After a long wait, the first set of Apple Intelligence features are finally here for compatible iPhones, iPads, and Macs. They are available via a free software update with the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1.
The Apple Intelligence personal intelligence system harnesses the power of Apple silicon to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and speed up everyday tasks. The first set of features are available today with more rolling out in the coming months.
Here’s what you can expect to see with Apple Intelligence. (Note: for Canadians who want to try the features out now, you will need to change your device and Siri language to U.S. English. Otherwise, the features will officially be in Canada next month).
Writing Tools
Deeply integrated across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, Writing Tools allow you to refine your language by rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing text everywhere you write, including Mail, Messages, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps.
With Rewrite, Apple Intelligence allows you to choose from different versions of what you have written, and adjust the tone, selecting professional, concise, or friendly, to suit the audience and task at hand. Proofread checks grammar, word choice, and sentence structure while also suggesting edits and giving explanations of the edits that you can review or accept. Select text and have it summarized in the form of a digestible paragraph, bulleted key points, a table, or a list.
More Natural and Conversational Siri
Siri becomes more natural, flexible, and deeply integrated into the system experience. It has a new design with a glowing light that wraps around the edge of the screen when active on iPhone, iPad, or CarPlay. On Mac, place Siri anywhere on the desktop to access it easily as you work. Type to Siri at any time on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and switch fluidly between text and voice as you use Siri to accelerate everyday tasks.
With richer language-understanding capabilities, Siri can still follow along when you stumble over words and can maintain context from one request to the next. In addition, with extensive product knowledge, Siri can now answer thousands of questions about the features and settings of Apple products. Learn everything from how to take a screen recording to how to easily share a Wi-Fi password.
More Intelligent Photos App
Natural language search in the Photos app lets you search for just about anything by simply describing what you are looking for, like “Maya skateboarding in a tie-dye shirt.” This works across videos, too, so you can search for something that happened in a specific segment of the video and go right to it. Search also offers smart completion suggestions to help you quickly complete a search.
The Clean Up tool, one of my favourite new tools having used in the beta phase for the past while, works like Google’s Magic Eraser, removing distracting elements from a photo, like a person walking by or leaves on the ground.
The Memories feature now gives you the ability to create movies by simply typing a description. Using language and image understanding, Apple Intelligence will pick out the best photos and videos based on your description, craft a storyline with chapters based on themes identified from the photos, and arrange them into a movie with its own narrative arc.
New Ways to Prioritize and Stay Focused
Priority Messages is a new section at the top of the inbox in Mail and it shows the most urgent e-mails, like a same-day invitation to lunch or a boarding pass. Across your inbox, you can see summaries without needing to open a message. For long threads, tap or click Summarize to view pertinent details. Additionally, Smart Reply provides suggestions for a quick response and will identify questions in an e-mail to ensure everything is answered.
Apple Intelligence helps you prioritize and stay in the moment with notification summaries that allow you to scan long or stacked notifications with key details right on the Lock Screen, such as when a group chat is particularly active. A new Focus, Reduce Interruptions, surfaces only the notifications that might need immediate attention.
In the Notes and Phone apps, you can now record, transcribe, and summarize audio. When a recording is initiated while on a call in the Phone app, participants are automatically notified. Once the call ends, Apple Intelligence generates a summary to help recall key points.
Features Coming Soon
New Apple Intelligence features will be available in December, with additional capabilities rolling out in the coming months. This includes Genmoji that can be personalized and created with a simple description; and Image Wand for turning rough sketches into images or creating images using context from the surrounding area (think a graph or table).
In December, Writing Tools will include the option for you to describe a specific change you want to apply to the text, like making a dinner party invite, reading like a poem, or adding more dynamic action words to a résumé. You will also have the option to access ChatGPT’s broad world knowledge within Writing Tools and Siri.
Also coming in December is a new visual intelligence experience that will build on Apple Intelligence and help you learn about objects and places instantly, thanks to the new Camera Control on the iPhone 16 lineup. You will be able to pull up details about a restaurant in front of you and interact with the information, like translating text from one language to another. This feature will be limited to the U.S. at initial launch.
Camera Control will also serve as a gateway to third-party tools with specific domain expertise, like when you want to search Google for where you can buy an item, or benefit from ChatGPT’s problem-solving skills. You are in control of when third-party tools are used and what information is shared.
In the months to come, Priority Notifications will surface what’s most important, and Siri will become even more capable, with the ability to draw on personal context to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to you. Siri will also gain onscreen awareness, as well as be able to take hundreds of new actions in and across Apple and third-party apps.
What About Privacy?
Apple Intelligence uses on-device processing, meaning that many of the models that power it run entirely on device. For requests that require more processing power, Private Cloud Compute extends the privacy and security of Apple devices into the cloud to unlock even more intelligence. When using Private Cloud Compute, your data is never stored or shared with Apple; it is used only to fulfill the request. Independent experts can inspect the code that runs on Apple silicon servers to continuously verify this privacy promise.
You can choose whether or not to enable the ChatGPT integration, which is available as part of using Siri, Writing Tools, or visual intelligence with Camera Control. You can access ChatGPT for free without creating an account, and privacy protections are built in: your IP addresses are obscured and OpenAI won’t store requests. For those who choose to connect their account, OpenAI’s data-use policies apply.
The first set of Apple Intelligence features is available now as a free software update with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, and can be accessed in most regions around the world when the device and Siri language are set to U.S. English. (As noted, if you update your device and Siri to U.S. English in Canada, you can try the features now).
Apple Intelligence is quickly adding support for more languages. In December, Apple Intelligence will be available for localized English in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K., and in April, a software update will deliver expanded language support, with more coming throughout the year. Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and other languages will be supported.
Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later, and Mac with M1 and later.