iOS 18.4 Update: Apple Intelligence Features and User Experience Enhancements

iOS 18.4 Adds My New Favorite Apple Intelligence Feature to the Ones I Use Daily

Apple Intelligence has gotten off to a rocky start, from misleading message summaries to delayed Siri improvements, but the AI tech is far from being a bust. In my day-to-day use, I'm using features that aren't as showy as Image Playground, but ones that help in small, significant ways. And the just-released iOS 18.4 added perhaps my favorite new feature, Prioritize Notifications, that gives attention to important alerts. If you have a compatible iPhone -- an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16E, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro (or their Plus and Max variants) -- I want to share six features that I'm turning to nearly every day. 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. On the other hand: Are you not impressed with Apple Intelligence or want to wait until the tools evolve more before using them? You can easily turn off Apple Intelligence entirely or use a smaller subset of features. iOS 18.4 adds a new smart notification feature that is subtle and, so far, helpful. When a notification arrives that seems like it could be more important than others, Prioritize Notifications pops it to the top of the notification list on the lock screen (with a colorful Apple Intelligence shimmer, of course). In my experience so far, those include weather alerts, texts from people I regularly communicate with and email messages that contain calls to action or impending deadlines. To enable it, go to Settings > Notifications > Prioritize Notifications and then turn the option on. You can also enable or disable priority alerts from individual apps from the same screen. You're relying on the AI algorithms to decide what gets elevated to a priority -- but it seems to be off to a good start. In an era with 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 as of iOS 18.1, but only on devices that support Apple Intelligence. 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. What did appear, as of iOS 18.2, was integration of ChatGPT, which you can now use as an alternate source of information. For some queries, if Siri doesn't have the answer right away, you're asked if you'd like to use ChatGPT instead. You don't need a ChatGPT account to take advantage of this (but if you do, you can sign in). Speaking of Siri, perhaps my favorite new feature is the ability to bring up the assistant without saying the words "Hey Siri" out loud. In my house, where I have HomePods and my family members use their own iPhones and iPads, I never know which device is going to answer my call (even though they're supposed to be smart enough to work it out). Plus, honestly, even after all this time I'm not always comfortable talking to my phone -- especially in public. It's annoying enough when people carry on phone conversations on speaker, I don't want to add to the hubbub by making Siri requests. Instead, I turn to a new feature called Tap to Siri. Double-tap the bottom edge of the screen on the iPhone or iPad to bring up the Siri search bar and the onscreen keyboard. On a Mac, go to System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and choose a key combination under Keyboard shortcut, such as Press Either Command Key Twice. Yes, this involves more typing work than just speaking conversationally, but I can enter more specific queries and not wonder if my robot friend is understanding what I'm saying. 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. Focus modes on the iPhone can be enormously helpful, such as turning on Do Not Disturb to insulate yourself from outside distractions. You can also create personalized Focus modes. For example, my Podcast Recording mode blocks outside notifications except from a handful of people during scheduled recording times. With Apple Intelligence enabled, a new Reduce Interruptions Focus mode is available. When active, it becomes a smarter filter for what gets past the wall holding back superfluous notifications. Even things that are not specified in your criteria for allowed notifications, such as specific people, might pop up. On my iPhone, for instance, that can include weather alerts or texts from my bank when a large purchase or funds transfer has occurred.

