Such was Apple’s marketing for its new line of iPhones, you’d be forgiven for thinking them mere vessels for Apple intelligence. But did the reality live up to the hype? In the first of an occasional series, I’m exploring publicly available Apple Intelligence features, to see whether they deliver on their promises. First up: iOS 18.1’s features for writing, notifications, Photos and Siri.
Apple Intelligence writing tools
Improve your writing… sometimes.
Apple’s AI writing tools won’t pen your next novel, but they can refine your existing words. They’re accessed via the contextual menu that appears when you select text. You can then have Apple Intelligence proofread, rewrite or summarize what you’ve written.
Proofreading is akin to a supercharged spellcheck, to the degree I wonder why it isn’t rolled into that feature instead. Accuracy is reasonable (but not perfect), and you can confirm or revert each suggested change. The rewriting tools are hard to judge as a writer myself. I imagine they’d be useful if you struggle to write, or need to quickly transform a bullet-point list into paragraphs. For such tasks, this tool is fine, even if it does strip personality from your words and needlessly mess around with synonyms.
Summarizing broadly successfully condenses text into bullet points or key points, and the List option smartly transforms comma- or space-separated items into a bullet-point list. The text-to-table equivalent was, in my testing, far more hit and miss.
Broadly, there’s good stuff here, but use these tools with caution. Apple Intelligence doesn’t always find errors and sometimes adds mistakes of its own. If you use it to rework anything important, double-check the results before submitting your text, whether it’s for work or even just a message to a friend.
Apple Intelligence notifications and Mail features
In theory, Apple Intelligence deals with a deluge of notifications by summarizing them. But results vary from the useful to the surreal. Apple Intelligence has trouble with complexity. And it struggles with context and nuance, which can lead to bizarre notifications. In one case, it was inferred my house was under siege, with multiple people detected at my doorbell. This was Apple Intelligence attempting to summarize a day’s worth of doorbell alerts.
One of the more comical notifications summaries I received.
Mail summarization has similar issues. It’s designed to replace message list previews and works best when you expand those to three lines in Settings. But while I sometimes found it helpful to grasp the gist of emails, this feature wasn’t always better than a line or two of the actual message. In-email summarization was more effective, although again not always accurate.
I found the other new Mail features less impressive. Priority messages didn’t appear to exist. Smart replies did, appearing like pulsating autocorrect responses. But they’re truncated to the degree they need to be added to your message before you can read them in full – at which point you might not want them. In all, this aspect of Apple Intelligence feels very version 0.1 rather than 1.0. It’s OK for basic interactions, but unlikely to save you significant time, if you’re comfortable crafting your own email replies.
Apple Intelligence features in Photos: smart fixes and memories
Apple’s Clean Up is a new item in the Photos app Edit view. It highlights elements you might want to remove. You confirm with a tap, or can instead opt to paint out objects or draw a circle around them.
I found results varied wildly, depending on source material. When removing people from a photo on a beach, shadows remained. Elsewhere, removing people sitting next to a stack of chairs led to Apple Intelligence only considering very local context. So instead of replacing the people with sand, it added copies of stacked beach chairs. Similarly, attempts to remove cables obscuring buildings gave very messy and unwanted results.
Clean Up doesn’t always do a good job.
With simpler use cases, the results can be more impressive. Doubly so with higher-resolution photos and relatively clean – or organic – backgrounds. I removed shells from a sandcastle, and zoomed in to find Apple had fixed things in a manner I’d not have bettered in Photoshop.
Even so, it’s curious this tool took until 2024 to arrive, given that Photomator and TouchRetouch have had similar features for some time. That said, I’m happy Apple has limited AI to fixes rather than fictions – although how long will that last when Google and others let you add anything from your imagination to your photos via a simple prompt?
Another success is Memories, which can now be generated from text prompts. I tried one using “Sam the dog, playing” and received a movie with my dearly departed dog in the prime of his life. The result was imperfect, but Memories can be edited, and this was a great starting point. That, for me, is where AI works best: to enhance rather than replace creativity.
Siri and Apple Intelligence
Apple has said many changes are coming to Siri, but they are not here yet. In fact, the most obvious update is visual. Trigger Siri and you get a shimmering animation across your screen. Fortunately, that can be removed if you turn on Reduce Motion, whereupon you instead get a subtler and simpler colorful border that feels a lot more Apple.
Siri goes colorful.
From a usability standpoint, the new Siri has benefits. You can interact with your iPhone rather than Siri blocking access to apps until you’re done with it. Siri’s ability to parse natural language – including mistakes during prompts – is improved. And it has a better handle on what your iPhone can do, although too often merely serves up short excerpts from the iPhone user guide rather than letting you perform actions.
Apple Intelligence: where next?
This first wave of Apple Intelligence, while promising, raises questions about long-term impact. While features will undoubtedly benefit many users, their true significance remains uncertain. AI as a whole is ensconced in a bubble of hype and overpromising, and Apple is not immune to that. Also, it’s playing catch-up with rivals, and will have to work hard to iterate and innovate, addressing shortcomings, and providing tangible benefits to keep up with the pack. Even then, I do wonder if that will be enough, or whether a few years from now we’ll wish the entire tech industry, including Apple, had used its collective energies to fix more important things instead.