iOS 18.1 will reportedly be released on October 28th, and if you own an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16, you can expect to get the first six Apple Intelligence features on that day.
I’ve used everything in the developer beta, but here I’ll share my personal experience and the AI features that I think are the most impressive.
What AI features are coming on October 28th?
Assuming Mark Gurman’s date is correct, that will be the day users who are not in the beta will be able to try out the first six Apple Intelligence features.
- Some elements of the new Siri
- writing utensils
- Notification overview
- Creating memories with photos
- Clean up with photos
- Intelligent breakthroughs with notifications
What was my experience with each?
Please note that I cannot comment on the last point. When my phone is on Do Not Disturb mode, I don’t look at it at all.
However, I’ll cover the remaining five in order from least memorable to most prominent.
Memories photos
In my experience, before Apple Intelligence, the Photos app generated memories in a fairly random manner. While it was generally great to understand that traveling is a sure bet and brings back happy memories of various trips, some of the other suggestions were ones I never even went looking for. It was something.
Additionally, the actual photo selection often seemed completely random. In particular, it didn’t seem to have the ability to determine which photos were the best, and didn’t even use a metric as crude as favorite photos.
The big news in Apple Intelligence is that you can now specify which memories you want. That’s basically great, but in my experience it’s not at all great at determining which photos to choose.
For example, when I heard “Winter Memories”, I wanted to see winter –with a theme photograph. That means snow and me and the others wearing heavy coats. Instead, it’s just a random selection of a bunch of photos taken during the winter.
Similarly, a request for “great shots from skyscrapers” resulted in some very random shots. of than that from tall building.
So I’m certainly not excited about this.
New Siri features
Don’t hold your breath here either. It will be a while before we see a truly intelligent Siri with all-new generative AI.
iOS 18.1 includes only two elements. There’s a new visual interface (admittedly very pretty) and more tolerance for malformed queries.
For example, Siri can now handle garbled characters such as:
What’s the current weather in Los Angeles – uh, no, what I’m actually saying is, what’s the current time in Chicago?
Siri is now fully capable of dealing with real-world voice patterns used for queries, and gone are the days when you had to rehearse a question or command in your head before saying it out loud.
That’s great and I’m impressed, but that’s the limit. For most queries, the results are exactly the same as before. Don’t expect to find fewer results on the web than before.
Notification summary and other summaries
Abstracts fall into categories that are very tricky to categorize. they are generally Really impressive. Summaries of messages and emails are generally great for getting the point across and distilling the most important elements. As well as a summary of notifications. As a technical achievement, it’s amazing.
But, and this is a very big problem, you may miss an important point or do something important wrong. That means you can’t rely on them, and if you can’t rely on them, then unfortunately it becomes essentially useless. Because whether you read the summary or not, you need to read the whole thing to check for errors and omissions.
Again, I’m impressed with this feature and have high hopes for it to continue to improve, but if you rely on this feature now, something is going to go wrong. .
Clean up with photos
Of course, this is far from Photoshop level, but we don’t expect it to be either. This is a consumer tool that simply aims to remove distracting elements from your snapshots.
So some challenges are just too big. For example, I tried to remove the boat from the right side of the shot, but it failed.
It was a brave attempt to remove the figures from this shot, but it left a shadow of one of the figures on the right and a very noticeable artifact on the left.
At this point, we had the high-rise building in the back removed. It worked for the most part, but I couldn’t deal with the bottom right railing and actually tried (poorly) to continue with it. But to be honest, I don’t think this is a good holiday snapshot. terrible.
Removing the white junction box from the wall helped somewhat. There are definitely artifacts, but I’m not sure if this is noticeable if you just look at the finished result.
Finally, it took several passes to remove the names and graphics from the walls. I left the tip of the Wi-Fi-like symbol at the top to indicate that another pass was required, but this is a very decent result.
It wasn’t sophisticated enough to be able to do the same for reflections, but I didn’t expect it to be.
Overall, I think this is a very solid start. It will only get better in the future, but in some cases it’s already a useful feature.
writing utensils
My impression hasn’t changed since then, so I’ll mainly introduce previous articles here.
in short:
- Calibration is excellent and definitely worth using
- The rewrite is impressive and I would definitely use this
- Summary is technically good, but not perfect
(The issue of summarization was discussed above.)
summary
The important point is that while my experience was with a developer beta, the current beta is likely close to what you can expect in the final release.
Don’t expect too much from Photo Memories or Siri, and treat all summaries with caution. Of course, don’t rely on them.
But we think you’ll find Photo Clean Up useful even in its current form. Also, with the feedback Apple is collecting on this, this feature is likely to improve rapidly.
Right now, the feature that stands out the most to me is the writing tool, and it comes from someone who probably isn’t very welcoming.
If you are also using the beta version, please share your experience in the comments.
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