Apple Intelligence Brings a Better Siri and New Photo Tools to iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Apple’s diverse family of products is now smarter and more capable, thanks to the highly anticipated launch of Apple Intelligence. Available across compatible iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices, Apple Intelligence features an improved Siri, writing tools, and Clean Up. This AI-powered image editing tool removes distractions while preserving realism.

Apple first previewed Apple Intelligence at WWDC in June, promising to bring AI to Apple products smartly and securely. Although Apple Intelligence notably missed the launch of the iPhone 16 smartphones last month, including the standard iPhone 16 and the iPhone 16 Pro, its debut looks to fulfill many of Apple’s promises.

Arriving via iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, Apple Intelligence is a personal intelligence system that relies heavily upon Apple Silicon to perform on-device tasks, including taking action across apps, understanding text and images, utilizing secure personal data to help people manage calendars, and more.

“Apple Intelligence introduces a new era for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, delivering brand-new experiences and tools that will transform what our users can accomplish,” says Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Apple Intelligence builds on years of innovation in AI and machine learning to put Apple’s generative models at the core of our devices, giving our users a personal intelligence system that is easy to use — all while protecting their privacy. Apple Intelligence is generative AI in a way that only Apple can deliver, and we’re incredibly excited about its ability to enrich our users’ lives.”

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, explains that Apple Intelligence “unlocks exciting new capabilities that make your iPhone, iPad, and Mac even more helpful and useful…”

“And it’s all built on a foundation of privacy with on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, a groundbreaking new approach that extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud to protect users’ information. We are thrilled to bring the first set of Apple Intelligence features to users today, and this is just the beginning,” Federighi adds.

While not everything Apple has shown off arrives today, many of Apple Intelligence’s core features are available now.

Systemwide Writing Tools

Integrated across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools enable users to refine their words through AI-assisted rewriting, proofreading, and summarization functions. This works across nearly every place users write, including Mail, Messages, Notes, Pages, and numerous third-party apps.

Rewrite lets users choose between different versions of what they have written, selecting variants based on tone and the target audience. Proofread checks grammar, word choice, and sentence structure while suggesting edits, with explanations, that may improve delivery. Meanwhile, summary tools can condense a large chunk of text into a paragraph, bulleted list, table, or standard list.

A More Natural Siri

Apple’s longtime virtual assistant, Siri, has taken a lot of flak over the years for not being as helpful or natural as some competing AI assistants. Apple hopes to change that with the new Apple Intelligence-powered Siri.

Siri promises to be more natural, flexible, and better integrated across the entire system experience. Siri has a new, glowing design and is always available to users. Siri works across text and voice, and Apple says Siri is much better at understanding users through richer natural-language understanding. Siri is also able to help users understand the features and functions of their Apple device, which should help novice iPhone and Mac users get more from their products.

Photos Is Much More Intelligent

PetaPixel did a deep-dive on the redesigned Photos app earlier this year, which arrived with iOS 18 last month. While Photos has been much smarter since then, Apple Intelligence brings even more to the table.

With Apple Intelligence, users can search for specific photos and videos using natural language inside the app. For example, users can find pictures of a person wearing a particular outfit or doing a certain action. Within videos, users can even search for a specific scene or moment.

The new Memories feature empowers people to create movies by simply typing a description. With natural language understanding and complex analysis of a user’s images, Photos and Apple Intelligence craft a storyline and arrange a person’s content into a memory movie. It promises to be as easy as typing a short description.

Apple Intelligence also helps people improve their photos. Clean Up uses AI to quickly and easily remove distracting elements from an image. While some companies are using AI to craft all-new images — to varying success — Apple is taking a reality-based approach to AI. Apple Intelligence is built to improve a person’s real photos rather than synthesize fake memories or moments.

More to Come

While Apple Intelligence has some of this starting today, Apple is treating its new AI platform as a work in progress. To that end, some features shown off earlier this year, like Image Playground and ChatGPT integration, will arrive later this year.

One upcoming feature of particular interest to mobile photographers is visual intelligence. Leveraging the new Camera Control button in the iPhone 16 family, Apple Intelligence will be able to provide details about whatever the camera sees. When Apple showed this off earlier in the year, it noted that photographers could use it to help them scout locations for photoshoots.

Available Now

Apple Intelligence is now available as a free software update. It is only available in U.S. English, although additional language support will arrive in December, with more languages to follow next spring.

Due to its on-device processing and privacy features, Apple Intelligence is not compatible with all Apple devices. Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max. It works on all iPad tablets with an A17 Pro and M1 chip or newer, and all Mac computers with M1 and later.

Image credits: Apple