Live: Using Apple Intelligence With Mac Apps

Hi everyone, this is Gary with MacMost.com.

This is another live episode and I'm going to be looking at using Apple Intelligence on your Mac with your Mac apps.

So looking at Apple Intelligence, of course you have to have a Mac that's capable of running Apple Intelligence.

There's some regions I think where you still can't and you have to have a fairly recent Mac.

A lot of this may or may not work on the iPad and iPhone as well, but I'm really just going to focus on Mac here.

Looking at my system settings, you could see here under Apple Intelligence and Siri, I've got Apple Intelligence turned on, of course, and I'm going to be using Siri a lot to access Apple Intelligence.

And also notice I've got under extensions, I've turned on chat gbt and there's an option in here if you click on chat gbt to have it uh like ask for permission every time that it's going to use chat gbt i've turned that off so it's not going to ask for permission so if it's asking you for permission each time you know why and the settings in here um i recommend turning this on even if you're using just a free chat gbt account because it keeps a nice history of everything you've asked and all that but i understand if you don't want to And some of this may or may not work just using plain old Apple intelligence.

In other words, Apple's a large language model rather than ChatGPT's large language model.

But I find the results are still far better with OpenAI's ChatGPT because, of course, it's a much more mature model.

Apple hasn't really reached anywhere near the level of functionality that ChatGPT has.

So let's go here and take a look at what I'm talking about when I mean using AI, Apple Intelligence with apps.

So yeah, you could go in and you could activate Siri and ask Siri questions.

And, you know, Siri is still primarily an assistant.

You can still just ask it to like set a reminder, you know, start an alarm, that kind of thing.

But you can also now, thanks to Apple Intelligence, ask questions like what's the fastest bird in North America or whatever, and you can get an answer.

But you could also ask Siri questions that are using the context of the app you're using.

Like, for instance, I am using Pages now, and I've got a long document in Pages, the entire book, Treasure Island, in fact, in a very long document.

I'm using as an example.

The idea here is this might be a book that you're writing, right? Or a really long report you're writing or something like that.

And you've got it in here and you want to be able to use AI to help you with this.

As an example, for instance, like just a really basic thing, you may just want to ask a question like this.

I'll activate a Siri here and I have it set to type to Siri just to make it easier to make a video like this, but you're probably going to actually click here and then ask Siri with your voice.

But you could what are the major themes in this document? And I'm going to press return and it's going to say working.

And then what it should do, yep, is it's going to come up and it says send this content from pages.

It recognizes that the app here you're using is pages to ChatGPT.

And you have two options.

And this is where it's important.

You've got the screenshot option.

So just send what's visible or full content.

send all the content of this document in so i'm going to send all the content of the document in and it's going to send that it's chat gpt along with my question and hopefully i'll come up with a good answer here um and give me the themes of this book so let's see and of course you know i should say that using uh something like this it's to quote galaxy question it's more art than science sometimes.

But here I get a response from this and it just read, you know, what was here.

So if this had been something I wrote, I could have gotten a similar answer.

Now this, you know, it's maybe a good study guide to learn more about this book if you're studying it for school or something.

But let's say it's something you wrote and you're just wanting to kind of use an assistant that has like a perfect memory you could say you know a follow-up question here uh who is the person that they find on the island and let's see i guarantee you during this video i'm going to get a lot of wrong answers or times it doesn't answer let's see how long i can go before that happens who's the person they find on the island so let's do that let's see if it can do it and give me an answer.

So, you know, the idea is you wrote this, you're writing something and you forget something that's from an earlier chapter.

And let's see if I could figure that out.

The other problem we often have here is it sometimes does not remember the context, doesn't remember you're in pages here.

But here, look, it found the answer from reading the text.

So if you dabble in writing, you know, sometimes you have that thing where it's like, oh, what did I call or what town did I have the characters go into? Or what was that person they met in the diner? You know, and you got to go and find it.

But you can use Apple Intelligence to actually do it using the context of the document you're working on.

So imagine all the other things that I could ask here about this, you know, including contextual stuff.

