Apple Intelligence: A New Era of AI-Powered Features for Apple Devices

Jim Rossman: First Apple Intelligence features roll out

By Jim Rossman, Tribune News Service The Tribune Content Agency Recently, Apple released an update to its operating systems that introduced the beginnings of a new suite of artificial intelligence tools called Apple Intelligence. Apple has been talking about Apple Intelligence since it was first mentioned back in June at their Worldwide Developer Conference. The first Apple Intelligence features finally made it to consumers with the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1. Apple users may or may not see the new features, as you'll need a recent device. Apple Intelligence is only compatible with iPhone 15 and 16 models, iPads with an A17 Pro or M1 or later CPU and any Mac with an M1 or later CPU. If you have a compatible Apple device, and you've updated to the latest version of the operating system, you'll still have to opt in to activate Apple Intelligence inside the system preferences. The option you will find is to be added to the Apple Intelligence waitlist. Why a waitlist? The server and network infrastructure to handle the AI requests is new, and I think Apple wants to keep an eye on the system capacity. That said, I clicked to join the waitlist on the first day and I received a notification that I'd been approved in about an hour. So, what is included? Writing Tools to help you summarize, proofread and rewrite text to change the wording or tone. You can choose to make your copy sound more professional, friendly or concise. You should find the writing tools if you select a block of type and right-click with your mouse. Writing Tools will be listed in the pop-up menu. You'll also find Smart Reply options in Apple Mail, and you'll see summaries of email conversations. Summaries and smart reply will also appear in the Messages app notifications. Photos gets some new features, including Clean Up, which lets you circle objects you'd like to remove. I cleaned up the background in a picture of my wife and I was really impressed at the results; the cleanup only takes a few seconds. Users can also search with natural language in the Photos app. You can search for things like "Christmas in Chicago" or "red convertibles" and the returned photos were surprisingly accurate. The searches even include your videos. Siri gets enhancements including typing your Siri queries and asking Siri questions about how to use your Apple products. (Siri, how can I make text bigger on my iPhone?) Apple will be releasing more Apple Intelligence features in future software upgrades, so you may want to turn on automatic updates in the Software Update system settings.

Apple Intelligence on Mac: 5 AI-powered features you can test right now

Apple Intelligence features to try on a Mac today. Credit: Apple Apple Intelligence has officially launched with the latest updates for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. While the AI-powered features on iPhone with the iOS 18 update is getting the most buzz because -- let's be real -- new smartphone features are arguably one of the most impactful in our daily lives, However, Apple Intelligence on Mac deserves some attention, too. With the macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Macs with an M1 chip or higher got a bunch of AI-powered features you can try out today. Some of the flashier features won't be available until the macOS Sequoia 15.2 update or later, but here are meaningful updates worth looking into. If you're a Notes app devotee like me, you might find Writing Tools worth playing around with. With Apple Intelligence, you can proofread, rewrite, summarize, and organize text into lists and tables by clicking the Apple Intelligence icon in the toolbar at the top of the app. This is helpful for organizing a haphazard to-do list or reworking the draft of a message or email. Speaking of texts and emails, you can also use Writing Tools in Messages, Mail, and Pages for editing documents. Another useful Notes feature with Apple Intelligence is automated audio transcriptions. You do this by importing an audio file or recording directly within Notes. Note: if you import the file, I've found that you have to play the file in order to get the transcription, so it's best used for recording directly. Once you have your recording, you can tap the Apple Intelligence icon to summarize the text. The big announcement with the Apple Intelligence launch is a new-and-improved Siri. Poor Siri languished for years without much attention, making it the subject of ridicule for not being very useful. But with a generative AI boost, Apple says Siri will be more conversational, intelligent, and better able to understand context. Unfortunately, Siri on macOS Sequoia 15.1 is only marginally improved. The latest update shows a new interface with the Apple Intelligence icon in the Menu bar, which invokes Siri. You can type with Siri or use audio. Siri is slightly better with surfacing information and is more responsive to changes as you type. It can answer basic questions like "what to make for a dinner party for eight people" by providing web search results. But some users have noted that it fails at more complex tasks like briefing a person on their daily schedule. But we weren't expecting any mind-blowing improvements to Siri just yet. Major Siri updates aren't slated until sometime next year. Removing unwanted objects in photos has been around for a while as a feature for Google devices and apps, but Apple finally launched this for the Photos app with the Clean Up tool. You can access this by opening edit mode on a photo and choosing Clean Up from the options above the photo. From here you can click, circle, or brush over the object you want to remove and within a few seconds, it's gone. This is a useful tool, but be warned, it sometimes leaves weird shadows or artifacts. You can brush over the area with the Clean Up tool to fix it, but hopefully this is something that will be improved with future updates. For Mail users, Apple Intelligence can help you parse through your inbox by providing brief summaries of what each email is about without having to click on it. Enabling Show Priority in the View menu allows Apple Intelligence to highlight emails it deems important, providing a quick one-liner summary of each. Admittedly, I'm not a big Mail user, but could see this as a useful tool for working your way through your inbox.

