Apple Intelligencerepresents the titular company’s first major push into the consumer AI market. Following in the footsteps of other industry titans, Apple promises that it’s suite ofgenerative tools and functionswill deliver on the promise of a more intelligent computing future.
iOS 18.1is set to launch soon, and with it, the first batch of Apple Intelligence features. Now, the company has seeded itsfirst beta release of iOS 18.2, which brings with it even more AI functions to play around with – namely, a suite of on-device image creation tools.
How to enter the Apple Intelligence waitlist in iOS 18.1
The first wave of Apple Intelligence features are rolling out alongside iOS 18.1 – here’s how to join the waitlist and try them out now.
iOS 18.2 brings more Apple Intelligence features to the iPhone
The beta release includes Genmoji, Visual Intelligence, and integration with ChatGPT
With this first beta release of Apple’s upcoming iOS 18.2 iPhone update, we’re able to get our first hands-on experience with some of Apple’s image creation-based AI features. Genmoji is one such feature, which generates any number of unique emoji designed based on your text prompts. For example, typing ‘a smiling dog blowing a whistle,’ should, in theory, generate precisely this imagery in an emoji-friendly format.
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The company’s Image Playground app is also included in the new beta, which allows you to generate fun and imaginative images on the fly, and do so on-device. The new Image Wand tool, meanwhile, allows you to circle an existing rough sketch and have it reimagined using AI. The former is available as a standalone app, while the latter can be found principally within the Notes app.
Apple’s default Mail app has also received a facelift in this beta release, now incorporating a ‘categories’ view. This breaks up your email inbox into the following groups: primary, transactions, updates, and promotions. The addition is a welcome one, though it’s nothing we haven’t seen before in third-party mail clients.
The long-awaitedChatGPTintegration forSiriis also on offer here, which is an opt-in feature that can tap into OpenAI’s impressive knowledge base when Siri simply can’t process a query. In fact, it’s now possible to bypass Siri entirely via voice prompts, by saying ‘ask ChatGPT’ at the beginning of your query. The option to log in with an OpenAI account is available, but it’s not required to use the built-in ChatGPT feature.
The long-awaited ChatGPT integration for Siri is also on offer here.
And, finally, we have Visual Intelligence, which is aniPhone 16series exclusive. This tool is similar toGoogle Lensin that it lets you point your camera at the real world and then surfaces contextually relevant results, and it works via the new iPhone’sCamera Control button. Visual Intelligence can be activated by long pressing on Camera Control, with the options to either perform an image search with Google, or to use ChatGPT to follow up with more information.
Notably, it appears that this first beta release of iOS 18.2 is available exclusively for the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPhone 16 series of handsets. This makes sense considering these are the only Apple Intelligence-compatible handsets currently on offer from Apple.
That being said, there are a couple of non-AI-based additions in iOS 18.2 beta 1 that are worth mentioning – the biggest user-facing change is the new centralized location within Settings to configure your default apps. Some of these options were already present in previous versions of the OS, while others, including default Messaging and Calling apps, are entirely new additions.
For residents of the European Union, iOS 18.2 beta 1 also introduces the ability to delete additional system apps, including the App Store, Camera, Photos, Messages, and Safari. This change is in response to theEU’s Digital Markets Act, in which Apple is legally compelled to make changes to how it operates its iOS platform. Thankfully, the aforementioned default apps screen addition is a worldwide feature and not EU-specific.
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How Apple Intelligence will stack up to its AI competition is still up in the air
The first batch of Apple Intelligence features are expected to hit the market alongside the public version of iOS 18.1, tipped for release early next week. iOS 18.2 will likely reach finalization sometime next month, bringing with it some of the aforementioned AI additionsfirst teased by Appleat its WWDC conference back in June.
It appears that the full roll-out of Apple Intelligence will be delivered over the course of several months.
It appears that the full roll-out of Apple Intelligence will be delivered over the course of several months, with some features perhaps not appearinguntil as late as March 2025. This is in contrast to other tech giants likeGoogle,Microsoft, andMeta, which have rapidly accelerated their AI portfolio in the past number of months.
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“We weren’t the first to do intelligence. But we’ve done it in a way that we think is the best for the customer,' says Apple CEO Tim Cook in a recentinterview with The Wall Street Journal.
Apple has placed astrong emphasis on user privacyover the past few years, which is arguably at odds with the data-hungry nature of artificial intelligence. It’s unclear how deeply the company’s ‘slow and steady wins the race’ approach will resonate with customers, but Pocket-lint will be following along closely.
As for the stable release of iOS 18.2, while nothing can be said for certain, I’d wager that the update will be finalized and pushed out to users sometime in December. A November release is also possible, albeit unlikely, as Apple will want to spend as much time beta testing these major new AI features as possible prior to a full release of the software.
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