Of course, that’s not the only change set to be introduced by Apple’s next software update – which, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, is slated for release on September 28 and below, we’ve rounded up five of the new features.
Siri: Apple’s new-and-improved Siri assistant is more natural, more contextually relevant, and just generally a lot smarter than before. For questions it can’t answer on its own, it can hand the query off to ChatGPT (with your permission), and summoning Siri will trigger a rather pretty device-wide glow animation.
Writing Tools: Apple’s suite of AI-powered writing tools will help you proofread text, rewrite text in a chosen tone of voice, and quick reply to messages or emails.
Photo features: For the Photos app, Apple Intelligence introduces Clean Up, which lets you erase unwanted people and objects from an image; Memory Movie, which creates image slideshows based on written prompts; and natural language search.
Summaries: Apple Intelligence can provide summaries (i.e. easy-to-read digests) of emails, phone calls, audio recordings, and even notifications.
As for the Apple Intelligence features that won’t be arriving with iOS 18.1, Apple reportedly plans to launch Image Playground and Genmoji in future iOS updates. The former will allow users to create generative images in various iPhone apps like Messages or Notes, while the latter is essentially a custom emoji generator.
Unfortunately, not all Apple Intelligence features will be made available in iOS 18.1 and those that do will be limited to US English for now but many of Apple’s core AI functions are set to make their debuts in the coming weeks. We’ve highlighted some of them below.