Apple Intelligence Arrives With iOS 18.1: Here Are 3 Features That You'll Use Daily

The wait for Apple Intelligence is over. Apple has teased and promised many features since introducing its AI technology earlier this year, and now we get our first taste of Apple's AI ambitions in iOS 18.1. And although the first suite of features is modest in scope, you're sure to find at least some of them to be helpful. After running the iOS betas with access to Apple Intelligence for several weeks, I think these are the three features you'll actually use on a day-to-day basis. You need an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro (or their Plus and Max variants) running iOS 18.1 and, crucially, you must request access to Apple Intelligence to take advantage of these new technologies. Once you're in, here's what you can realistically expect. More features will be added as time goes on -- and keep in mind that Apple Intelligence is still officially beta software -- but this is where Apple is starting its AI age. In an era when there are so many demands on our attention and seemingly less time to dig into longer topics...Sorry, what was I saying? Oh, right: How often have you wanted a "too long; didn't read" version of not just long emails but the fire hose of communication that blasts your way? The ability to summarize notifications, Mail messages and web pages is perhaps the most pervasive and least intrusive feature of Apple Intelligence so far. When a notification arrives, such as a text from a friend or group in Messages, the iPhone creates a short, single-sentence summary. Sometimes summaries are vague, and sometimes they're unintentionally funny, but so far I've found them to be more helpful than not. Summaries can also be generated from alerts by third-party apps like news or social media apps -- although I suspect that my outdoor security camera is picking up multiple passersby over time and not telling me that 10 people are stacked by the door. That said, Apple Intelligence definitely doesn't understand sarcasm or colloquialisms -- you can turn summaries off if you prefer. You can also generate a longer summary of emails in the Mail app: Tap the Summarize button at the top of a message to view a rundown of the contents in a few dozen words. In Safari, when viewing a page where the Reader feature is available, tap the Page Menu button in the address bar, tap Show Reader and then tap the Summary button at the top of the page. I was amused during the iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 releases that the main visual indicator of Apple Intelligence -- the full-screen, color-at-the-edges Siri animation -- was noticeably missing. Apple even lit up the edges of the massive glass cube of its Apple Fifth Avenue Store in New York City like a Siri search. Instead, iOS 18 used the same-old Siri sphere. Now, the modern Siri look has arrived in iOS 18.1, but only on devices that support Apple Intelligence. If you're still tapping your fingers in the Apple Intelligence waitlist queue, you'll also see the Siri sphere for now. With the new look are a few Siri interaction improvements: It's more forgiving if you stumble through a query, like saying the wrong word or interrupting yourself mid-thought. It's also better about listening after delivering results, so you can ask related followup questions. However, the ability to personalize answers based on what Apple Intelligence knows about you is still down the road. iOS 18.1 also doesn't yet tie in ChatGPT as an alternate source of information -- that interaction has only just rolled out in the iOS 18.2 developer beta. Until iOS 18.1, the Photos app on the iPhone and iPad has lacked a simple retouch feature. Dust on the camera lens? Litter on the ground? Sorry, you need to deal with those and other distractions in the Photos app on MacOS or using a third-party app. Now Apple Intelligence includes Clean Up, an AI-enhanced removal tool, in the Photos app. When you edit an image and tap the Clean Up button, the iPhone analyzes the photo and suggests potential items to remove by highlighting them. Tap one or draw a circle around an area -- the app erases those areas and uses generative AI to fill in plausible pixels. In this first incarnation, Clean Up isn't perfect, and you'll often get better results in other dedicated image editors. But for quickly removing annoyances from photos, it's fine.

