Use “Type to Siri” on Mac Easier Than Ever in Sequoia
Siri has been considerably improved in recent MacOS versions, mostly because it’s now linked to ChatGPT. One of the other recent changes to Siri in modern MacOS versions is that it’s now easier to access the “Type to Siri” feature, no longer being relegated to an Accessibility setting that has to be enabled separately like it is in earlier versions of Mac system software.
With macOS Sequoia 15 and newer, Type To Siri can be accessed from anywhere on the Mac with a simple keypress. If you haven’t used this feature on your Mac yet, take a moment to learn about it and give it a go.
How to Use Type to Siri on Mac
You will need macOS Sequoia 15.0 or newer to have access to this feature, and for it to be most useful you’ll want an Apple Silicon Mac as well for Apple Intelligence support.
- From anywhere on the Mac, hit the Command key twice in a row to bring up “Type to Siri”
- Type out your request, query, or command, and hit return
- If Siri is unable to handle the request directly, it may ask you if you wish to ask ChatGPT instead
- The Siri interface will provide the ChatGPT response if appropriate:
Using Type To Siri in MacOS is a better experience than it once was, but it’s not perfect. Siri can still be oddly slow sometimes, and strangely incapable of providing answers to simple questions.
In the example screenshots, Siri was able to answer a simple question about an insect, but when asked about when the next full moon is, information that is available in the Weather app on the Mac, it was unable to provide that information without consulting ChatGPT.
When Siri fails to answer queries successfully, it will usually eventually ask you if you want to use ChatGPT instead. Given that ChatGPT is a much more capable, faster, and a much more advanced AI tool than Siri has ever been, you might want to simply get the ChatGPT app for Mac (or iPhone or iPad for that matter) to gain much faster and direct access to ChatGPT. And of course you can always use ChatGPT from the web as well. But for those of you who want to stay within the Apple ecosystem, Type to Siri on an Apple Silicon Mac now provides a direct path to using ChatGPT within MacOS.
Remember, Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT support is only available on Mac hardware with Apple Silicon architecture, which is indicated by an M-series chip like an M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M80000, Pro, Max, etc. Given that Siri is simply calling out to ChatGPT to then relay provided information from ChatGPT back to the Mac, and that ChatGPT can be used in basically any web browser, it’s a little disappointing to have such strict hardware requirements for using Apple Intelligence, but Apple makes these determinations based on a variety of considerations that the user is not always happy with or even privy to.
What do you think of the new Type to Siri key sequence to activate? What do you think of Type to Siri in general on the Mac? Are you using this feature, or are you simply using the ChatGPT app directly instead? Let us know your experiences and thoughts in the comments.
