Apple Reminders Gets Natural Language in iOS 27
Ryan Christoffel reports today for 9to5 Mac about key changes to Apple’s stock Reminders app in iOS 27. The headlining new feature is natural language input.
“Reminders has offered some level of natural language support for new reminders for a while. But in iOS 27, Apple Intelligence brings a new take on the feature,” Christoffel wrote on Friday. “When creating a new reminder, you can still use the same old system where you type certain reminder info, like a due date, and the keyboard row will suggest adding that date to the reminder.”
He continues: “But Apple Intelligence now goes a step further, letting you describe a reminder and have it automatically adopt all of the relevant metadata you mention.”
Christoffel also mentions copy in a splash screen. Apple says users can “[use] your own words to describe a reminder and Apple Intelligence will help create it for you.”
Like in Calendar, that Reminders is getting support for natural language input in iOS 27 is a big deal—and a big de-facto accessibility feature to boot. I use Reminders as my task manager—as with Mail and Podcasts, it does the job for my needs—and am very excited by the notion I can “casually” write a short blurb and the system will parse it into something coherent and actionable. The accessibility win is exactly the same as Calendar, insofar as users (like me) needn’t be so precise in their language to get an event and/or task in their phone. That you can now use natural language means there’s less cognitive overhead in remembering how and what to write, but also remembering to dig deeper and fill out the important metadata like location, date and time, etc. In other words, this kind of automation is a prime example of AI’s strengths, be it from Apple or OpenAI or Anthropic or Google. (See also: Shortcuts and Xcode this year too.)
Other new-to-Reminders-in-iOS 27 upgrades are a redesigned metadata editor within lists, as well as improvements to managing grocery lists, according to Christoffel.