I've been testing Apple Intelligence -- here's 3 reasons why it's worth upgrading to a new iPhone

Not everyone needs to upgrade because of Apple Intelligence -- but these additions make it worthwhile If you've got an older iPhone and are prone to FOMO -- that's the fear of missing out for us olds -- the arrival of Apple Intelligence via updates to iOS 18 must feel like a trying moment. Maybe you weren't considering an upgrade to the best iPhones before, but all the chatter around Apple's suite of AI tools has you wondering if you might be passing up an opportunity to really improve your iPhone experience. As I said when evaluating Apple Intelligence in the wake of the iOS 18.1 release, I don't think the initial batch of AI features alone should prompt a rush of iPhone 16 upgrades, though that's more about the strength of the phones themselves than a judgment on what Apple Intelligence delivers. All of the iPhone 16 models benefit from performance improvements, longer-lasting batteries and design flourishes like the Camera Capture button; the iPhone 16 Pro models in particular benefit from improved camera hardware. That's the reason to upgrade, not because Apple Intelligence can now fine-tune your emails via the Writing Tools feature. It's also worth remembering that Apple Intelligence's arrival will be an ongoing process, as evidenced by the fact that iOS 18.1 arrived just a couple of weeks ago, and we're already packing the new additions appearing in the just-released iOS 18.2 beta. If you're not sure about an iPhone upgrade this year, just wait -- Apple Intelligence will still be there, and in better shape, when you are ready to get that new iPhone. Still, the feeling that you're missing out on something can be a powerful motivator. So if you're still on the fence about getting a new iPhone and Apple Intelligence is the one factor that could push you into the upgrade column, here are the three reasons why it makes sense to ditch that older phone for a newer model that supports Apple Intelligence. If you find yourself firing up the Photos app a lot -- either because photography is a hobby, a side hustle or even how your bread and butter -- Apple Intelligence has a lot to offer you. The Clean Up tool in Photos puts a new AI-powered editing feature at your disposal, letting you remove distracting objects or stray people from a photo with a tap. My colleague John Velasco put together a Clean Up vs. Magic Eraser face-off, and while Google's editing tool has been around for several years, Clean Up has made a promising debut. Certainly, it's a very intuitive photo-editing tool that really seems to understand what you're trying to remove from an image. You'll also find Photos an easier app to navigate with Apple Intelligence, and I'm not just talking about the redesign Apple introduced for anyone who upgrades to iOS 18 (a redesign that I've grown to appreciate, by the way). Searching in Photos is vastly improved, as Apple now supports natural language search. Just type a description of the images you're looking for, and the odds are pretty good that it will turn up in the search results. iOS 18.2 adds other imaging tools, including the Image Playground and Genmoji. With both features, you're using text prompts to generate images, whether it's a new avatar for one of your contacts or an emoji that you can use in Messages. You've got to request early access to Image Playground, and as of this writing, there's a multi-day wait ahead of you when you do make your request. But the image creation tools available available on your iPhone are expanding rapidly, and I can understand wanting to get in on the ground floor of that. Outside of Photos, no app on your iPhone has seen a greater Apple Intelligence-driven improvement than Apple's own Mail client. If Mail is your go-to app for staying in touch and getting things done, there's a lot to like in the updated version. We'll start with the fact that a priority mail feature floats your most important messages to top of the inbox These are messages with a deadline or call to action, and the new Mail app wants to make sure you act on them in a timely fashion. If you struggle to stay on top of your inbox, this will go a long way toward making sure you're responding to key messages. Summary features turn out to be a real time-saver, too, whether it's the auto-generated summaries that appear in some messages in your inbox to give you the gist of what an email is about before you tap on it, or the summary tool that parses messages to highlight their key points. I especially like the latter, too, because it helps me sort through long email chains with multiple recipients weighing in. I can just summarize the entire string of message into a couple of key sentences that break down what's been discussed, without having to peruse every single message. iOS 18.2 introduces a new organization to Mail as well, splitting your inbox into different categories for primary mail, receipts and transactions, newsletters and promotions. (Note that this change isn't Apple Intelligence-specific.) I've just started using iOS 18.2 so I don't yet have a verdict on these changes, but they do seem to fall in line with the other productivity improvements Apple Intelligence has introduced so far. Apple has big plans for Siri, as it uses Apple Intelligence to make its digital assistant smarter and more responsive. Eventually, the plan is for Siri to be aware of what's on your iPhone screen, put that information in context and form responses based on that information -- but we're a long way from that, as Mark Spoonauer's new Siri vs. old Siri testing indicates. Of all the features I tested while putting iOS 18.1 through its paces, Siri has the most work ahead of it. iOS 18.2 looks like a crucial step forward by adding ChatGPT integration to Apple's digital assistant, which at the very least, has enhanced the conversational capabilities of Siri, according to my colleagues who've spent more time with this feature. I turn to Siri for the basics at the moment, but if you're more heavily invested in the digital assistant's evolution into a more powerful part of the iPhone experience, you'll likely want to be a part of that progress. And that could be reason enough for you to get an iPhone that's capable of supporting the Apple Intelligence-powered version of Siri.

