sneakers on Glance” and follow up with “Now find pants to go with those sneakers”, and Siri keeps the context. The app also uses Apple’s on-device AI to explain why an outfit suits the user.
For Arvind Jayaprakash, senior vice-president, technology, Glance, the biggest change is how quickly a user gets from wanting something to seeing it. “Earlier, discovery meant opening Glance, scrolling, and searching. Now, an Apple user can simply say ‘Hey Siri, let’s Glance. Find me something for a beach wedding’ and Glance surfaces personalised looks and lets them see what they can shop — all without leaving the Siri AI experience,” he said. “Intent to action now collapses into a single conversation.”
Siri AI’s grasp of personal context opens up requests that draw on other apps. “Siri AI is able to look at the user context across various apps and allows users to combine them in a way that offers both convenience and control to the end user,” Jayaprakash said. “For example, you can now ask Siri AI to use Glance to recommend an outfit for you that is suited for an upcoming business meeting; the details of which reside inside your calendar.”
Siri AI is a capable and conversational assistant with personal context understanding, broad world knowledge, onscreen awareness, and more systemwide app actions
He said Apple controls what information Glance receives in that exchange. “Apple has ensured that only details of that one specific event flows into Glance and that this happens at the behest of the user; all without Glance having to develop specific integrations into the calendar. This kind of cross-app context sharing allows users to create a personal assistant for themselves.”
Glance already runs its own AI to understand what users like, but Jayaprakash said the two systems do not overlap. “Apple Intelligence and Glance AI play different but complementary roles. Apple helps users express what they want in a simple, natural way, while Glance uses its deeper understanding of fashion, shopping, and personal preferences to give the right recommendations,” he said. “In other words, Apple helps start the conversation, and Glance brings shopping expertise.”
He said the integration itself was easier than expected. “Apple has designed these systems with a strong focus on developer ergonomics — App Intents and App Schemas make it remarkably intuitive to expose Glance’s core capabilities to Siri AI, which meant the technical integration itself was smoother than we anticipated.”
In deciding what to make available through Siri, the team focused on everyday shopping tasks. “Through Siri AI, we chose to cater to most common commerce related asks a user may have, viz searching for products, building occasion-based looks, and taking quick actions like sharing looks generated with their friends over iMessages, etc.”
Mood Dial for Apple Music: Naming a feeling, not a song
Mood Dial is a music player for Apple Music subscribers on iPhone and iPad. Instead of browsing by genre, users pick from a 30-mood dial or describe how they feel, and the app generates an Apple Music station. Optional Apple Health integration takes activity, heart rate and sleep into account. Through Siri, a user can say “Hey Siri, I want to focus right now. Play something to focus in Mood Dial”. Users can also resume sessions and manage playback through Shortcuts, widgets, Control Center and CarPlay.
Mohit Nandwani, founder of Mood Dial for Apple Music, said the app has always handled requests the way Siri AI now does. “Mood Dial has always taken requests as sentences rather than searches, so it sits naturally with the way Siri AI works. Someone will say ‘tired but want to keep going’ which is two things at once, and both of them matter,” he said. “With Siri AI that whole sentence reaches the app the way it was said, instead of being reduced to a keyword on the way in.”
Starting with Siri, he said, removes a step. “With Siri AI you just tell Siri how you are feeling, and Mood Dial plays music for it. You are not naming a song or an artist, you are naming a feeling. Any app can play something you can already name, and this is for when you cannot.”
He said this helps when a user cannot reach the screen. “It works while you are driving, answering emails, or doing the dishes. And it works on the days when deciding is the hard part and you only want something that will hold you up. Taking that decision away matters more than it sounds.”
The app also uses listening history, time of day and health signals, but Nandwani said a spoken request always comes first. “Mood Dial builds a picture of your taste from what you actually listen to on Apple Music, and that is what keeps a station from feeling generic,” he said. “Time of day, activity and health signals sit on top of that and only shape what the app offers when you have not asked for anything specific, so late at night it might put Unwind (a station in Mood Dial) in front of you.”
“Health data never leaves the phone and it is completely optional. The moment you actually ask for something, that takes over, and nothing the app has guessed about you overrides what you said.”
He said the integration has also shown him how people talk about music. “The thing that stands out is that people do not ask for genres, they ask for moments. Someone made a station called ‘cozy rainy evening chai songs’, another asked for ghazals for a quiet night, and one person wrote a whole paragraph describing the tempo and the kind of vocals they wanted,” he said.
“Very few people use a single word, and quite often they will put two feelings together on purpose, something like ‘restless but hopeful’. People are also much more specific in their own language than any category would let them be. That is what I build for, the way people actually talk about what they want to hear rather than the labels we usually give music.”
(Left to right) Mohit Nandwani, founder of Mood Dial for Apple Music; Rama Krishna, who is behind Noteshelf; and Arvind Jayaprakash of Glance
Noteshelf: Talking to handwritten notes
Noteshelf is a note-taking app that lets users write by hand, mark up PDFs, record audio and organise everything into notebooks. It recognises handwriting in 65 languages. With Siri, users can create, open and search notebooks, start recordings or scan documents by voice, and ask questions about the page that is open. With the latest iOS update, the app can also turn audio recordings into summaries and action items.
Rama Krishna, founder of Fluid Touch, which makes Noteshelf, said Siri AI lets users work with the app easily. “With Siri AI, users can interact with Noteshelf using natural language, making it easier to create, find, and add to their notes—all completely hands free,” he said. Instead of navigating the app, a user can say “Create an audio note in Noteshelf”, “Find where I wrote about the Chennai Trip” or “Add recipe for Biryani to my Recipe notebook”.
Onscreen awareness lets Siri work with whatever page is open. “Siri’s ability to understand onscreen content allows users to interact with what they’re currently viewing in Noteshelf, even if it’s completely handwritten. They can ask Siri to explain a concept, answer a question, or add useful information into their notes,” Krishna said. A user could ask “What does this note say?”, “Explain this diagram” or “Summarise this section and add it to this note”.
He said this changes how people use their handwritten notes. “It turns handwritten notes from something users simply read into something they can actively converse with. Noteshelf’s powerful handwriting recognition understands what users have written, while Siri AI adds a conversational layer—letting them ask questions, find information, and build on their handwritten ideas.”
The use case that stood out for him went the other way, from Siri back into the notebook. “The most interesting possibility was being able to have a conversation with an intelligent assistant and seamlessly bring the useful parts of that conversation back into your notes. Even as handwriting,” he said.
A user could ask Siri “What is quantum mechanics?”, follow up with “What makes it so interesting?” and then say “Create a reading list about this in Noteshelf”. “It brings the entire experience full circle — from asking a question to understanding the answer and turning it into part of your notes,” Krishna said.