Oliver Haslam on June 10, 2024, 9:13 pm

Apple Intelligence Announced: The AI For Rest Of Us

Apple’s WWDC event is now very much underway and the company showed off the iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia software updates that will be released later this year.

There are a ton of new features coming to all three platforms, but Apple Intelligence could be the biggest change to the way we use our devices yet.

Powering a number of new features including an upgraded Siri, Apple Intelligence will bring new capabilities to iPhone, iPad, and Mac across a suite of apps while also hooking into third-party apps that are downloaded from the App Store.

Apple announced the new Apple Intelligence features via the WWDC opening keynote before going into more detail via a press release that explained the new capabilities on offer. Those capabilities include a variety of features including creating and editing text and images.

Whether tidying up class notes, ensuring a blog post reads just right, or making sure an email is perfectly crafted, Writing Tools help users feel more confident in their writing. With Rewrite, Apple Intelligence allows users to choose from different versions of what they have written, adjusting the tone to suit the audience and task at hand. From finessing a cover letter, to adding humor and creativity to a party invitation, Rewrite helps deliver the right words to meet the occasion. Proofread checks grammar, word choice, and sentence structure while also suggesting edits — along with explanations of the edits — that users can review or quickly accept. With Summarize, users can select text and have it recapped in the form of a digestible paragraph, bulleted key points, a table, or a list.

Apple Intelligence will also allow people to greater Genmoji, new emojis built using generative AI commands on the fly. Those Genmojis can then be added to messages and shared as stickers, while they can also be sent as Tapbacks with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia.

There are other generative AI capabilities including the ability to remove things from photos, but it’s Siri that is getting the biggest upgrade. Users can ask Siri questions and then follow up with another one immediately, and the digital assistant will use the context from the original question to create a more conversational experience. Users can also type to Siri, too.

While Apple will run Apple Intelligence requests on-device as well as its own data centers, ChatGPT support is built in for those times when a user wants to get information from the wider world, including the internet.

Apple is integrating ChatGPT access into experiences within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, allowing users to access its expertise — as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities — without needing to jump between tools.

Siri can tap into ChatGPT’s expertise when helpful. Users are asked before any questions are sent to ChatGPT, along with any documents or photos, and Siri then presents the answer directly.

ChatGPT will also be available inside other apps, allowing people to use it to create text based on prompts where required. Apple says that the new system will be powered by GPT-4o while ChatGPT subscribers can sign in with their OpenAI account and make use of paid features, too.

Apple Intelligence is available for free and will be available in beta when iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia ship this fall so long as you’re using US English. Other languages are on the way, while you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or an iPad or Mac running M1 or later chips to use Apple Intelligence.