When is Apple Intelligence coming to Australia? Soon!

Apple is taking a very strategic approach to it’s rollout of AI on their devices. Having announced and showcased the features of what they call “Apple Intelligence” in June at their Worldwide Developers Conference it’s roll out is only just commencing, but Australia will have to wait just a little bit longer.

Apple Intelligence has been in testing for users on the “Beta” version of iOS18 for some time, and it’s starting to graduate to the A team.

iOS 18.1 will roll out in the next week as October comes to an end. That update will include some parts of Apple Intelligence, but only for devices with English (US) as their device language – that’s not you if you’re in Australia.

Now it is possible to change that, and sign up to enable Apple Intelligence, but honestly, the impact on your device (little things like Siri, the Units and Measures, some apps change) isn’t worth it.

That version of iOS has some fundamental elements of Apple Intelligence:

• Writing tools, allowing you to get a rewrite of your message or text, get a summary of a document.
• Siri gets a bit smarter, and able to maintain context request after request and know more about your apps – plus, Siri LOOKS cool, with a glow around the screen.
• In Photos you can do a cleanup which other manufacturers have had for a while
• Notification summaries are amazing, giving you simple contextual summaries of multiple messages or long messages.
• In Mail the same summaries happen for your emails rather than just seeing the first few lines of a messages
• Messages too has summaries in the message list
• And phone calls can be summarised with transcripts.

Apple has commenced testing of iOS18.2 for developers only, and that update expands the availability of Apple Intelligence to Australian English devices. This is the update iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 users will be waiting for.

We would anticipate that iOS 18.2 going into public Beta in a month or so, but we know it will roll out to the public in December.

Apple has committed to “December” as the timeframe for Apple Intelligence for Australia for the get-go.

iOS18.2 adds a few more features over and above 18.1 and over and above the additional language support.

• Writing tools allows you to describe the change you want made to your text.
• Genmoji’s are available so you can describe an emoji and it will be created for you to send (as a sticker, won’t go as an Emoji)
• Image Playground – a cool way for you to simply describe an image and have it created for you
• And ChatGPT – the integration mooted at WWDC comes to life.

So the simple fact is, Apple Intelligence is coming to Australia when iOS 18.2 is available in December.

Given we have the EFTM App to update and support, I’ve been testing this already, and I’ve said several times this is the greatest implementation of AI into a phone yet.

It’s not just a list of things your phone can do – it’s things your phone just does for you (Summaries, priorities etc).

But, regular iPhone users have another couple of months before you see Apple Intelligence on your phone!