Apple recently announced that its latest artificial intelligence service, Apple Intelligence, has been officially launched on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and the first batch of features will be rolled out to users with the software updates of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Apple Intelligence leverages Apple's powerful silicon technology to provide language and image understanding capabilities, enable cross-app operation, and simplify daily tasks, while making significant progress in privacy protection.
Core features of Apple Intelligence include system-wide Writing Tools, which are integrated into iOS, iPadOS and macOS to help users optimize text, including Mail, Messages, Notes, Pages documents and third-party applications. Writing Tools can provide text rewriting, proofreading and summarizing, help users adjust the tone of text, and check grammar and wording.
Siri has also been upgraded with the launch of Apple Intelligence, making interactions more natural and smooth, and more deeply integrated with the system experience. Siri can now understand richer languages. Even if the user's expressions are not coherent, Siri can smoothly understand and continue to use contextual scenes for consecutive requests.
The Photos app has become even smarter, with a new natural language search feature that allows users to search content within photos and videos by describing text. In addition, the Clean Up tool in the Photos app allows users to remove unnecessary elements from photos while retaining the artistic conception of the photo. The recall function can select the most suitable photos and videos based on the user's description text and edit them into videos with complete narrative logic.
In terms of email management, Apple Intelligence allows users to proactively control their inboxes through the Priority Messages function, displays the most urgent emails, and provides email summaries to help users prioritize. Users can also record audio in the Notes and Phone apps, and have the audio transcribed into text and generated summaries.
Apple plans to launch more AI features in December, including a new upgrade of emojis, a picture park image generation tool, an Image Wand hand-drawn sketch conversion tool, and a Priority Notifications function. Siri's functions will also further evolve to provide exclusive intelligent services and have screen awareness capabilities to perform more in-app or cross-app operations.
The first batch of Apple Intelligence features are available as free software updates, currently supporting US English, and will add support for more countries and regions in the coming months, including Chinese, Indian English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, etc. Apple Intelligence now supports iPhone16, iPhone16Plus, iPhone16Pro, iPhone16Pro Max, iPhone15Pro, iPhone15Pro Max, as well as iPad and Mac devices equipped with A17Pro, M1 or subsequent chips.