iOS 18 — all the new AI features coming to your iPhone
When it comes to AI, Apple needs to play catch up, especially if the company intends on impressing people with new features coming to its iPhone 16 later this fall. As a result, all the talk heading into next week’s WWDC 2024 event concerns iOS 18 AI features, which will be critical in reigniting Apple’s mobile software to keep pace with its rivals.
So far, the rumors indicate that artificial intelligence will most certainly be a key talking point for Apple. This comes after the industry saw a surge in AI-powered features on board phones like the Google Pixel 8 and Samsung Galaxy S24. Apple can’t afford to sit back any longer, especially since many of these AI features in phones have proven to be helpful and practical to use.
While Google showed off even more impressive AI tools and features during Google I/O 2024 last month, Apple can’t afford to let Android 15 win out the AI wars against iOS 18. We’ll break down all the biggest iOS 18 AI features that are expected to accompany the latest update to the iPhone’s software.
Smarter Siri actions
Not surprisingly, a lot of the rumors about iOS 18 pertain to Apple’s voice assistant. Siri’s expected to lean into large language models (LLM) to make it sound more natural with responses. More importantly, Siri is expected to handle more complex tasks as well.
Many of those tasks are believed to center around productivity in iOS 18, like the ability to summarize long emails and messages, open specific documents for you, and even move a note from one folder to another. Right now, those actions are mostly manual processes that require users to open up specific apps to carry things out, but Siri is expected to streamline the process with iOS 18 by just doing them for you through voice commands. Just imagine the amount of time you’ll save.
AI-generated emojis
Adding a bit of playful charm to messages, iOS 18 is tipped to offer AI-generated emojis that can be created with the help of generative AI. Even though there’s a healthy catalog of emoji to choose from with the iPhone keyboard, there are still times when you can’t find an emoji that best represents your feelings.
These AI-generated emojis are allegedly going to be created by using a text-based prompt where users describe the emoji they want to create. While this isn’t technically new — many third party apps offer a feature similar to this through paid subscriptions — iOS 18 would offer this capability natively.
Smart replies
Although it remains to be seen if Apple’s ripping off Samsung and Google here, messaging in iOS 18 could introduce contextual quick reply options. Obviously, AI would analyze the conversation in message to provide users with relevant responses to choose from, but this again highlights the time-saving qualities of having AI in phones.
While convenient, we’re curious to see how iOS 18 generates these smart replies — when testing Samsung’s version, Galaxy AI Chat Assist, it was painfully obvious that someone else wrote the response.
Summarizing in mobile Safari
Sometimes you just need a tl;dr summarization when it comes to those endless articles on a web page. iOS 18 is planning to offer such a function by tapping AI to summarize content in mobile Safari. That way, you’ll spend less time reading while being presented with the most important points about the article.
This AI-assisted summarizing feature may sound familiar already because the Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 do it with their respective summarizing features.
Smarter notification recaps
At one point or another, you’ve probably been inundated by a slew of notifications on your iPhone that you’ve yet to look over, but iOS 18 might help out in a big way with smarter recaps.
Rather than being overwhelmed by all of those notifications just chilling in the Notification Center on your iPhone, this AI-assisted feature would highlight only the most important notifications that deserve your attention. With this feature, users can feel more confident and relaxed that they didn’t overlook an important notification.
AI photo editing
Ask anyone who’s used the Pixel 8 Pro or Galaxy S24 Ultra, and they’ll probably tell you that the most impressive AI features center around photo editing. Apple’s undoubtedly going to be investing heavily in the AI photo editing features of iOS 18, since it appears set to be gaining a similar feature to Google’s Magic Editor.
This would allow anyone to quickly and easily edit their snapshots through the Photos app on iPhone. In addition to being able to remove unwanted objects in photographs, generative AI would aid in the process to fill in any gaps. It’s reportedly being called Clean Up, while another feature called Generative Playground would allow iPhone users to create custom images through an app extension.
Auto generated playlists in Apple Music
Finding new music to listen to can be exhausting all on its own, which is exactly where AI could lend a hand by making it easier to find music that’s tailored to your tastes. In iOS 18, Apple Music is tipped to gain auto generated playlists. Why spend the time fetching new tracks to listen to when you can have AI do it all for you? Naturally, this feature would aggregate these playlists according to your preference.
Transcribing voice memos
And finally, another useful implementation of AI in iOS 18 would be helping out to transcribe voice memos recorded by an iPhone. As we’ve seen in other phones that use AI for voice recordings, this could bring much-needed features like the ability to distinguish multiple voices, summarize the entire recording, and even intelligently format the summarization complete with bold headings and bullet points.
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