What is Apple Intelligence, Apple’s very own take on AI?

Apple has been putting NPUs in its in-house A-series and M-series chipsets for a while now. But while rivals like Samsung launched their Galaxy AI, Apple was yet to actually bring usable AI applications to its devices. Until now that is. Enter, Apple Intelligence, the brand’s very own take on AI.

Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC 2024, and it brings smarter generative AI features to its devices – from iPhones and iPads to Macs and MacBooks. Here’s everything you need to know about Apple Intelligence and its features. Also read on to find out whether your device will support these new AI features.

What is Apple Intelligence?

Apple Intelligence is a term given to a suite of features that Apple incorporates into its devices. The suite includes several features, which will work on supported Apple iPhones, iPads, and Macs. A play on the term ‘artificial intelligence’, Apple Intelligence offers a unified solution to all kinds of generative AI features for supported products.

In other words, if you have a supported product, Apple Intelligence will bring in a system-wide suite of features that may replace the need to use individual generative AI applications like ChatGPT or Copilot.

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System-wide implementation allows Apple Intelligence to power a multitude of features across iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. These include new Siri capabilities, integrated writing tools, intelligent email categorisation, notification prioritisation, and much more.

Apple Intelligence features

Apple Intelligence brings a number of system-wide and app-specific features and is likely to have more features added in the future. Here’s a list of all the features that will be available this year, when your device gets Apple Intelligence.

Writing Tools

Users will be able to use generative AI-powered writing tools, allowing you to rewrite, proofread, and even summarise text across Apple’s own and third-party apps. This could be a text message in iMessage or WhatsApp, a note in Notes, or an email in the Mail or Gmail app.

Priority Messages and Smart Reply

For those who use the Mail app, Priority Messages is a new section at the top of your inbox, which will use AI to understand and show you the most important and urgent emails first. The feature will also summarise the email for you here, instead of just showing you the first few lines.

Smart Reply, meanwhile, will uses AI to understand the context of a message, and accordingly suggest automatically generated replies, that you can then send with a single tap.

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Priority Notifications

Just like your inbox, Apple Intelligence will also be able to understand your iPhone notifications and sort out the most important ones. These will then show on the top under a new Priority Notifications section.

Longer notifications, or stacks of multiple ones, will similarly be summarised. The feature will work with Focus Modes, where interruptions are reduced, and only important and relevant notifications make it through.

Image Playground and Image Wand

Apple Intelligence will also bring a number of image-creation features, including Image Playground that will allow you to create images using text prompts and suggestions. Created images will then be available to use anywhere across the platform, including in Messages.

iPad users with an Apple Pencil will get the Image Wand, which will allow them to turn rough sketches into images or select an empty space to create contextual images. The latter will be available in apps like Freeform, Keynote or Pages. The feature will also come to third-party apps that implement the new Image Playground API.

Recording, transcribing and summarisation

Inside the Notes and Phone apps, Apple Intelligence will bring several audio-related features, including the ability to record audio (a first for the Phone app) as well as transcribe and summarise it instantly.

Genmoji

You will soon be able to use Apple Intelligence to power Genmoji – generative AI-powered images created by you. You will be able to use Genmoji to create emojis of your friends and family, which can then be used in apps like Messages. The feature is similar to Memoji, but for emojis, and backed by generative AI.

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AI photo search, Clean Up and Memories

The Photos app will leverage Apple Intelligence to power advanced search features. These will allow you to look for photos or videos by simply entering terms like “Maya skateboarding in a tie-dye shirt,” or “Katie with stickers on her face.”

A new Clean Up tool, meanwhile, will let you select unwanted elements in an image and use AI to remove it without messing the subject up. Users will be able to create Memories in the Photos app – short movies made up of auto-selected photos and videos, which can then be clubbed with a storyline and even music from Apple Music.

New Siri features and ChatGPT integration

Apart from intelligent AI-powered tools around writing, audio and media, Apple Intelligence also includes a range of powerful features for Siri, which are implemented system-wide.

This includes advanced language understanding, the ability to remember context across requests, and a new text-based way of communication if you want to use Siri in a silent environment.

With the entire iPhone User Guide now baked into Siri, users will be able to ask how to execute certain iPhone features (like “how to schedule text messages”) and get step-by-step instructions on the same.

Contextual actions will also make tasks like adding an address to a contact card possible with one simple voice command. Users can also bring up articles from their Reading List, or send particular photos to a contact, all using Siri.

Most of these features will be possible entirely on-device ensuring none of your private data leaves the device. However, for more complex, resource-hungry features, Apple has introduced Private Cloud Compute. This is a network of secure, remote servers powered by Apple silicon, which are specifically built with privacy in mind.

With ChatGPT integration, Siri will get the power of GPT-4o, and capabilities like sharing your screen with the assistant for more context and relevant assistance.

ChatGPT assistance will also be free and will not require an OpenAI account. However, the feature will allow syncing with your Premium ChatGPT account for other paid features.

Which devices will support Apple Intelligence, and when?

Apple Intelligence features will be available on devices powered by the A17 Pro chipset, as well as all the M-series chipsets. This means the features will come to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, along with all the iPad, Mac, iMac and MacBook variants that are powered by the M-series chipsets.

The Apple Intelligence suite of features will come to supported devices in English US later this year, while other languages will be supported across next year.