Apple Intelligence: Anticipated Features and Improvements in iOS 26

3 Apple Intelligence features that would convince me to ditch Gemini and ChatGPT

With WWDC 2025 around the corner, Apple is facing one of its biggest challenges yet: convincing the masses to take its AI features seriously. Apple finally entered the AI race at last year's Worldwide Developer Conference when it revealed Apple Intelligence. However, some of the biggest updates announced at WWDC 2024 -- such as a new and improved Siri and an AI that's aware of your personal context from your daily phone use -- have yet to deploy, leaving users frustrated. Still, I think there is hope. Apple has done a lot well with the limited features it has shipped -- and offered a promising glimpse of what's to come. For example, many of the new features -- including Genmoji, voice memo transcriptions, and photo clean-up -- are useful and easy to access, while also not being forcefully pushed to iOS users. Also: Forget Siri: Apple Intelligence's true potential on iPad and Mac lies in third-party apps Most importantly, Apple's A18 chip provides the iPhone 16 models with the infrastructure and compute necessary for Apple to support more compute-heavy AI features, while keeping Apple's promise of on-device processing that can preserve your information's privacy and security. Although the full Apple Intelligence suite of tools has yet to be revealed, the foundation is there. Here are three features that would make me a believer in Apple Intelligence. While Siri has a new look, with the screen glow showing up every time it's activated and a new way to interact with the AI via text, it's still trailing behind most AI voice assistants. The biggest perk of conversational chat with a voice assistant is having it provide you -- almost instantly -- with feedback on anything you may be thinking of, from simple tasks such as the weather and notifications to more complex ones such as advice and math problems. Siri doesn't yet have the knowledge or intelligence to support this breadth of assistance. The actions it can perform for you are still pretty limited, and the more advanced conversational prompts require a reliance on ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT is a third-party application, there's a time lag when sending the message to the chatbot and then Siri answering. There's room for Apple to remove some reliance on ChatGPT and give its own assistant some TLC so that it can do more both in terms of knowledge and actions, which leads me to the next point. Agentic AI, which takes AI assistance one step further by taking actions on your behalf to carry out a task with minimal intervention, has been the biggest AI trend since last year's WWDC. Interestingly enough, at WWDC 2024, before AI agents were all the buzz, Apple said that Apple Intelligence would be able to carry out tasks on your behalf, such as "Pull the files that my coworker shared with me last week." While last year it was a really cutting-edge feature, to keep up, this year, it is especially necessary to roll these features out as quickly as possible to keep up and provide that extra something users are looking for. Also: What are AI agents? How to access a team of personalized assistants Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic all held their annual developer conferences last week, and all of them unveiled agentic AI products. Apple Intelligence was originally poised as a "personal assistant," and I think adding this agentic functionality can bring it a step closer to that reality. The concept of Apple Intelligence being grounded in your personal information and context, retrieving data from across your apps, and referencing the content on your screen was a unique and helpful approach to implementing AI into an ecosystem of phones. While it would be amazing if Apple could ship this feature promptly, it is a relatively complex undertaking. I foresee further delays. In the meantime, Apple could announce another unique feature that is less of an undertaking, such as the rumored revamped Health app that features an AI agent meant to replicate the insights a doctor can give patients based on their biometric data. Key to the success of any new feature Apple announces is that it needs to be ready to ship to restore user confidence lost due to the extended waiting period. Also: Apple's AI doctor will be ready to see you next spring A combination of the features above would also help give users who only purchase a new phone with the A18 chip for Apple Intelligence a return on their investment beyond the phone's basic functionalities.

