Apple Intelligence: A Guide to Apple's New AI Platform and Features

If you’ve recently moved to a newer iPhone, you’ve likely seen Apple Intelligence appearing in your most-used apps like Messages, Mail, and Notes. Apple Intelligence (also shortened to AI) became part of Apple’s ecosystem in October 2024. It’s a permanent fixture as Apple competes with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to offer top-tier AI tools.

What is Apple Intelligence?

Apple’s marketing team has positioned Apple Intelligence as “AI for the rest of us.” The platform aims to build on the strengths of generative AI—such as creating text and images—to enhance existing features. Similar to platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Apple Intelligence was trained on extensive foundational models. These systems use deep learning to connect concepts across text, images, video, and music.

Its text-based capabilities, driven by a large language model, appear as Writing Tools. This feature is available across many Apple apps, including Mail, Messages, Pages, and Notifications. It can summarize long passages, proofread text, and even draft messages for you based on your specified content and tone.

Image generation has also been integrated, though not quite as smoothly. Users can ask Apple Intelligence to create custom emojis (Genmojis) in Apple’s distinctive style. Image Playground is a dedicated app that uses prompts to generate visuals for use in Messages, Keynote, or on social media.

Apple Intelligence also brings a much-anticipated upgrade to Siri. While Siri was a pioneer in smart assistants, it has seen little development in recent years. Now, Siri is woven more deeply into Apple’s operating systems. Instead of the familiar icon, a subtle glow will appear around your iPhone screen when Siri is active.

More importantly, the new Siri can work across different apps. For example, you can ask Siri to edit a photo and then place it directly into a text message—creating a seamless experience that was previously missing. With onscreen awareness, Siri understands the context of what you’re doing to provide more relevant responses.

Ahead of WWDC 2025, many anticipated an even more advanced version of Siri, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that.

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“As we’ve shared, we’re continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal,” explained Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi at WWDC 2025. “This work needed more time to meet our high-quality standards, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”

This forthcoming, more personalized version of Siri is designed to understand “personal context,” such as your relationships and communication habits. However, a Bloomberg report indicates that the current development version is too prone to errors for release, leading to the delay.

At WWDC 2025, Apple also introduced Visual Intelligence, a new feature that lets you search for objects within images as you browse. Additionally, a Live Translation feature was announced for real-time conversation translation in Messages, FaceTime, and Phone apps.

Visual Intelligence and Live Translation are expected to launch later in 2025 with the public release of iOS 26.

When was Apple Intelligence unveiled?

After months of speculation, Apple Intelligence was introduced at WWDC 2024. The announcement came amid a flood of AI news from rivals like Google and OpenAI, leading some to worry that the secretive tech giant had missed the boat on the latest trend.

Contrary to this speculation, Apple had a team working on what became a distinctly Apple approach to artificial intelligence. While the demos had the usual flair, Apple Intelligence is ultimately a practical and integrated take on the technology.

Apple Intelligence isn’t a standalone product. Instead, it’s designed to enhance existing features. Although it represents a clear branding effort, the underlying large language model (LLM) technology works behind the scenes. For most users, it will simply appear as new functionalities within familiar apps.

More details emerged during Apple’s iPhone 16 event in September 2024. Apple highlighted several AI-powered features coming to its devices, including Apple Watch translation, iPhone visual search, and enhancements to Siri. The initial wave of Apple Intelligence arrived in late October as part of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1.

The features launched first in U.S. English, followed by Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, South African, and U.K. English versions. Support for Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese is scheduled for 2025.

Who gets Apple Intelligence?

The first wave of Apple Intelligence arrived in October 2024 via updates to iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. These updates brought integrated writing tools, image cleanup, article summaries, and a typing mode for the revamped Siri. A second wave of features, including Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, Image Wand, and ChatGPT integration, came with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2.

These features are free to use, provided you have one of the following devices:

• All iPhone 16 models
• iPhone 15 Pro Max (A17 Pro)
• iPhone 15 Pro (A17 Pro)
• iPad Pro (M1 and later)
• iPad Air (M1 and later)
• iPad mini (A17 or later)
• MacBook Air (M1 and later)
• MacBook Pro (M1 and later)
• iMac (M1 and later)
• Mac mini (M1 and later)
• Mac Studio (M1 Max and later)
• Mac Pro (M2 Ultra)

Notably, only the Pro versions of the iPhone 15 are supported, due to the standard model’s chipset limitations. Presumably, the entire iPhone 16 line will be compatible with Apple Intelligence from the start.

How does Apple’s AI work without an internet connection?

When you ask GPT or Gemini a question, your query is sent to external servers for processing, which requires an internet connection. Apple, however, has taken a custom, small-model approach to training.

The main advantage is that many tasks become less resource-intensive and can be performed directly on your device. Instead of relying on the broad, generalized data used by platforms like GPT and Gemini, Apple has created specific, in-house datasets for tasks like composing an email.

This doesn’t apply to every query. More complex requests will use Apple’s new Private Cloud Compute service, which runs on Apple Silicon servers. Apple claims this offers the same privacy level as its devices. Whether a task runs locally or in the cloud is invisible to the user, unless the device is offline, in which case cloud-based requests will fail.

Apple Intelligence with third-party apps

There was much discussion about Apple’s partnership with OpenAI before Apple Intelligence launched. In practice, the deal is less about powering Apple Intelligence and more about offering an alternative for tasks it isn’t designed for—acknowledging the limits of a small-model system.

Apple Intelligence is free, as is access to ChatGPT’s basic features. Paid ChatGPT subscribers, however, will have access to premium features like unlimited queries.

The ChatGPT integration, launching with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2, serves two main purposes: supplementing Siri’s knowledge and expanding Writing Tools options.

With the service enabled, certain questions will prompt Siri to ask for permission to use ChatGPT. Examples include recipe and travel planning queries. Users can also directly tell Siri to “ask ChatGPT.”

Compose is another key ChatGPT feature within Apple Intelligence. Available in any app supporting Writing Tools, Compose lets users generate content from a prompt, joining existing tools like Style and Summary.

Apple has confirmed plans to partner with additional AI services, strongly hinting that Google Gemini is next in line.

Can developers build on Apple’s AI models?

At WWDC 2025, Apple announced the Foundation Models framework, which allows developers to access its AI models for offline use.

This opens the door for developers to build AI features into third-party apps that leverage Apple’s systems.

“For example, if you’re getting ready for an exam, an app like Kahoot can create a personalized quiz from your notes to make studying more engaging,” Federighi said at WWDC. “And because it happens using on-device models, this happens without cloud API costs […] We couldn’t be more excited about how developers can build on Apple Intelligence to deliver new experiences that are smart, available offline, and protect your privacy.”