10 Small But Useful AI Features In macOS Golden Gate

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at ten small AI features that are new in macOS Golden Gate.

So there are a lot of big new features that involve AI in macOS Golden Gate. For instance you can create Shortcuts for Safari extensions involving AI There is an entire new Siri AI app where you can have ongoing conversations and you've got some new features in Photos as well. But there are a lot of small AI features mixed around in macOS. 

For instance there is File Naming. You get suggested file names now when you create a new document. Like here in Pages let's say you type some text, like this, and then you're still working on the document. You haven't saved it yet. Look at the top where it says Untitled. After a little while it is going to put a suggested file name there. So you don't have to save it as Untitled. But when you do go to Save you can actually look at other suggestions there as well and choose the one that you want. So you don't always have to come up with a file name. You, of course, can change the file name any time you want after that. This is just a way to get started quickly. 

You can also do this in lots of other apps. For instance here in Numbers, let's say you create a new document here and you've got a spreadsheet going but you haven't yet saved it. I'm not going to wait for a file name to appear like before. I'm just going to go right to the save dialogue and then I can click in there like I'm going to type something. But look at the little spinner to the right. You can see it's working on coming up with its own file name suggestions. So I can just choose one of those. 

Next there is Quick Responses. This works in Mail and Messages. So let's respond to this email here and you see as soon as I move my pointer over where I'm supposed to type it gives me some options there and then it flushes out those options into a full few sentences there. I can Revert back to what I had before in case it is replacing something. Or I can just accept it but it's just text now. So I can continue to Edit it. So in this case maybe I can trim some off. I don't need all of this here but I can keep the main part of this as a Quick Response. Probably what I would have typed anyway. 

Here's what's happening in Messages. You can see it picks up on the question being asked and gives me the two responses there. So I can just click instead of typing. Let's continue the conversation here. You can see I'm going to get a question back at me. I can use the same process here. When I go to type something new you can see it comes up with some suggestions and I can select one just like that.  Since this is in Messages you can see how short the suggested responses are which is appropriate. 

Now here is a small but very useful feature that's going to be in Safari. Say you've got a ton of Tabs like this. A lot of us have a ton of tabs, right. Now, there might be some way to group these. But are you really going to take the time to move them around? Well, now you can go into the Safari Preferences, into Tabs here, and there's a Setting for Organize Tabs. You can set it to automatically create them. You can see it has done just that. It has figured it out based on the content of the those pages that they can be grouped into three separate groups here. 

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Here's another place where you get automatic organization. Let's say you are creating a list in the Reminders App. You can create your own sections, of course. But you can also go to File, and then turn on the Automatic Sections. Then you can see it working there. It puts all the items there into different sections. It doesn't matter what the list is about. It's not like groceries before where it had to be groceries. It can be a variety of different things. You can see here it's a checkbox so it is still on. Which means if I were to add a new item here it would figure out which category it goes to and move it up there. You can even see it working how it uses that little color there for the text to put it in place. When you go to turn this Off you have the option to keep the sections or remove them. 

There are actually a lot of different ways in macOS now that you can easily add an event to your Calendar. For instance here I'm going to simply type in Siri, so I do Command Space and I'm typing there. It's looking at what's on my screen here. There's an event there. It's going to pick up the event, the date, the time, the location, all of that and add it to my Calendar. I can just easily click it right there to jump to that calendar event if I want to modify it or add some notes. But there are other ways you can do this as well. For instance you could get a message from somebody, like this. There's the message that came in. You can see it has all the information there for the event. Sure enough you get this little Add to Calendar Button that appears right under the message. You can just click that and it picks up on things like the location. It even gets the time right. You know it is dinner so you know it is 7 p.m. not a.m. and you can see it here in the Calendar App. 

