AI Is Coming to Your iPhone. Here Are All the New Features Apple Just Announced.

AI, or artificial intelligence, has been promising to change the way you use technology, and now Apple is getting on board. The company plans to differentiate its AI tools, which it calls Apple Intelligence (get it?), by making them available across your Apple devices. And they might actually be useful. We’re on the ground at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, to see what’s in store for the iPhone when iOS 18 rolls out publicly this fall. Here’s everything you need to know.

The most exciting features coming to iOS 18 :

Siri is getting a useful AI boost. Siri will have a new visual look, shimmering at the edges of the iPhone screen, and it promises to (finally) get better at understanding you when you hem and haw or correct yourself. You’ll also be able to type to Siri, instead of using only voice commands. Apple says that Siri will better understand context too, so you can ask it to find some information and then ask follow-up questions.

The most exciting Siri improvements aren’t coming until later in the year. Apple says that Siri will have awareness of what’s on your screen to gain better context for your queries, and it will take actions within apps as well. Siri has been maligned for not understanding queries or providing useless answers, and it has never quite caught on the same way as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. We’ll have to see if Apple can improve Siri’s reputation with this AI assist.

ChatGPT is coming to your iPhone. Apple is collaborating with OpenAI, and soon you’ll be able to ask ChatGPT questions, receive answers, and have ChatGPT generate text for you, just as you would if you were using it directly—but you won’t have to create an account. Apple says that anything you send to ChatGPT won’t be stored and that iOS will always ask your permission before engaging with ChatGPT.

AI can rewrite, proofread, and summarize text everywhere, from emails to notes. Anywhere you can enter text, you can call on Apple’s AI to complete what you’re saying, fix grammar mistakes, and even change the tone of what you’re writing.

You can (finally) remove unwanted people or objects from photos. Apple’s photo-editing tools are getting new abilities, such as a photo cleanup tool that removes people or objects from pictures. Google and Samsung already offer similar tools for Android phones.

You can generate your own emoji with AI. If you’re tired of the same old set of Unicode emoji, Apple is offering generative AI as the answer. In iOS 18, you can use AI to generate unique emoji for any occasion. The company is calling them Genmoji, and we expect that they’ll be a big hit. A new Image Playground tool lets you create different kinds of AI-generated images across the operating system.

But the new AI features aren’t the only things coming in iOS 18. Apple also announced new customization tools that let you fully personalize your iPhone, new messaging options, and a whole lot more.

You can fully customize your home screen. iOS 18 comes with customization features that are unprecedented for the iPhone. Soon you’ll be able to give app icons custom colors for fun or for organization, and you’ll be able to place icons anywhere on the screen, not just on the traditional grid. An enhanced Dark Mode will also adjust the colors of app icons. AI might grab all the attention, but iOS will never look the same thanks to these features.

Apple is releasing a Passwords app. Apple has long stored and synced passwords, passkeys, TOTP codes, and other authentication information in Keychain, but getting to those features has always been a hassle. With the Passwords app, Apple is bringing these excellent features to the forefront and hopefully easing their adoption. The Passwords app is coming to iOS, iPad, Mac, and the Vision Pro, as well as Windows. We’ll have to see how it stacks up against our favorite password managers.

Recordings and transcripts are coming to the Notes and Phone apps. The Notes app will now allow you to make audio recordings, create transcripts, and generate summaries of recordings. The Phone app will be able to do that as well, but it will warn participants that the call is being recorded.

Messages is getting a ton of new features. iOS 18 will let you send tapbacks with any emoji, instead of the default “ha ha” and heart you’ve been limited to previously. You can also animate text with new effects and bold or strike through text to emphasize what you’re saying. You’ll also be able to schedule texts to send later in Messages.

And Apple’s long-promised support for RCS, or Rich Communication Service, is coming, which means your texts with green-bubbled Android users won’t be so terrible anymore. Images and videos sent between iPhone and Android will be higher-resolution. RCS also supports read receipts and typing indicators.

In addition, Apple is extending satellite support from phone calls to text messages, which will allow you to send messages even when you don’t have cell service.

You can mirror your iPhone on your Mac. Summon a windowed version of your iPhone on your Mac and interact with it just as you would if it were in your hand. You’ll be able to drag and drop to it, as well as type on it with your computer’s keyboard. iPhone notifications can also appear on your Mac, and you can interact with them using iPhone mirroring. When your iPhone is mirrored, it remains securely locked, keeping your interactions private.

You can lock or hide apps. Never worry about handing your phone to someone again. iOS 18 lets you require additional authentication for specific apps. This feature is perfect for guarding finance apps or anything else you’d rather that others not see. Information from those apps won’t appear throughout iOS or in search. You can also hide apps fully.

Apple is taking AI beyond the iPhone. The Apple Intelligence features that Apple debuted today are also coming to Macs in macOS Sequoia and to iPads with iPadOS 18 this fall.

What about privacy? :

Apple has positioned itself as a privacy-first company for several years, which is at odds with how some AI systems work. Complex queries sometimes need to be processed on a server, which raises questions about how much companies can see, what information they retain, and whether what you send might end up as part of the AI’s training data. The personalized context that Apple is touting as its AI’s defining feature is, basically, all the information on your iPhone—and it might be unnerving for you to see that information used in novel ways.

Apple is attempting to address these concerns by stressing that many of the AI features in iOS 18 are carried out on the device and don’t send any data to Apple. However, that’s true only for some AI functions. Apple says that it will still need to send data to its servers for processing, but it has outlined safeguards intended to keep that information secure. The company says that your data isn’t available to Apple and is only used to carry out the specific request. The company also stresses that the servers were built by Apple, and that there are some transparency tools to validate these claims. We’re curious to see what security researchers and privacy advocates make of Apple’s approach.

The rollout of AI products from other big tech companies hasn’t gone smoothly. Microsoft’s Recall feature, part of its Copilot AI assistant and baked into new Copilot+ PCs, was roundly criticized for gathering huge amounts of personal information and not securing that data adequately. Microsoft announced major changes to the feature as a result. Google’s generative-AI search responses, meanwhile, were criticized for inaccuracies when they rolled out widely in May.

There’s also concern about the ethics of generative-AI systems overall. These tools use enormous amounts of electrical power, and the companies behind some have been accused of copyright infringement. Apple will have to square these urgent concerns against its desire to be seen as a competitive force in AI.

AI tools are not available yet :

Apple is releasing its developer betas of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS on June 10, with public betas, including a public beta version of iOS 18, available for anyone to try in July. Apple Intelligence features will be available in beta this fall in the US. We’ll be trying everything out to get a feel for these new features, but we don’t recommend that readers do the same—beta software can have unforeseen bugs that can cause serious problems for your device.

Note that not every Apple device will be able to take advantage of the new AI features: Only the iPhone 15 Pro, the Pro Max, and M-series Macs (and presumably any iPhones released later this year) will be able to opt in to using Apple’s new AI tools.

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