New Apple Intelligence Tools in iOS 18.2

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.2.

So iOS 18.2 brings a lot of new Apple Intelligence features to your iPhone. Unfortunately these features are only available on the iPhone 15 Pro models and all the iPhone 16 models. If you have an older iPhone, even if you update to 18.2, you won't find these features there. There are also some restrictions based on region and language. I'll talk more about languages at the end of this video. 

Now first let's talk about Writing Tools. Writing Tools were added in 18.1 but there is a big improvement to them now. For instance, let's say you're writing in an app, I'm going to use Mail as an example here, but this could be Pages, it could be Notes, it could be a website or some other app. Let's say you've selected some text and you want to use AI Tools to rewrite it. So you can look for in the Menu here, the Writing Tools, and that's one way to bring up the Writing Tools here. Like before you have the ability to rewrite it and you can rewrite it Friendly, Professional, or Concise. Now you have this extra thing up here where you can describe your change. So you could type something and instead of using those three buttons you can do something like this. Then when you execute that it will actually rewrite it following your instructions. Now it doesn't work with anything that you type. For instance, you could type something like this and then when you try this it is just going to tell you it can't do it. So there are limits. 

But here is a more reasonable example. This time I'm going to use the Toolbar up here. Tap this and I'm going to describe a change like this. So you can see, in this case, it does work and it will produce a result. 

Now another option that you've got is you can now, in addition to rewriting things, you can use a Compose Button. So I'm going to scroll up here and you can see Compose and I can describe something and it will compose new text. Now notice right here you get this little symbol. That's the ChatGPT logo. It's going to use ChatGPT for this. So you can see how something like this might be useful information in an email and I can compose there. It's going to call to ChatGPT and it's going to paste the text in. You can see I've got that there. Now, that is your text to edit. So you can edit it as you like or just pull out a piece of information and delete the text it generated.

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Now I mentioned that I've used ChatGPT. You go into the Settings App and go to Apple Intelligence & Siri you'll see now that there is a ChatGPT part here. You can go into that and you can actually log into your ChatGPT account if you have one. If you don't want to that fine! You'll just be using ChatGPT anonymously. But logging in might give you more prompts per day if you're paying for a plan and it might then relate things to other things that you've added to your ChatGPT account. 

Now integration with ChatGPT also helps improve Siri. So you can ask Siri questions and like before you're going to get a lot of answers that come from Apple Intelligence. Like this. What is the fastest marine mammal? You can see here it returned an example from Wikipedia it says there and it didn't use ChatGPT. But let's do something that will force using ChatGPT this time. Give me a list of the best ten states to vacation in. You can see there is says working with ChatGPT because it recognizes it is something that Apple Intelligence can't handle on its own. Then you get a result here and it indeed tells you at the bottom that it is ChatGPT generating this result. So Siri gets a lot more powerful thanks to ChatGPT. 

Now iOS 18.2 adds two ways you can use Apple Intelligence to generate images. One of them is using using Image Playground. So, you can run the Playground App. It's just a regular app like all the others. Run that app and then what you can do here is describe an image you want. One of the key ways that Image Playground is different than image generation AI, say, like Dolly or MidJourney, is that it is tied into your Photos app, into the people there. So, notice one of the suggestions there is Me. You can actually very easily pull Faces from your photos and use them as the basis. Using comic book looking illustrations of you and your family members and friends very easily with this. I'm going to select Me here and it is pulling on all of the different times I appear in all of my photos and then it generates an image like that. I can also use some of these other suggestions. So, for instance, if I were to choose scarf here it's going to add that as an idea and then it is going to regenerate the image and sure enough I'll be wearing a scarf. If I choose volcano then, guess what, it's going to put me in front of a volcano. So you can see the results here. You can also use these Dots here to flip over to the next one and then keep going. When it actually runs out of them it's going to generate more. So you can keep going until you find an image that you like. 

When you're done you can tap here and you can Copy this image, you can Share it, you can Save the image. It will save the image here in the app so you can get back to it and even continue editing it later on. Now there are two different styles here as well. You can tap the Plus button here and you can switch from Animation to Illustration and you get a very looking different style. 

Now you can also just type something to generate an image. You don't have to use the suggestions there. So, I can go in here and I can type something like that. Then Done. Then I can remove these other items. Let's remove Me and scarf and volcano and just stick with my description there. Now you can see it generates the road in the forest. I'm sticking with the Illustration here and you can see how this might actually be a useful image, say, in a presentation. 

Now there's another way you can use Image Playground. It's called Image Wand. It works here in the Notes App. So let's say you do a simple drawing in Notes. I'm horrible at drawing so this is the best I can do but hopefully you can tell I'm trying to draw a teacup. Now if you go back into the Drawing Tools you have all the different pencils and things like that. But you also have this Image Wand Tool right here. I'm going to select that and I'm going to circle this image. Then it is going to, sometimes, ask me to add a phrase. So I'll do that and I will generate and you can see it's going to take my drawing here and the description and it generates a teacup from that. So you can pretend that you're better at drawing than you actually are. 

Now a different way to generate images is using a feature called Genmoji. In other words generate your own emoji characters. The way you do that is you go to type, say, you're going to type in a message here in the Messages App. You're going to use emoji. Notice it says, Describe an emoji now instead of Search. You can start describing it but you can also tap this little button here to the right and then it will jump right into the new Genmoji interface and you can describe something. If you write a description that could be a person it's going to try to generate something that looks like an emoji character. So I'll do that and you can see it's going to generate like a pirate emoji. Just like with Image Playground you can swipe to the left and get variations on that. If, on the other hand, you describe something that wouldn't be a person, like that, then it will try to draw an object. You can further refine. Like that. You can see you get that there. So now you can Add and what it will do is it will add that to your message. It looks like an emoji character. It's actually a little inline image. So the person on the other end doesn't need to have this character. They won't. But what they're going to get is a little inline image that then they would see in their text. But also notice how it is added right here to your Favorites. So you can get back to it and reuse this if you want. Not only that, you can use it in other apps. So here I am in Notes and I'm going to go in and I could generate a new emoji character or I could just use that one that I just created. It will even work in apps like Pages as well. I can add that in Pages. It's just an inline image. So you can see here in Pages it actually appears pretty large. Maybe in the future Pages might handle it a little differently. But it is just an inline image there. This also works on the Mac but you can't create them on the Mac. You will find them added via iCloud to your Favorites emoji characters and you can use them in different apps. Apps on your Mac will be able to have the embedded image since an embedded image isn't anything particularly special. It's the generation of these that is special in iOS 18.2.

Not just using an image like this. 

Now another new feature of Apple Intelligence only works in the iPhone 16 models is to use the Camera Button to use visual intelligence. Visual Intelligence allows you to use the Camera App and they get information about what your camera sees about taking a picture. So you can point it at say a poster for an event and then maybe add that event to your Calendar or maybe if you're standing in front of a restaurant you can point your camera at the restaurant and then get information about it, menu, reviews, thing like that. 

Now I also don't want to overlook at huge new Apple Intelligence feature for people in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Is that these features will now work set to English for your region. Before, even the iOS 15.1 features didn't work. But iOS 15.2 brings that up to date. Of course Apple is going to be working on adding more countries to that in other languages including eventually countries in the EU as they work those details out. 

So if you've got an iPhone 16 or an iPhone 15 Pro model and you've upgraded to iOS 18.2 give these a try. This also works the same on iPad OS 18.2 if your iPad is one that supports Apple Intelligence. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.