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When it comes to AI, Apple has some catching up to do, especially if it wants to impress with the new features coming to the iPhone 16 later this fall. As a result, all the talk heading into next week’s WWDC 2024 event will be about iOS 18’s AI features, which will be crucial in reinvigorating Apple’s mobile software and catching up with rivals.
Rumors so far have suggested that artificial intelligence will definitely be a key topic for Apple. This comes after the industry saw a surge in AI-enabled features in smartphones such as the Google Pixel 8 and the Samsung Galaxy S24. Apple cannot afford to sit back and do nothing any more, especially as many of these AI features in smartphones have proven to be useful and practical.
Google showed off some more impressive AI tools and features at Google I/O 2024 last month, but Apple isn’t going to let Android 15 win the AI war with iOS 18. Here’s a closer look at all of iOS 18’s biggest AI features expected to come with the latest iPhone software update.
Smarter Siri Actions
Naturally, many of the rumors surrounding iOS 18 center around Apple’s voice assistant, Siri. Leveraging large-scale language models (LLM) will make responses sound more natural and, more importantly, it is expected to enable Siri to handle more complex tasks.
Many of these tasks are expected to be part of iOS 18’s productivity focus, such as the ability to summarize long emails or messages, open specific documents, or move notes from one folder to another. Currently, these actions are primarily manual processes that require users to open specific apps to perform them, but iOS 18 is expected to streamline this process by having Siri perform them on your behalf with a voice command. Imagine how much time that could save.
AI-generated emojis
To add a bit of fun to your messages, iOS 18 is expected to bring AI-generated emojis that can be created with the help of generative AI. Although the iPhone keyboard has a rich catalogue of emojis, there are still times when you can’t find the one that best expresses how you feel.
These AI-generated emojis are said to be created using text-based prompts from users describing the emoji they’d like to create, and while this isn’t technically new (many third-party apps offer similar features via paid subscriptions), iOS 18 brings the feature natively.
Smart Reply
It remains to be seen if Apple is copying Samsung and Google here, but messaging in iOS 18 could introduce contextual quick reply options. Apparently, the AI will analyze the conversation within a message and provide users with appropriate reply options, again highlighting the time-saving properties of having AI on your phone.
While useful, I’m curious to see how iOS 18 generates these smart replies. When I tested Samsung’s version, the Galaxy AI Chat Assist, it was painfully obvious that someone else had written the reply.
Summary in Mobile Safari
Lengthy articles on web pages can sometimes require a concise summary, and in iOS 18, mobile Safari will provide AI-powered content summarization, highlighting the most important points of an article to help you read faster.
This AI-assisted summarization feature may already be familiar to you as the Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 do it in their respective summarization features.
Smarter notification summary
You’ve probably had the experience of having a ton of notifications on your iPhone that you haven’t seen yet, but iOS 18 could help a lot with this issue with a smarter summary feature.
Rather than being overwhelmed by the number of notifications piling up in iPhone’s Notification Center, this AI-assisted feature highlights only the most important notifications that deserve your attention, giving users the confidence and peace of mind that they won’t miss any important notifications.
AI Photo Editing
Ask anyone who’s used a Pixel 8 Pro or Galaxy S24 Ultra and they’ll likely tell you that the most impressive AI features are centered around photo editing, and Apple is definitely going to be investing heavily in AI photo editing features in iOS 18. It looks like they’re going to add features similar to Google’s Magic Editor.
This will allow anyone to quickly and easily edit snapshots from within the Photos app on iPhone. Not only will you be able to remove unwanted objects from your photos, but generative AI will aid the process in filling in the gaps. This will reportedly be called Clean Up, while another feature called Generative Playground will allow iPhone users to create custom images through the app extension.
Automatically generated playlists in Apple Music
Finding new music to listen to is a tough task in itself. AI is here to help you do just that by helping you easily find music that matches your tastes. With iOS 18, Apple Music is said to be adding auto-generated playlists. Why spend time searching for new tracks to listen to when you can let AI do it all for you? Naturally, the feature will aggregate these playlists according to your tastes.
Transcribe voice memos
And finally, another useful implementation of AI in iOS 18 is helping to transcribe voice memos recorded on the iPhone. As we’ve seen in other phones that use AI for voice recording, this could bring much-needed features like the ability to distinguish between multiple voices, summarize the entire recording, and intelligently format the summary with bold headings and bullet points.
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