AAPL Apple Inc

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles 

You're going to have a lot more to talk about with Siri this fall. In iOS 10, Apple Inc.'s upcoming iPhone and iPad operating system, you'll be able to control third-party app functions using the company's voice-activated assistant for the first time.

Among the first apps to yield to Siri are big names like WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Square Cash and Slack, along with lesser-known ones including Looklive and The Roll.

I've tried out Siri's new abilities in demos with developers over the past few days. After getting an early look at a more capable Siri, it's clear that this long-overdue feature is important to making Siri more useful in everyday life. Still, controlling third-party apps is merely a first step toward Siri living up to Apple's promise as a new way to control our devices.

The Siri commands I saw in action centered around mobile payments, image search and messaging. I could say, "Siri, send Catherine $20 for lunch with Cash," and the Square Cash app would transmit the funds. (Not to worry -- your unique fingerprint is required to complete the transaction.) Saying "Hey Siri, send Jim Gonzalez a message in LinkedIn" sends a direct message to a contact via the Microsoft Corp.-owned social network.

Strings can get even more specific. For instance: "Siri, show me photos of what Kanye West wore to the VMA awards this year in Looklive." This command pulled up pictures of the rapper's wardrobe, along with links to buy what he was wearing, in the celebrity shopping app. In most of these demos, Siri carried out the task without opening the app itself. Instead, a card, styled like the app, appeared with the details of the action.

Telling Siri what to do was quicker than launching the app and carrying out the task with your fingers. At least it was in my demo experiences.

Siri needed this. Since 2011, we've been able to use Apple's assistant to check the weather, dial a phone number and get sports scores. It's novel, but not imperative. This wasn't the computing Holy Grail we've dreamed about since the earliest episodes of "Star Trek."

Not every app, of course, will have Siri-controllable actions, but hundreds of app developers are adding them. Even if apps only respond to one or two commands, it feels like Siri is finally growing up.

Here are apps that Apple says Siri will be able to control at this fall's iOS 10 launch:

For chat: LinkedIn, WhatsApp, WeChat and Slack. If you can't remember someone's full name, Siri can help. For example, say "Hey Siri, I want to send Michael a LinkedIn message," and Siri will list all the Michaels you're connected to in that network, and ask you which one you meant.

For mobile payments: Square Cash and Monzo. Square Cash lets you use Siri to send money to people in your iPhone's contact list, and ask those people for money, too. In both instances, the final step is Siri asking you to scan your fingerprint on the iPhone's home-button TouchID sensor, so your friends (or enemies) can't just grab your phone and ask it to send them your money.

For photo search: Pinterest, Vogue Runway, Looklive, The Roll and Pikazo. Once the photo-search results show up, you can tap any thumbnail to open the related app. Photo-search commands can include contents of the images, as well as when they were taken. For instance: "Hey Siri, show me my best photos of sunsets taken last summer using The Roll?"

At its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, Apple said Siri would also be able to book you a ride using Lyft, snag you movie tickets via Fandango and control the AC in a CarPlay-compatible automobile. (Apple wouldn't confirm the timing and availability of these updated apps, or any others beyond those I was briefed on.)

If an iPhone app has an Apple Watch counterpart, developers will be able to build similar Siri commands for WatchOS, too.

LinkedIn's vice president of engineering, Kiran Prasad, said he hopes Siri can help boost use of the company's messaging service. "For years, nobody really thought of LinkedIn as a place to send messages," Mr. Prasad said. "With Siri, our app sort of fades into the background. But if that means more people are using our service, I'm OK with that."

Even with these newfound skills, Siri and its rivals need to continue to evolve if they're to be key to how we use devices going forward, said Ben Arnold, a consumer electronics analyst at NPD Group Inc.

"Right now, all the voice assistants still mostly answer questions or perform an action," Mr. Arnold said. "Where they all need to go is getting you information before you ask for it, anticipating your needs, gaining context on where you're at and what you're doing and what'll be useful to you at the time. Nobody has come close to nailing that yet."

Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 30, 2016 17:15 ET (21:15 GMT)

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