The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products. Still, the tech giant is taking a cautious approach to integrating computer intelligence into its online services.

Apple is working to make its iPhone and other gadgets smarter, responding to competitors' recent moves by building more artificial intelligence into its Siri digital assistant, photos, maps and other online services. The tech giant kicked off its annual software conference by announcing new software features for the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well, while unveiling a new design for the Apple Music service. It's also extending Apple Pay to the web, so users can pay for purchases made on their Mac computers using the fingerprint authorization on their iPhone or Apple Watch. Most of these new features won't arrive until this fall. At a time when sales of its flagship iPhone are slowing, Apple seemed determined to show that it can make its gadgets indispensable, or at least as useful as its competitors' products.

Apple unveiled a smarter Siri personal assistant on Monday that's picked up some features already offered by Google, but emphasized that it's improving Siri without compromising the company's commitment to user privacy. An update to the iPhone and iPad operating system coming this fall will deliver a Siri that's able to search through more apps than ever and offer users' information based on what it thinks they might want to know. That includes automatically adding event invitations to the Calendar app, telling iPhone holders who might be calling based on an unknown number matching one in an email and launching the Music app when someone plugs in headphones in the morning because that's become their routine. Apple made the announcement to kick off its weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference, a gathering for appmakers to learn about Apple products. "We think these kind of intelligence features make a huge difference in iOS 9," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told an audience of media and software developers at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.