So I could probably, I could definitely ask it things like, tell me more about the writing of this book, you know, it being a real book.

or, you know, things like that.

So maybe I can even have it look for inconsistencies in the book.

You know, have I always spelled this character's name the same, that kind of thing.

You can ask it lots of different things.

So yeah, that's, you know, a good example of how to do this using pages.

But it's not just pages.

Let's go into numbers here.

So I've got a spreadsheet here in numbers.

And this is just a sample spreadsheet.

You may recognize it from a tutorial I've done in the past.

And the example here is just a bunch of products sold, the amount, and then I've got the cost of them and then the sale price.

And then there's a bunch of stores and stuff.

And it's a long document here.

And if you want to compute something from it, you can do all sorts of cool formulas.

You can create pivot tables and all of that.

But you could also rely on Apple intelligence just to analyze the document and maybe tell you some things about it.

So I can go in here and say, from this spreadsheet, which products have the best profit? And it should do the same thing here, prompting me, do I want to send a screenshot, there he goes, or full content.

So far, it's been really good at recognizing the document I'm talking about.

If it doesn't, if it's like recognizing some other document you have open or it says, I don't know, what document are you talking about? Sometimes I find it's good to make the document full screen, go to full screen mode.

So it kind of recognizes that, oh, there's only one document I could be talking about.

I'm going to send this whole document in here and let's see if it just could analyze the spreadsheet and come up with an answer to this kind of ambiguous question that I could spend a few minutes building some sort of spreadsheet or pivot table or something.

to give me an answer to.

But with ChatGPT, it's going to be pretty quick here in telling me what I want to know, I hope.

So let's see it.

And it's definitely faster at some times than other times.

It probably depends on how much of a workload ChatGPT has at the moment.

So come on, ChatGPT, there you are.

Oh, oh, okay.

So like this is the more art and science.

like I tested this just before going live.

I did a bunch of tests and it told me perfectly quickly that it was oranges.

Um, so let's, let's try it again here.

Um, sometimes the language helps.

Okay.

Um, which product most important? and let's see if saying document instead of spreadsheet document definitely seems to be a magic word uh when asking apple intelligence stuff right now at least um instead of like doing something else so here it goes and so this you can see how quickly it responded this time right so this time not only does it give me an answer orange is the most profitable product but it breaks it down and gives me the numbers here.

So I've got that and I could follow up.

Notice how in pages, I followed up with a question.

I didn't have to send the document again.

And I could follow up here, which store is the most profitable? Let's see if it can get this one.

And it's not asking me for the document again, because it has the document.

It's continuing the chat.

So there it goes.

So it tells me the West Store.

So you can see how I've gotten information here from this spreadsheet in numbers using Apple intelligence.

So it's kind of the whole point here.

Now, it's sometimes, you know, you do have to send a screenshot.

There are a lot of times when you would need to do that.

Let's go into photos here.

And let's go and let's pick a photo.

We'll go to this one here, and I'm just going to do a simple request here.

I'm going to say, tell me about this photo.

And let's see, it's working, and it should ask, and here I can do a screenshot, or oh, you can see it's showing my notes.

So this is a case where it is latching on to TextEdit, which I have on my other screen, and it thinks I want information about that, not about photos.

Let's go and see if I'm making this full screen here that I can get Siri to figure out what I want.

Let's see if this works.

Nope.

It still thinks text edit is what I want.

I'm going to try hiding text edit and let's see if it works this time.

This is typical.

Nope.

It now thinks Finder.

It's the one I want.

So let's go ahead, cancel that.

And the only app I have visible now, not even Finder, is Photos.

So, let's go and try again.

And I'm going to use different language if it doesn't get it this time.

Ah, finally it got it.

So, notice that what I thought it was going to do and what it's done for me in the past is it says, you want to send the screenshot? But here it actually latched on and said, oh, you want Photos.

Like it was the front most app every time.

But here it actually gets that I want the photo.

And it's only going to send the photo, which is really nice.

It shows that photos is communicating, but it gives me information like that.

So it's describing the photo.

So it's kind of like maybe not what I really wanted.

I really wanted to know where this is.

And let's see if it can get it.