So Screenshots have a new function. You can use Visual Intelligence now. You can see the little button here when you bring up the Screenshot Tool. The button does not appear if you are doing a recording. Only one of the three screenshot options and then you can turn it On. Now I'm going to select here, since I chose the Selection Tool, and I can simply click Ask Siri and ask a question about what's there. I didn't have to take the screenshot and save it somewhere and go to it. I'm just doing it directly from the screen using the Screenshot Tool and Siri and it will come up with an answer for me here. You can see it starts a little Siri conversation similar to if you asked using the Spotlight Menu. I can follow up with another question here if I like. 

But you can use Visual Intelligence with the live camera on your Mac. So what you want to do is open the Magnifier App, that's kind of like the Camera App for your Mac. You could have saved images in there or you can use the Live view and you can ask a question. So you don't even have to take a picture here to actually get this to work. I'm just going to ask a question here. Hold up a book and then press Return at that moment and you can see how it is going to respond based on what I was showing there. But I can also go to the Saved Image and ask a question from that. I can ask something much more specific here and I get a response. But I'm not completely happy with the response so I can keep the conversation going. You're not limited to just that one question. And you can see here I get kind of the answer I was looking for. 

Now one of the ways that I think Siri AI works really well is for doing searches through Mail, Messages, even your Notes App. I'm not talking about the regular searches where you go into the App and use the Search there. That works better too. But I like that you can just trigger Siri with Command Space and then ask for something. Even be vague about where that information could be. Like is it in Mail, is it in Messages, is it in the Calendar. You can just ask something like this and it will actually find it. It's not basing it on keywords that it is looking for. It is actually trying to figure out what will match what you're describing. 

Now if you like using Numbers for spreadsheets but you're not really good at formulas, especially advanced formulas, you could actually use Siri for this. I'm going to do Command Space here and then ask for a formula to keep a running total here. So I'll just give it the question and it is going to come up with the answer that is correct. So you can see here it wants me to put a SUM and paste it in all those cells. Actually that's the way most people would do it. But I happen to know there's a way to do it with one formula and that would Spill to the other cells. So let me see if I can tell Siri how to do it that way. You can see here it gives me an answer. I can actually copy and paste the formula that it gives to me or I can read about how it works with a much better description than the one you get in Help in Numbers. So I'm going to paste this in here and see if it works or not. An indeed it does. One thing I notice though is that it doesn't get it quite right. It stops after the 20th row. But this is AI. I can chat with it and ask for a solution to this problem. Now I'm going to bring up Siri AI again. It's not in the same conversation but that's fine. It will figure out what I'm asking based on the previous conversations I had. So now it gives me a new formula here and it seems to understand what I want and when I Copy and then Paste this in here I can see that it indeed works. Now I've got what I want with just a little back and forth. 

Image Playground isn't new. But what is new is the ability to generate realistic looking images. I'm going to take this image here, which I generated a year ago for another tutorial, and I'm going to change the style to Any Style and see if it comes up based on the same description with something that now looks realistic, not from a cartoon. There I go. So you've got more options to generate things in AI without having to rely, like for instance this could be some sort of clipart for a presentation and I didn't have to go out and purchase anything or, you know, find the exact thing. I could describe more of what I want, the angle, the material to match, that kind of thing. 

I saved the best for last because I think a really good, but overlooked use for Siri AI, is for getting help for things on your Mac, like if you just can't figure out the setting for something or if something is possible. For instance, here you could see I'm annoyed by the fact that the Dock appears and disappears based on where the pointer is. I just want to it to be here all the time. Is there a setting for that and where's that setting.  I could just ask Siri and it will tell me exactly where that setting is but, not only that, it will show me this quick little keyboard shortcut that I can use to accomplish what I want. Of course all of this requires that you've got Apple Intelligence On for your Mac. So look in System Setting. macOS Golden Gate is under Siri and make sure you've got it turned On. If it is not available is could be that it is not yet available in your region.

So there are some new things you can try once you've upgraded to macOS Golden Gate. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.