As Apple continues to work on the revamped version of Siri — which has reportedly been delayed till 2026 — it is integrating its assistant with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This now allows iPhone users to let Siri ask ChatGPT for assistance in certain tasks. Data is not shared with OpenAI if you use ChatGPT on your iPhone without an OpenAI account. You also have control over whether you want to enable ChatGPT’s integration with Siri on your phone or not.
Image Playground brings text-to-image AI generation to the iPhone. You can use it as a standalone app or as an in-built service in Messages and certain other apps. If you provide Image Playground with a photo of a friend or family member it can generate images of people that look like them as well.
In a similar vein is Genmoji which lets you generate unique emojis using textual prompts. This is one of the more fun additions to Apple Intelligence in my opinion. Genmoji can also create emojis that are inspired by a family member or friend, making conversations a lot more personal or just outright silly. Reacting to messages with custom-tailored emojis is sure to be a hoot in friend groups.
Apple showed off its upcoming AI features in September. | Video credit — Apple
Another major new feature in iOS 18.2 is Visual Intelligence. Visual Intelligence lets you take a picture of something or even a place and then ask AI about it. You can even copy, summarize or translate text in your photo which is very cool. With Visual Intelligence you can also search Google for something in a photo or ask ChatGPT about it.There are a number of other new features in iOS 18.2 as well including:
- Sharing AirTag locations with links
- Setting default apps
- Image Wand for the Notes app to generate images from your sketches
- Compose which lets you, you guessed it, compose text using ChatGPT
- Describing what changes you want in a text and letting AI make them
Apple is also expanding localized English support to the following countries:
- Canada
- UK
- Ireland
- Australia
- New Zealand
- South Africa
Most of the new additions to Apple Intelligence have been applied systemwide and even across some third party apps. This is excellent news and will finally make the iPhone 16 a much more exciting upgrade over the iPhone 15. Some of the AI features are, however, also making their way to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.According to the Apple Intelligence phases that we know of we should be seeing the complete rollout of Apple’s AI toolset in the first few months of 2025. That is if the new Siri is still slated for its original release date.
Some of the best phones of 2024 just got a lot better with Apple Intelligence and it’s only up from here.