And maybe ChatGPG's just not going to be able to do it.

Oh, nope.

It figured it out.

It knows exactly where this is.

Very nice.

So, and that information isn't on the screen anywhere.

Not that it matters because I sent a screen.

I sent the photo.

You saw, you see exactly what's sent.

For privacy, it's showing me what it's sending.

So there's that.

Let's see.

So let's try another example here.

And I got to see.

Whoa.

So this is just another way to do it.

And let's say you've got some notes, your class notes like this.

You've taken some notes and you want to actually ask Apple Intelligence through Siri to recommend books that you could read to learn more about this.

So let's try that.

And I'm going to try doing it and seeing if it will send this.

And in the past it hasn't.

So I'm going to show you an alternative way to do it.

Recommend some books I can read to learn more about the topic or the things in this note.

And let's see if it does it.

Oh, so it actually did it.

So it's allowing me to do a screenshot here.

And so I could just send what's in the screenshot.

So it's not going to get the information below.

So if I send this in here, it may miss something because it's only seeing what's in the screenshot.

And here's some recommendations.

Great.

But another way to do it is I'm going to go to bottom of this note and I'm going to create a section called further reading.

Let's even be fancy here and create a heading.

And then below it, I am going to click the little Apple Intelligence button here.

And instead of having it proofread or rewrite or summarize, I'm going to say compose.

And I'm going to say, give me a list of books that are where I can learn more about this.

and here below you can see it says include all text or selected text.

I haven't selected any text, but that would be useful.

I could select specific text from this note just to get recommendations about that, but I'm going to say include all, and I'm going to press return, and it's going to compose, but composing is basically just filling this in, and look at that.

I get this whole section here and I can now go in and, you know, maybe just edit this.

I don't need that.

And I can go through and delete the ones that I'm not interested in and all that.

But I can ask questions about what's in the note under the guise of composing more of the note.

So, yeah, that's another way to go about doing things.

And of course, I could have done the same thing in pages as well and other places.

but it's particularly useful there in notes.

Let's go and really push things and try something else here.

In the preview app, I've got a PDF here.

Let's see if we can convince Siri to send information to ChatTPT about getting information about this form.

So let's just do something really basic.

Tell me about this PDF form.

And let's see if it latches on to the fact I'm using preview.

No, it's going back to text edit.

I'll hide text edit.

Make preview the only app.

And let's see if this time it's okay with it.

Now, don't have a PDF form to look at.

I mean, it's tricky to get this going.

Nope, still doesn't allow me to do it.

Let's make this full screen.

And let's try it now.

I definitely, this is not unexpected because I got this pretty much each time.

Now, finally, with it full screen, I've convinced it to allow me to send the full content of this PDF to either Apple Intelligence or ChatGPT.

In this case, it's going to send it off to ChatGPT.

Apple Intelligence doesn't do much now that's complex.

It's almost always offloading to ChatGPT.

So it's doing this, and I can ask more questions.

What info do I need to fill? I could kind of follow up, and I can ask more questions about this, which is, you know, maybe for a form like this, it's like, well, why am I asking that? It's pretty straightforward.

But plenty of us have received forms that need a little bit more explanation before filling it out.

So you can see how I get useful information here from ChatGPT through Siri with this form.

And you could do even more, even with apps that don't necessarily have documents, here is Maps.

So we've got Maps here.

Let's see if we can convince it to tell us about this.

Let's see, I'll just do something simple.

I mean, you could probably think of something much more interesting to ask as a first question, but you can always just try to get things going with this.

So this is going to say, oh, I don't know how to interface with Maps, but I know that you're using Maps.

I can get a screenshot and I'll send that in.

So I can do that, which shows you how you can work with apps that have no clue that Apple Intelligence or Siri or ChatGPT even exists because of the screenshot functionality.

So it shows this, and then you can ask follow-up questions about it, and it's going to just work with ChatGPT.

It's still got the context, that it's this map, this location that it's asking about, so you can do some really useful stuff.

And another example here would be like music.

So I could just go in, here's an album, and if I ask this, hopefully it'll latch onto it and say, no, look at that, it wants to get the Finder window.

