Apple Intelligence is finally in the hands of beta testers as of the launch of iOS 18.1. But while the new iOS 18 dev beta allows access to several new abilities for your iPhone, it’s still limited.
One of the biggest additions bundled with Apple Intelligence is Siri 2.0, or at least part of it. The revamped digital assistant now has a new glowy UI and a better understanding of user speech and context.
What’s missing however is support for “personal context,” which allows Siri to access your information on the iPhone to provide more tailored responses. Fortunately, this component will be available before the end of the year, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
Outside of Siri, the Apple Intelligence beta edition contains a few other highlights. There are handy new writing tools like tone/grammar suggestions, text summaries and audio transcription, natural language image searching in the Photos app, and the ability to turn a selection of your images and video clips into a montage with Memory Movie.
It'll only get smarter
There's plenty more that Apple showed off at WWDC 2024 for Apple Intelligence that we've yet to see. For instance, Siri should in theory be able to conduct in-app actions for you, and be able to read your screen to answer questions about it.
Beyond Siri, there's no sign of the Image Playground or Genmoji image generation tools, Priority Notifications, or the Clean Up feature for fixing up images in Photos. There's also no ChatGPT integration yet either, for when Apple Intelligence recognizes the limits of its abilities and instead directs you to use OpenAI's product instead.
Apple isn't saying for certain when these features will arrive. But it seems like even if we get some within the next few months, we won't have everything Apple's promised until next year.
The official launch of Apple Intelligence is coming in October, although at this point it will still be limited only to devices set to US English, and apparently lack many of the features described above. Only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as M-series-powered iPads and Macs, are confirmed as compatible so far, but we'd imagine all iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models will be able to use Apple Intelligence to its full potential, and give Samsung's Galaxy AI and Google's Gemini a run for their money.
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