This roundup lists all the Apple Intelligence features available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac and how they can be useful in everyday life.
Apple Intelligence, the most prominent new feature in iOS 18, has become a focal point of Apple’s messaging. From the latest iPhones and Macs to the new iPad mini and iPhone 16e, “Built for Apple Intelligence” or “Hello, Apple Intelligence” are plastered across Apple’s product pages.
Setting up Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, any model from the iPhone 16 family, or a Mac or iPad powered by the M1 chip or later. Follow along with our guide to learn about what each Apple Intelligence feature does. And if your iPhone isn’t compatible with Apple Intelligence, you can replicate most Apple Intelligence features using third-party apps and services.
Notification Summaries
Notifications summarized by Apple Intelligence are among the first things you’ll notice after enabling Apple Intelligence. The feature displays an AI-generated overview for each app, with the text in the notification banner summarized.
This can be useful in certain situations (until they produce unwanted results), but you still must tap the summary to show full details. If you don’t find this feature useful, you can turn off AI notification summaries for all or select apps.
Writing Tools anywhere there’s text
The Writing Tools make it easy to rewrite messages, notes, emails, and more in friendly, professional, and concise styles. Among other things, the Writing Tools check your grammar and misspellings to proofread any text. And with ChatGPT built into the Writing Tools, you can compose text from scratch using a simple prompt.
Clean Up in the Photos app
Clean Up is a feature of the built-in Photos app that lets you remove unwanted objects from pictures. If random folks just photobombed your otherwise perfect beach photo, this tool can remove them and seamlessly replace the background. Just open the image in the Photos app, touch the edit icon, select the Clean Up tool, and move your finger over any object you wish to remove.
Memory Movie in the Photos app
Memory Movie in the built-in Photos app lets you create animated slideshows comprising your photos and videos by using simple written or spoken commands such as “Ellie celebrating birthday with cake and balloons.” Apple Intelligence automatically gathers matching pictures and videos from your library, turning them into a slideshow you can save as a video or share on social media.
Improved search in the Photos app
The Photos app was already smart to an extent before Apple Intelligence in the sense that it could understand what’s on images. For instance, typing pizza would show all matching pictures. Apple Intelligence improves Photos search with natural language understanding. You can type queries like “Sebastien playing football” or “Chris in a red T-shirt and blue jeans” to get relevant results from your camera roll.
Reduce Interruptions Focus mode
Reduce Interruptions is a new Focus mode on iPhone, iPad, and Mac powered by Apple Intelligence. It cuts down on useless notifications, as the system prioritizes alerts that it deems important while silencing the others.
Reduce Interruptions is great for those times when you don’t feel like personalizing the Focus feature. Instead of manually allowing certain people and apps, Reduce Interruptions outsources this work to Apple Intelligence.
Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing in Focus modes
The core feature of the Reduce Interruptions Focus is actually available across all Focus modes. When customizing a Focus like Work, Sleep, Driving, or Do Not Disturb, you can turn on the Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing switch to benefit from the same smart delivery features as the dedicated Reduce Interruptions mode.
Priority notifications and emails
Apple Intelligence can identify urgent messages, important emails, and crucial notifications and highlight them in a Priority Notifications box at the top of the Lock Screen or inbox in the Mail app. This is to ensure important alerts get your attention.
Smart replies in the Messages and Mail apps
When you receive a text or an email message, Apple Intelligence may suggest replies above the onscreen keyboard. You can tap an appropriate suggestion to quickly respond to the message instead of manually typing out your reply.
Summaries in the Messages, Mail, and Safari
If you receive an excruciatingly long email or a lengthy message or don’t have the time to read a web article in Safari, the Summarize feature can condense it into a few sentences. These summaries only include the gist, saving your time.
Improvements to Siri
The Siri assistant gets a new edge glow animation on the iPhone and iPad. You can also double-tap the bottom edge of the screen to invoke an improved type to Siri interface.
Siri will finally understand you, even if you stumble over words or change your voice command mid-sentence. It also handles follow-up questions better than before.
For example, you can ask about the weather in Paris and then follow up with another question like, “What about Normandy?” Siri will maintain the context and understand you’re inquiring about the weather forecast for Normandy even though you haven’t mentioned the word “weather” in the follow-up request.
AI image creation with Image Playground
iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 bring a dedicated AI image creation app called Image Playground. With it, you can create cartoonish images based on short descriptions and suggestions. You can swipe through different styles or pick one of the themes, costumes, accessories, or places to customize further. Image Playground also powers the Image Wand feature in the Notes app.
AI sketches with Image Wand
Image Wand lets you generate AI images based on surrounding text or rough sketches you make with your finger or Apple Pencil. If you are working on a college report dealing with places of worship, draw a church or temple, and Image Wand will turn it into a much nicer sketch, illustration, or animation.
Image Wand is like Image Playground but exclusive to the Notes app.
AI emoji with Genmoji
Genmoji is Apple’s AI emoji creation tool for generating custom emoji characters based on descriptions or images of people. For instance, Genmoji can create a cartoonish image of your friend eating pizza.
To use Genmoji, open a conversation in the Messages app, hit the emoji key on the onscreen keyboard, and then touch the Genmoji button. Describe your Genmoji, and Apple Intelligence will go to work and create it for you. If the prompt involves people, you’ll be asked to select a person from the Photos app. With your genmoji created, tap the three-dotted icon to save it as a sticker for use in the Messages app and elsewhere.
Call and voice memo transcription and summarization
You can record calls on all iPhones running iOS 18, as well as record audio in the Voice Memos and Notes apps.
However, if your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, you can also summarize transcriptions of your voice memos and recorded calls to get you up to speed without having to listen to the whole thing.
Visual intelligence is like Google Lens
The visual intelligence feature taps into ChatGPT or Google Lens to provide information about objects around. Just point the camera at a retail store, and the feature will show opening hours, ratings, price ranges, and other information. It can also read and summarize text and provide quick actions based on detected phone numbers, emails, and addresses.
Visual intelligence is available on the iPhone 16 family with iOS 18.3 by long-pressing the Camera Control capture button. The upcoming release of iOS 18.4 (currently in beta) in April will bring visual intelligence to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max with the ability to:
- Bind the feature to the Action button
- Invoke it via a dedicated Control Center button
- Assign visual intelligence as a quick-launch Lock Screen shortcut in place of the Camera or Flashlight icon, or
- Set it as a double or triple-tap Back Tap gesture
ChatGPT integration in Siri and Writing Tools
If Siri is unable to resolve a complicated query, the assistant will ask your permission to offload the request to ChatGPT and show you the results.
OpenAI does not use your Siri request to train its AI. You can also log in with your ChatGPT account to use paid features within Siri.
ChatGPT is also integrated into Writing Tools so you can use it to compose emails, messages, and other text from scratch.
What Apple Intelligence features are particularly helpful? For me, Clean Up and Smart Replies are the ones I use frequently. How about you?