Earlier this year during WWDC 2024, Apple announced its take on AI integration into its ecosystem dubbed Apple Intelligence. Last night, the tech giant confirmed that the features under the new AI umbrella will be rolling out in beta form in October to a limited number of devices.
Apple Intelligence will be available for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro series, the iPhone 15 Pro series, as well as iPads and Macs with the M1 chip and later. It will be released with a “beta” label as part of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. At first, it will only support U.S. English, but it will expand to localised English in several countries in December, while support for Chinese, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Singapore English will be coming next year.
The company claims that a lot of its AI features will run on-device, with cloud-based processing to only be done for larger models. Some of the Apple Intelligence features include a writing tool, new Memories and Clean Up feature in Photos, the ability to record and transcribe audio in the Notes and Phone apps, summarised notifications, automatically prioritise emails based on content, and more.
Long-time voice assistant Siri will be getting a major upgrade with a new design. It will be able to understand conversational context and switch between text and voice. It can even understand what you’re saying if you pause or stutter in the middle of a sentence. If Siri thinks that it can’t handle your query, it’ll pass the rein to ChatGPT; users will be able to access ChatGPT for free, while paying users of the service will be able to link their account.
Later in the year, Apple will roll out at least three new Apple Intelligence tools. This includes Image Playground, which is an AI image generator, Image Wand, which turns sketches into images, and the ability to create a custom emoji by typing or using a photo. As for this year’s major software upgrades, users will be able to update to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia starting 17 September.
(Source: Apple)
