iOS 18 brings some AI Assistance to your iPhone – Apple Intelligence

Apple has played a massive game of AI Catch up today with the announcement of “Apple Intelligence” at WWDC 2024.  The announcement brings a range of AI capabilities to all Apple devices, including iPhone with the next generation of software.

Apple announced their push into the new generation of AI by first acknowledging they’ve been working with AI for years, but pointed to “recent developments in generative intelligence and Large Language Models” as a way to take Apple products to new heights.

Critically, Apple highlighted their use of Privacy across their platforms and that it was a core feature of their “Intelligence” model.

The best description of the difference between what Apple is doing and others are doing, was that instead of having “World Knowledge”, Apple Intelligence has “Personal Intelligence” – knowing you and what you do based on integration across Apple products and software.

Some of the most standard “AI” features we’ve seen from Samsung and Microsoft recently are part of Apple Intelligence – offering a rewrite function when you’re typing, proof reading for you or creating summaries of content.

There will be a range of suggestions when you need to reply to texts or emails, as well as a tweak of smarts in those replies like asking you if your partner is coming or you are getting an Uber to potentially change the context of your reply.

Additionally, your notifications will be summarised for you, so if you’ve been away from your phone – never fear – there will be a summary of that group chat for you!

These changes also power more of what Siri can do – and Siri gets a decent overhaul across iOS 18 and other new software platforms. Siri looks different, can be communicated with via text and most importantly retains context.  So you can ask about the weather at one location, then follow up to ask for a reminder to go there, without having to repeat the location.

Siri will improve further over the year ahead, with the ability to see what’s on your screen for its context.

Critically, Apple has also made a deal with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT directly into their software.  However, it’s again using a clear bridge for privacy – ensuring you are prompted to use ChatGPT when it thinks you might.

So if you ask a question or request of Siri, you will get a prompt to ask ChatGPT if that is the best way forward.

This also allows you to write content, use Image analysis and more using ChatGPT, for free, just within your Apple device.

Outside of these AI changes, there’s a few tweaks coming to iOS that all compatible iPhones will notice.

Firstly your app icons, you can arrange them almost anywhere on screen – leaving gaps on your Home Screen for your own ease of access, or to show the image on the wallpaper.

Plus, you can now add a theme colour, which will change the app icon colours to suit – something people have been doing with workarounds for a few years now.

For those who hand their phone over to people now and then, there’s now an APP LOCK function, allowing you to lock an app so it requires a FaceID unlock to use.  And, apps can be hidden from the device in a locked folder also.

In messages, Apple has added support for RCS – meaning your Android friends will get your tapback thumbs up, see you are typing and get higher quality images and videos.  Long, Long overdue.

For those using iMessage, there’s new text formatting features so you can BOLD or UNDERLINE as well as text effects.

Messages can now be sent and received via Satellite also.

The photos app gets a decent overhaul that will freak a few people out when it comes, but it’s basically Apple giving you more groups of photos like Today, or events and places.  But the ability to hide things like screenshots or receipts to make it more like a “Photo library” than a storage place for images:)

Developer Beta launches today, with a Public Beta in the months ahead before full scale availability in September.  Many of the AI features will roll out slowly over the next year.

The most advanced “Apple Intelligence” features will require an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, along with any of the macs on Apple Silicon.

Trevor Long travelled to Cupertino as a guest of Apple