App Intents

App Intents is the framework Apple uses to let third-party apps expose their capabilities to the broader Apple Intelligence system. When you register an intent in your app, you are declaring a discrete action that Siri can call when relevant. A CRM app might register an intent to pull a customer record; a logistics app might register one to surface a shipment status. Once registered, Siri can invoke these actions in response to natural language requests, without the user ever tapping to open your app.

This is conceptually similar to function-calling or tool-use in LLM contexts (where a model is given a set of tools it can invoke to complete a task), but it operates at the operating system level rather than inside a chat interface. Siri becomes the orchestrator, your app's intents become the tools, and the user's device becomes the environment where actions execute. Apple has positioned App Intents as the primary way apps will participate in the Siri AI ecosystem going forward, and put the older SiriKit framework on a deprecation clock.

For iOS builders specifically, App Intents is now a strategic surface, not optional polish. Apps that do not register relevant intents will be invisible to Siri's reasoning even if they do exactly what a user asks Siri for. Apple has also connected App Intents to Spotlight's semantic index, meaning well-registered apps become discoverable through natural language search, not just keyword matching. The pattern matters beyond iOS too: it is a concrete example of how OS-level AI integration is shifting from chatbot add-on to ambient, always-available action layer.