In iOS 26, Apple Intelligence could power the three best features - 9to5Mac

Most of the hype surrounding iOS 19 -- I mean, iOS 26 -- focuses on the big redesign that's rumored. But looking past design changes to actual functional upgrades, three of the best iOS 26 features are, perhaps surprisingly, powered by Apple Intelligence. Here's what's coming. Most of the time when people think of AI, they think about chatbots like ChatGPT, or image generation like Genmoji and Image Playground. In iOS 26, Apple plans to launch a new AI feature that's far simpler, but also extremely practical. Mark Gurman writes at Bloomberg: The company is planning an AI-powered battery management mode...The enhancement will analyze how a person uses their device and make adjustments to conserve energy... To create the technology -- part of the Apple Intelligence platform -- the company is using battery data it has collected from users' devices to understand trends and make predictions for when it should lower the power draw of certain applications or features. Based on Gurman's report, it sounds like this feature could work entirely in the background. You might be able to disable it if you choose, but in theory, you won't need to because AI will only "conserve energy" in areas that will go unnoticed. All you'll know is that your iPhone's battery is lasting longer than ever. What better way to spur quick upgrades than the promise of better battery life? Siri received a number of changes in iOS 18, but it says a lot about the assistant's struggles that its best change involved punting questions to ChatGPT. In iOS 26, Apple Intelligence is expected to power a variety of new Siri advancements. Features delayed out of iOS 18 are chief among them, like personal context knowledge, on-screen awareness, and hundreds of new app actions. But there's even more coming, like multiple new integrations with third-party assistants, and the first version of 'LLM Siri.' Apple called last year the start of a new era for Siri, but it's in iOS 26 where the assistant should make much bigger gains. Tim Cook has long said that health will prove Apple's overall biggest contribution to the world. The Health app changes coming in iOS 26, powered by AI, could be a major part of that. Mark Gurman has reported that Apple Intelligence will power several new features in Health, some of which will likely be part of a paid service called Apple Health+. Some highlights, per Gurman: Apple's Health app has been around a long time. But until now, it's mostly been a data hub. Apple has shied away from actually interpreting your health data and offering helpful suggestions. But using AI to encourage key lifestyle changes -- assuming it works as intended -- could have a major impact on millions of users for years to come. Less than two weeks out from WWDC, there's still a lot we don't know about what's coming in Apple's new software versions. Though there have been plenty of iOS 26 leaks, I suspect many more features have still been kept secret so far. But from what we've heard to this point, better battery life, a truly supercharged Siri, and potentially transformative Health changes all seem like top highlights to me. And after iOS 18 offered Apple Intelligence features that were a bit of a mixed bag, the strength of this iOS 26 trio is exciting to see. Would it surprise you if Apple Intelligence features end up being the highlights of iOS 26? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.

These are three Apple Intelligence features I'd like to see with iOS 26 - 9to5Mac

Apple Intelligence has been off to a rocky start, especially when it comes to Siri. The assistant still has a lot to be desired, and that should definitely be at the forefront of Apple's priorities. Regardless, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple plans on expanding current Apple Intelligence capabilities to additional apps in iOS 26, and I figured I'd throw out some ideas I'd like to see. I think providing summaries is probably one of the better use cases of on-device large language models. Apple introduced notification summaries in iOS 18, and while there were some major inaccuracies early on, things seem to be mostly fine. Apple recently enabled Apple Intelligence on compatible devices by default, rather than making it an opt-in feature. For one, I think it'd be neat if there were an API for developers to use summarization models in their apps. I'm sure Apple would put strict guardrails on it, but allowing third-parties to utilize Apple's summarization models would be a big win. It'd empower indie developers to create AI features without having to worry about an OpenAI bill. On top of that, I'd really like to see some summarization improvements in the Messages app, particularly in group chats. If you missed out on a 100-message conversation, Apple should provide a more detailed summary than what can fit within two lines. Or, say you're a student - imagine being able to summarize the notes you took in a class after the fact. You'd still need to read the notes to get a thorough understanding, but a note summary could serve as a great way to jog your memory if you're quickly trying to recall something. Genmoji is probably one of the most popular Apple Intelligence features unveiled at WWDC24. Unfortunately though, it's only available on some of the most recent iPhone models: iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max, iPhone 16e, iPhone 16/16 Plus, and iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max. If you have anything older, including the one-year-old iPhone 15, you can't use Genmoji. I don't expect Apple to make its models run locally on less capable hardware, as nice as that would be. However, they did announce Private Cloud Compute - a private server for handling Apple Intelligence requests in the cloud. Those servers were likely low capacity when they just begun rolling them out, but it'll have been over a year since the rollout begun by the time iOS 19 releases to the public. While I don't expect Apple to give out Private Cloud Compute usage for free, I think it'd be pretty neat if they bundled Genmoji in iCloud+ subscriptions for users with older devices - giving people a taste of what Apple Intelligence offers. One of my favorite features in iOS 18 has been the new Reduce Interruptions focus mode. In short, it analyzes every notification that comes through, and only presents what it thinks is important. The rest just stay in notification center. I'd really like to see Apple offer additional granularity here. For example, you could configure a focus mode that only triggers on key words that you set up. I could also see the inverse being useful, where you'd normally allow an app to notify you, but you'd like notifications with matching key words to be muted. That's just scratching the surface, but I really think there could be a lot of opportunity for AI to enable more granular notification management. The new "Reduce Interruptions" focus is just the start.