First Look at iPhone AI – Apple Intelligence

By: Nick Gambino

iPhone users who have access to the iOS 18.1 developers beta can start using the newly built Apple Intelligence – the company’s version of AI.

This is the newest in an AI wave that has swept the tech world in the last year. Unsurprisingly, Apple jumped into the murky waters, developing their very own AI platform which they announced at their annual WWDC.

At the conference they teased us with a plethora of features, many of which seem like they’re not going to be available when Apple Intelligence is released to the public later this year.

This is a problem, considering Apple is pushing AI as a reason to upgrade to the iPhone 16. Finding a way to give buyers a push to move on to the next iteration of their smartphone is something they’ve struggled with in recent years.

The features currently available in iOS 18.1 are limited but include a boost to Siri’s abilities. The resident digital assistant gets a facelift with the edges of the iPhone glowing bright whenever Siri is in play. She’s also getting some work under the hood and will understand requests better, even if you stumble over your words.

There are built-in writing tools that will help you create texts and other writings based on simple prompts. This is a big feature that many who hate drafting memos and such will find helpful.

Additional Apple Intelligence features include the ability to access AI summaries of emails and messages, more accurate searching of photos and much-improved automatic video creation.

The AI features we won’t be seeing at iOS 18 launch in the fall but were unveiled at WWDC include the ability to generate your very own images and emojis by plugging in prompts, auto photo edits and cleanups and ChatGPT integration. There are other Siri improvements we’re supposed to see as well.

Again, this is all in beta for now so we’re gleaning a lot of information from that. We’ll see what’s officially included in iOS 18 when it launches in the coming months.