Whether you like it or not, AI is the name of the smartphone game in 2024 and Apple has just well and truly joined the party. On Monday the company lifted the lid on iOS 18, the latest version of the software for the iPhone that leans heavily on artificial intelligence to bring new features designed to help you do more with smarter tech – but also to help Apple compete with rivals Samsung and Google after they announced big AI updates for their smartphones first.
Apple CEO Tim Cook described the new features as “profund new intelligence capabilities” before the company dubbed the AI as ‘Apple Intelligence’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’, and then called Apple Intelligence “the new personal intelligence that makes your most personal products even more useful and delightful”.
Compatible iPhone, iPad and Mac devices will be able to do new things such as prioritise your notifications, create images using AI of people and things in different styles within apps, and use an improved version of Siri to do more advanced tasks. An example used was asking your iphone to “Play the podcast that my wife sent the other day” – the device will know what to do thanks to knowing your ‘personal context’ – which it can work out by scanning data and information on your devices to perform tasks more accurately.
Apple concentrated on how private it claims these new AI smarts are. The company said many of the AI features work ‘on-device’, which means your data doesn’t have to be held in the cloud for all this to work. The catch? It’ll all only work on the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, as well as any M chip – that means it’ll only work across recent Macs and iPads, and not any made before 2020. The update will roll out for free in the autumn.
A fun new tool is Genmoji, which uses AI to let you create unique new emoji using text prompts (see below picture).
Many of the AI features will work in Apple apps and even access third party apps, including a function that helps you rewrite, proofread or summarise text. This is designed to help you rewrite an email, proofread an essay, or summarise a webpage – with many other options surely possible.
Siri has become the butt of many jokes as it’s not always been seen to be as clever as Apple hoped. The firm will hope the mockery is over as it announced many new ways Siri can help you out. Apple says the digital assistant is cleverer, and will be able to keep up with you being more conversational – meaning you can ask it several questions in a row and it’ll understand the context from your previous queries.
You can also finally type to Siri, like you can with Google Assistant and other rival digital assistants, so you don’t always have to speak out loud to it when it isn’t appropriate.
Siri will even gain the ability to do things inside apps where it hasn’t been able to before, which Apple demoed by finding specific photos, editing them, and then adding the results into a specific note in the Notes app.
Apple said Siri has a lot more understanding of your personal context thanks to new artificial intelligence upgrades. In a demo, Apple asked Siri when their mum’s flight was landing, and the iPhone supposedly can find the information from an email, and then cross-referenced it with live flight information from another source to give one answer displayed in a pop up on your screen. If it indeed works, Siri will hopefully prove a lot more useful and become less of a cultural punchline for ineffective tech.
Popular chatbot ChatGPT (specifically version 4o) is now integrated into Siri, and will be called on when needed. Apple showed a pop up asking your permission to use ChatGPT, highlighting how Apple wants to be clear when it’s using cloud services with its AI. ChatGPT will also be able to be used to create content, such as writing prose and generating images within apps.
Tons more changes were announced for popular Apple apps such as Notes, which can now include more imagery, and Photos, where you can remove unwanted people from the background of images like you can with Google’s Magic Eraser tool.
Before all this was announced, Apple spent several minutes at the start of its slick pre-recorded presentation going over lots of new visual changes that will come in iOS 18 later this year, including finally matching something you’ve been able to do on Android for years – you’ll be able to put apps anywhere on your home screen. You’ll also be able to change the colour – or ‘tint’ – of icons to give them a different look and feel that either matches your phone’s wallpaper or is a colour of your choice.
iPhone users will also be able to do new things such as hide apps in a hidden apps folder, use any emoji for Tapbacks in the Messages app (a.k.a. Emoji reactions), schedule messages to send later, and send iMessages and SMS by satellite on iPhone 14 and later. The update will come for free to iPhone XS and later but most models won’t get any of the new Apple Intelligence features as they will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro – and presumably the rumoured iPhone 16 series that is expected to launch in September when iOS 18 is likely to roll out too.