I've been testing iOS 18.4 -- try these 5 features first after you upgrade

iOS 18.4 is out of beta and available as a full release for anyone to download on their iPhone. Though at this point, the update seems to be getting more attention for what's not included than the features that actually are there. This update was expected to be the last significant one ahead of this summer's iOS 19 preview. As a result, we were looking for iOS 18.4 to deliver some promised Apple Intelligence features that had yet to materialize during the rollout of Apple's AI tools. Specifically, iOS 18.4 was supposed to bring new capabilities to Siri that made the assistant more aware of context and capable of interacting with apps on your phone. That's not happening, nor will it occur any time soon. Earlier this month, Apple confirmed that the Siri revamp would be delayed, with some people speculating that we may not see the features promised to us last year until 2026. "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year," an Apple spokesperson conceded in a statement to Daring Fireball. While Apple's AI struggles are certainly disappointing, it would be a shame if they were to overshadow the enhancements that Apple has included with iOS 18.4. While not as significant as a Siri overhaul, features included in iOS 18.4 do bring some new capabilities and quality-of-life improvements to the iPhone. Even better, with a couple noteworthy exceptions, the big changes aren't tied to Apple Intelligence. That means anyone with a compatible iPhone -- i.e., an iPhone XR, iPhone XS/XS Max or later -- can enjoy the benefits that iOS 18.4 delivers. I've been trying out iOS 18.4 across multiple iPhones since the initial betas came out. And I've found a few features that are definitely worth trying out if you're only now upgrading to the latest version of Apple's iPhone software. Let's start with an Apple Intelligence feature if only because this is one of the better instances of Apple's AI efforts. Visual Intelligence lets you use the camera on your iPhone as a search tool. You can point your iPhone camera at signs in another language to get a translation, or you can use it to capture times and dates of upcoming events you see on a flyer. And yes, you can turn to Apple Intelligence to look up information about what your camera captures similar to Google Lens. Previously, that functionality was limited to iPhone 16 models, largely because they came with a camera capture button that had been necessary for accessing Visual Intelligence. iOS 18.4 adds a shortcut to launch Visual Intelligence that you can tie to your phone's Action button, making the feature available to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Am I flagging this up because I have an iPhone 15 Pro on hand, and this immediately makes my own phone more useful? I will not pretend otherwise. But the occasional hiccup aside, Visual Intelligence performs well, and it's nice to see feature parity restored to all iPhones capable of support Apple Intelligence. An iOS 18.4 addition that everyone can enjoy -- and one that's probably my favorite new feature in the update -- is the arrival of ambient music in Apple's Control Center. If music playing in the background helps you concentrate on work or wind down before bed, you should definitely check this out. Just swipe down from the upper right right corner of your iPhone screen to access the Control Center, and then press and hold on the screen to edit it. If you tap Add a Control, you'll find four new ambient music options as you scroll through the list of various Control Center shortcuts. You can even add an ambient music control to your phone's lock screen for quicker access. If I have a criticism about the feature, it's that I wish there were a way to toggle between various ambient music modes like Productivity and Chill without having to dedicate different spots on the Control Center for those specific shortcuts. But still, as a person who needs music in the background to focus sometimes, I find the addition of ambient music to be a welcome one. Apple includes some minor changes in each iOS update that aren't exactly headline-grabbers, but still make the iPhone any easier device to use. iOS 18.4 includes a couple of these changes that are worth noting. When using Safari, you may notice that a list of your recent searches now appears when you open a new tab and tap the search bar. Maybe that doesn't bug you, but it's not the most secure way to go through life. The shipping version of iOS 18.4 adds a toggle in Settings to hide your recent Safari searches from anyone who happens to glance at your iPhone screen at an inopportune moment. The other minor change in iOS 18.4 that's caught my eye is the ability to pause app downloads rather than stopping them completely. That way, you don't lose any progress when you resume downloading app when your network connection is stronger or you're back on Wi-Fi -- or really whatever reason you have for mashing that pause button. Switch back to Apple Intelligence-specific improvements, iOS 18.4 sees the arrival of priority notifications. These are alerts that are deemed to be time-sensitive by the on-board AI within your phone, which then floats them to the top of your notification stack. Here's an example: My wife texted me in Messages about an upcoming dentist appointment. The priority notifications feature figures that's a more pressing concern than the goofy meme my daughter texted to me, so my wife's alert appears first, regardless of the order in which those texts were sent. When I was testing the iOS 18.4 beta, I didn't alway appreciate how another Apple Intelligence feature -- notification summaries -- would truncate the texts into an alert I couldn't easily parse. But as someone who's not always paying attention to messages as they come into my iPhone, I do like the fact that the most important ones will be displayed more prominently. To take advantage of priority notifications, you've got to go into the Notifications menu of the Settings and turn the feature on. If you've got a phone that supports Apple Intelligence, I suggest that you do, if only to see if the feature fits into your workflow. Apple Intelligence has been rolling out slowly to different parts of the world, debuting in the U.S. last October before arriving in the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand late last year. iOS 18.4 lets the EU join the part, and there support for more languages. Specifically, iOS 18.4 now supports simplified Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Localized English is also available in Singapore and India. If you speak those languages or live in those countries and have an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone, that's a big deal. And it's an even bigger deal with Apple, which has said that its new iPhones sell better in places where Apple Intelligence is available. Those aren't the only iOS 18.4 additions. Apple has added other things that I either haven't had a chance to try or that I'm a bit more dubious about. But I'll highlight them here in case they're capabilities that matter to you. I have not now nor ever been someone who cares about emojis, though I recognize that puts me in a very small minority. If you're someone who does find emojis to be the ultimate form of human expression, you've got eight new ones courtesy of iOS 18.4. Study them well, and use them as you will. On the Apple Intelligence front, the Image Playground app adds a third drawing style -- Sketch joins Animation and Illustration. That certainly starts to tackle one complaint I've had about Apple's image generation feature -- not enough styles. But my overall observation that images generated in Image Playground really don't have practical uses remains. One iOS 18.4 addition that I haven't tried but would like to centers around the addition of food-related content to the News Plus subscription service. Specifically, Apple is bringing recipes to its News app. Most of the "tens of thousands" of recipes Apple is introducing will be for News Plus subscribers, but a few will be available to everyone -- think of it as your free taste. I'm a bit of a foodie myself, and I'm always looking for new ideas of what to whip up for dinner. So that might just tempt me to part with the $12.99/month that Apple charges for News Plus. That service's growth beyond just a collection of magazine articles and news stories to include games and now recipes is one of the more interesting developments among Apple's various subscription packages.