10 MIND-BLOWING Apple Intelligence Features You NEVER Knew Existed!

Apple's latest innovations in Apple Intelligence tools and user interface enhancements are designed to streamline your digital experience. These features, seamlessly integrated into the Apple ecosystem, aim to boost productivity and creativity across various applications and devices. From enhanced writing tools to intelligent summarization features, Apple is transforming the way you interact with your devices. Let's explore ten remarkable features that can transform your digital workflow and unlock new possibilities. The video below from iReviews shows us some awesome features of Apple Intelligence. Enhanced Writing Tools: Apple's iOS writing tools have undergone a significant upgrade, offering a more versatile and efficient experience. With the latest enhancements, you can effortlessly rewrite, revert, or create lists by simply selecting text. This feature is crafted to streamline your writing process, allowing you to focus on the content rather than the formatting. Whether you're composing an email, drafting a document, or jotting down notes, these enhanced writing tools will save you time and effort. Safari Summarization: Navigating lengthy web pages can be a daunting task, but Apple has addressed this challenge with Safari's summarization feature. By switching to reader mode or selecting specific text, you can generate concise summaries of the content. This feature is particularly useful when researching a topic or browsing through news articles. The summarization tool extracts the key points, making the information more digestible and saving you valuable time. You can quickly grasp the essence of the content without getting lost in the details. Siri Typing and Suggestions: Siri, Apple's intelligent virtual assistant, has evolved to offer even more convenience. With the introduction of typing functionality, you can now communicate with Siri from any screen by simply typing your queries or commands. This feature is especially handy in situations where voice commands may not be suitable, such as in a quiet library or a crowded public space. Moreover, Siri provides dynamic suggestions tailored to your current activity, ensuring that the assistance you receive is always relevant and helpful. Email Summarization: Managing an overflowing inbox can be a time-consuming task, but Apple has introduced a solution to simplify email management. With customizable email previews, you can view summaries of your emails without even opening them. This feature allows you to quickly assess the content and prioritize your responses accordingly. You have full control over the summarization settings, allowing you to adjust the level of detail and customize the experience to your preferences. Say goodbye to the hassle of sifting through lengthy emails and hello to a more efficient email management system. Photos App Cleanup: The Photos app has always been a favorite among Apple users, and with the latest update, it has become even more powerful. The new cleanup feature introduces a seamless way to edit your images. By simply circling unwanted objects, you can remove them instantly, leaving your photos looking pristine. Whether it's a stray object in the background or an unwanted photobomber, this tool makes it effortless to refine your images without the need for advanced editing skills. Action Button Customization: Apple recognizes that every user has unique needs and preferences, which is why they have introduced customizable action buttons. You can now assign various tasks to the action button on your device, such as typing to Siri, directly from the lock screen. This feature provides quick access to the functions you use most frequently, enhancing the overall usability of your device. Whether you want to launch a specific app, initiate a search, or perform a custom action, the customizable action button puts the power at your fingertips. Advanced Writing Tools in iOS 18.2: With the release of iOS 18.2, Apple has taken its writing tools to new heights. The integration of AI technology, powered by ChatGPT, offers a sophisticated writing experience that caters to both casual and professional users. You can now compose and enhance your text with the help of intelligent suggestions and prompts. Whether you're crafting a compelling story, drafting a business proposal, or simply expressing your thoughts, these advanced writing tools will assist you in refining your language and conveying your message effectively. Image Creation from Text: Apple has pushed the boundaries of creativity by introducing Apple Intelligence image creation. With this groundbreaking feature, you can transform text into stunning visuals with just a few taps. Whether you're a designer, marketer, or simply someone who appreciates visual storytelling, this tool opens up a world of possibilities. You can generate images with customizable styles, colors, and layouts, allowing you to create unique visual content that aligns with your vision. Apple's commitment to enhancing the user experience through intelligent design and Apple Intelligence integration is evident in these hidden features. By leveraging these tools, you can optimize your workflow, improve communication, and unleash your creative potential. Whether you're a professional seeking to boost productivity or an individual looking to express yourself in new ways, Apple Intelligence-driven tools and user interface enhancements provide a platform for innovation and growth. Apple is expected to release iOS 18.2 with its new Apple Intelligence features in the first week of December.