iOS 18.1 will reportedly launch on October 28, and if you own an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16, that’s the date you can expect to get your hands on the first six Apple Intelligence features.
I’ve been using them all in the developer betas, and here are my personal experiences, and the AI features I think are most impressive …
What AI features are coming on October 28?
Assuming Mark Gurman is right about the date, then that’s the day those not on the betas will be able to try the first six Apple Intelligence features:
- A couple of the elements of the new Siri
- Writing Tools
- Notification Summaries
- Memory Creation in Photos
- Clean Up in Photos
- Intelligent Breakthrough with Notifications
What’s been my experience of each?
I should note that I can’t comment on the last of these: When my phone is in Do Not Disturb mode, then I don’t ever look at it at all.
But for the other five I’ll work up from the ones I’ve found least impressive to the ones which stand out.
Photo Memories
Prior to Apple Intelligence, the Photos app would generate memories rather randomly, in my experience. It was generally good at realising that travel was a solid bet, and would bring back happy memories of various trips, but some of its other suggests weren’t things I’d ever have gone looking for.
Additionally, its actual photo selections often seemed completely random. In particular, it seemed to have no ability to judge which were the best photos, not even using as crude a metric as favorited ones.
The big news in Apple Intelligence is you can now specify the memories you want. That’s great in principle, but in my experience it’s no better at all at judging which photos to pick.
For example, when I asked for ‘Winter memories’ I was hoping to see winter-themed photos. That is, snow, me and others bundled up in thick coats, and so on. Instead it just picked a bunch of random photos that were taken during the winter months.
Similarly, a request for ‘stunning shots from tall buildings’ just showed some very random ones, including shots of rather than from tall buildings.
So I for sure wouldn’t get excited about this.
The new Siri features
Don’t hold your breath here either: The all-new generative-AI-powered truly intelligent Siri won’t be arriving for quite some time yet.
The only two elements included in iOS 18.1 are the new visual interface (which is admittedly exceedingly pretty) and a greater tolerance for badly-formed queries.
For example, Siri can now cope with something as garbled as this:
What’s the current weather in Los Angel– Uh, no, what I actually mean is what’s the current time in Chicago?
I’d say that Siri is now able to cope perfectly well with the kind of real-life speech patterns used for queries, so gone are the days when we had to kind of mentally rehearse our question or command before we voiced it.
That’s great, and I’m impressed – but that’s as far as it goes. For the vast majority of queries, the results are exactly the same as they were before. Don’t expect to see fewer web results than before!
Notification summaries, and other summaries
Summaries fall into a very awkward category to categorize! They are mostly really impressive. Summaries of messages and emails are generally good at conveying the gist, and picking out the most important elements. Summaries of notifications likewise. As a technical achievement, it’s fantastic.
However – and this is a giant-sized however – they sometimes miss an important point, or get something important wrong. That means you can’t depend on them, and if you can’t depend on them, then unfortunately that renders them essentially useless. Because whether or not you read the summary, you’re going to then have to read the whole thing to check for errors and omissions.
As I say, I’m impressed, and fully expect this feature to continue to improve, but if you rely on it today, something is going to go crunch.
Clean Up in Photos
This is of course nowhere near Photoshop level, but nor would we expect that to be the case. This is a consumer-grade tool intended simply to remove distracting elements from snapshots.
As such, some challenges are simply too great. For example, my attempt to remove the boat from the right-hand side of the shot was, uh, not successful.
Removing the people from this shot was a valiant attempt, but left the shadow of one of the people on the right, and very noticeable artefacts on the left:
Here I asked it to remove the skyscraper behind. It did well with most of it, but didn’t manage the railing at the bottom right, and indeed then tried (badly) to continue it. But honestly, for a holiday snapshot, I don’t think this is terrible.
Removing the white junction box from the wall was somewhat better. There are artefacts for sure, but if you only saw the finished result, I’m not sure this would stand out.
Finally, removing the name and graphic from the wall took several passes, and I’ve left the very tip of the Wi-Fi-like symbol at the top to show that one more pass was needed, but this is a very decent result:
It wasn’t sophisticated enough to do the same for the reflection, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.
All in all, I think this is a very solid start, will only improve from here, but it’s already a useful feature in some cases.
Writing tools
I’ll mostly point you here to my previous piece on these, as my impressions haven’t changed any since then.
In short:
- Proof-reading is good, and definitely worth using
- Rewriting is impressive, and I can absolutely see uses for this
- Summaries are technically impressive, but not perfect
(I’ve addressed the summaries issue above.)
Wrap-up
An important note is that my experience has been of the developer betas, but it’s likely that the current one is close to that we can expect from the final release.
Don’t expect much from Photo Memories or Siri, and treat all summaries with caution – for sure don’t rely on them.
But I think you’ll likely find Photo Clean Up useful even in its current form, and the feedback Apple is capturing on this will likely see it improve very rapidly.
Writing tools are currently the standout feature for me, and that’s coming from someone you might expect to least welcome them!
If you too have been using the betas, do share your own experiences in the comments.
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