IOS 18.1’s Biggest Features Coming Next Week
Apple placed a lot of emphasis on Apple Intelligence when it launched the iPhone 16 late last month. And yet, the iPhone maker’s first foray into artificial intelligence , exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro and later, has yet to materialize. According to reports from The Verge and the Wall Street Journal , that will change next week when iOS 18.1 is released to the general public. Based on the currently available iOS 18.1 beta , we already know what to expect from Apple’s debut AI offerings, so here’s a quick look at what’s coming to compatible iPhones in just a few days. Even if you don’t have an Apple Intelligence-compatible phone, it’s worth reading: There are some non-AI features, too.
Writing Tools
With writing tools, you can use AI to rewrite, proofread, and summarize text. These features help you create emails that sound more professional, correct grammatical errors, and make drafts more concise. You will also receive a bulleted list or table with the key points of your draft.
Updated Siri
Siri will get a new look in iOS 18.1, as well as the ability to accept written prompts. The digital assistant will also get a new language model that should improve natural language understanding, as well as the ability to send more complex queries to the cloud for more assistance. ( Apple promises it won’t store your data .) Lifehacker will also get some competition as Siri will be able to offer some technical support for certain Apple products.
Smart answer
Smart Reply will offer you contextual reply suggestions when you text or write an email. For many email users, this is nothing new: Gmail, for example, offers contextual replies based on the content of the original message. If you’re really pressed for time and want to respond quickly and move on, these replies can be useful, but for complex emails that don’t have easy answers, they’re probably not as useful.
Call transcription
iOS finally got call recording in iOS 18.1, and it looks a little more generous than expected. Even though it was originally announced only for the iPhone 15 Pro and newer, the latest iOS 18.1 beta showed it working on iPhone models starting with the XS. This is a bit surprising since it is supposed to use Apple Intelligence, which excludes iPhone 15 and older.
However, Call Recorder adds a button to the Phone app that notifies everyone involved that you’ve started recording, then saves the audio of your call for you and generates a transcript of your call. iPhone 15 Pro and later will also be able to summarize calls and transcribe them in real time thanks to voice recording in the Notes app.
Notification Summary
Notification summaries can be configured to group related notifications together and use artificial intelligence to quickly share key information about all of them at once. For example, you can get one notification for your electric bill, payment receipt, and payment confirmation, rather than having to scroll through each one individually.
Summary in mail and messages
As above, the Mail and Messages apps summarize long message threads to help you get to the bottom of things faster. One beta tester in particular went viral after learning how notification summaries were handled with text separation.
Photo updates
The Photos app is getting a number of AI-powered updates, including the ability to ” clean up ” photos by removing unwanted objects from them (similar to Google’s Magic Eraser ), search your photo library in natural language, and create a “memory memory.” movie”, inviting Apple Intelligence to create its own collage based on a description in natural language.
Intelligent Interrupt in Focus Mode
Apple Intelligence can display alerts it deems important even when you’re in Focus mode.
Non-AI features in iOS 18.1
Even if you don’t have an Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhone (again, iPhone 15 and older), iOS 18.1 still has a number of updates to look forward to. Aside from call recording, which looks like it’s coming to older phones despite the use of AI, there’s a new reset option for a fully customizable Control Center in case you’re not happy with the changes made, as well as custom tiles. for connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop and cellular data; the ability to drag and drop files when mirroring your iPhone to Mac; and greater access to your phone’s NFC chip for third-party apps, opening it up for use with transit cards or hotel room keys.
iPhone 16 models can also use the capacitive camera control button to quickly switch to selfie mode.
What’s not quite ready yet
iOS 18.1 is just Apple’s deep dive into artificial intelligence, so expect more features to arrive in the future. These include image-making features like Image Playground and Genmoji , ChatGPT integration, an even more contextual Siri, the ability for Siri to help you in third-party apps, and Visual Intelligence , which offers useful context about your surroundings just by taking a photo. about where you are.
Apple Intelligence will also be limited to US English at launch, and currentlyhas no official release schedule in the EU or mainland China .