Apple has launched its Apple Intelligence platform in Australia. First announced in June, the company chose a staggered approach to rolling out its AI software which is now available on iPhones, iPads and Macs in the US, UK, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada.
Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later, and Mac with M1 and later.
The first set of the AI features include writing tools with which users can help by rewriting, proofreading, and summarising text in Mail, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps.
There’s also the new Describe Your Change option. Describe Your Change gives users more flexibility and control to make their writing sound more expressive, such as adding more dynamic action words to their resume or even rewriting a party invitation in the form of a poem.
Furthermore, users can remove distracting objects from images with Clean Up, and express themselves visually with Image Playground, creating emojis with Genmoji.
The Notes app meanwhile gets new tools too. With Image Wand, users can create images in their notes using the written or visual context already captured within the notes. Image Wand also transforms a rough sketch into a polished image by simply circling it.
In Photos, the Memories feature will enable users to create the movies they want to see by just typing a description. Using language and image understanding, Apple Intelligence will pick out the best photos and videos based on a user’s description, craft a storyline with chapters based on themes identified from the photos, and then arrange them into a movie with its own narrative arc.
In addition, natural language can also be used to search for specific photos, while search in videos gets more powerful with the ability to find specific moments in clips.
Users can describe what they are looking for, such as “Nathan skateboarding in a tie-dye shirt”. They can search for something that happened in a specific segment of a video and go right to it.
Search also offers smart completion suggestions to help users quickly complete a search.
Apple Intelligence will also give users the option to access ChatGPT’s broad world knowledge with access to its expertise as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities.
Users with an iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro can learn more about their surroundings with visual intelligence with Camera Control.
Visual intelligence summarises and copies text, translates text between languages, and detects phone numbers or email addresses. Camera Control also allows users to search Google so they can see where they can buy an item, or benefit from ChatGPT’s problem-solving skills to ask for an explanation about a complex diagram.
For those who need some AI assistance with their emails, Priority Messages is a new section that will appear at the top of the inbox in Mail and shows the most urgent emails. Across their inbox, users can see summaries without needing to open a message, and for long threads, they can tap or click Summarise to view pertinent details. Additionally, Smart Reply provides suggestions for a quick response and will identify questions in an email to ensure everything is answered.
The company said that in addition to the first wave of expanded language support available starting today, additional languages — including Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Vietnamese — will arrive over the next few months, with an initial set arriving in a software update in April.