So let's go down and try it again.

I have nothing else open except this.

and I think using the iPad and iPhone it's going to be a little bit easier with a lot of this because you just have the one screen thing on the screen at a time although that's not true for the iPad anymore so be interesting to see like how it works but you know just you just have to keep working with it you can't just because it doesn't work one way with one set of words and you know one thing on the screen doesn't mean that if you don't change something a little bit go full screen hide other apps ask the question slightly differently that it won't work then so you just have to keep and anybody uh working with large language model stuff like chat gpt and the like knows that sometimes you need to ask the question a different way or ask for clarity so you get uh you know this here um and you can ask follow-up questions based on that i agree the next natural listen after rubber saw would be revolver so um there you go so yeah a lot of different cool things that you can do notice how like nothing i showed here was all the bad side of AI, creating content that's not yours, plagiarizing things and all of that.

It's all about increasing your knowledge, helping you write your thing, helping you analyze your spreadsheet, helping you get more information about locations and maps, understanding how to fill out PDF forms, and all of that.

I think a lot of that gets overlooked, the useful practical uses for AI, for Apple Intelligence, for ChatGPT.

Let me just take a look at some questions here.

Let's see.

We'll be covering the type of things that Apple Intelligence does that it doesn't need to call to ChatGPT for.

No, because really to do this level of complexity right now, you need to call out to ChatGPT.

Apple set it up like that.

There are things and questions you can answer to using Apple Intelligence, but it's going to automatically go and say, ChatGPT is better at this.

And that's why it's going to ChatGP.

I didn't have anything set up to say, always ask ChatGPT.

Every one of these requests went to ChatGPT because Apple Intelligence recognized it.

If I were to say, ask something else, let's say, what's the fastest animal? That didn't go to ChatGPT.

That went to Apple Intelligence, and that's why I got such a quick answer.

But give me a list of the top 10.

Then it's going to say, oh, chat GPT, I'll do that.

And while in this case, it didn't really understand even the context there.

So Apple has definitely said that they are working on getting Apple intelligence's large language model up to the speed of chat GPTs.

And I'm sure what's holding the back is more of the privacy stuff.

So trying to get it to be more private and also probably legal stuff.

They want to make sure everything that they're training their model on squeaky clean.

And that's what's holding them back while other small companies can kind of like just put out large language model things all the time because they're not too worried about that.

But right now they have an agreement with ChatGPT and you don't have to have ChatGPT, you know, signed up with your account.

It could still ask ChatGPT anonymously for things.

So a lot of this, maybe all of this will work, even if you don't have ChatGPT set up in settings like I showed at the beginning.

Let's see.

Great.

Cool.

So I think I've answered a lot of the questions here, and I hope I've given you some ideas how to go even further.

The way to get good at this is the way to get good at any skill is to practice it.

For instance, if you're a writer, go back to what you were writing.

Start off with something like what I did, where I said, you know, give me the themes of this or whatever.

And then think about what else can I ask? Can I, like for this here, can I ask, give me a list of all the characters? You know, you're writing a book.

You're halfway through it.

Maybe you take a month off.

Would be useful to have Siri with ChatGBT give you a list of all the characters you've created so far.

And maybe give you a list of all the locations.

Maybe, you know, ask it different questions about your book.

Ask it to find inconsistencies.

Things like that.

It could probably analyze your writing and tell you things like, are your paragraphs too long? Sentences too long? That kind of thing.

What's your most common grammatical mistake? There's probably a whole bunch of different things you can keep asking.

Experiment with it.

And don't experiment with it when you need it.

Set aside some time and play around with it to kind of get ideas of what you can do because not only we discover things might be useful later, but it'll kind of open you up to what sort of things are possible.

And then check this space three months later, six months later, a year later, because it's going to keep getting better.

Apple Intelligence's large language model will do more at some point.

ChatGPT will do more still at some point.

And there's a lot of just cool stuff that you can use.

It's a great tool.

The Apple Intelligence stuff is a tool just like anything else.

And if you learn to use it, it could work for you.

So hope you found this useful.

Thanks for watching.