Apple Intelligence has made its grand entrance.
Apple showed off its major AI upgrade at WWDC 2024 and didn’t hold back on new features. We knew that Apple’s developer conference would be heavy on AI thanks to early rumors, but the number of updates coming to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia still took us by surprise.
These Apple Intelligence-powered changes will be available cross-platform, with a few exceptions, like Image Wand. However, most people will first interact with these features through their iPhone 15 Pro models.
iOS 18 doesn’t come out until this fall (developer betas arrive this month and public betas in July), but if you want a preview of what’s coming, keep reading!
1. Writing Tools
If you need someone to proofread or rewrite your email before you hit send, Apple’s new Writing Tools can be your new assistant. With AI, you adjust your email’s overall tone to be friendly, professional, or concise.
2. Smart Reply
Sometimes you don’t have time to craft a response to all the emails in your inbox. With Smart Reply, Apple Intelligence goes the extra step, looking for relevant questions in the email and then suggesting prompts to make your reply sound much more tailored.
3. Mail Summaries
Because creating summaries seems to be the best use case for generative AI, iOS 18 can create quick summaries of each email that’s visible in the Mail app’s main view. That means you don’t have to open an email to get to the most important parts of it.
4. Notification Prioritization
Much like the Mail summaries in iOS 18, Apple Intelligence can summarize and prioritize your iPhone’s notifications. This will be a lifesaver when it comes to rowdy group chats, so you can glean the crucial details from your lock screen instead of going through the entire chat log yourself.
5. Reduce Interruptions Focus Mode
Finally, we have a middle ground between Do Not Disturb’s on and off modes. With this new Focus Mode, Apple Intelligence can comb through your notifications and only push through the ones that might need immediate attention.
6. Genmojis
Everybody loves emojis and in iOS 18, now you can make custom ones. The so-called “Genmojis” can take a prompt and generate a unique emoji or generate one based an emoji based on a person’s contact picture.
7. Image Playground
Apple is fully embracing generative AI images with its Image Playground tool. You can punch in a few keywords — a theme, costume, or place — and Apple Intelligence generates a few options that can be further tweaked to match a sketch, illustration, or animation style.
8. Clean Up
Just like the Magic Eraser tool we saw in Google’s Pixel phones, iOS 18 will give iPhones the ability to remove unwanted objects in photos while leaving the important subjects untouched.
9. Natural Language Search
Nobody wants to waste time digging through their massive Photos library. Enter Apple Intelligence, which can search through it for you using natural language prompts. It could be something as specific as “Maya skateboarding in a tie-dye shirt,” or finding a particular moment in a video clip.
10. Create More Personalized Memories Videos
iOS’s Memories feature within Photos is great for surfacing important moments. Apple Intelligence will make them even more personal, combing through your media library to make a fun video edit with a storyline and unique chapters. All you have to do is give it a prompt and your iPhone will take care of rest.
11. Transcribe Audio
In both the Notes and Phone apps, your iPhone can transcribe, record, and generate summaries with iOS 18. Apple Intelligence can spit out all the key points of the notes you took during a long meeting, or even transcribe and summarize an important phone call. For the sake of transparency, everybody on the call gets notified when a recording starts.
