Ten, eleven years ago, when the chief scientist of Siri’s development sat down to watch the movie Her for the second time, he tried to understand what it was about Samantha, the artificial intelligence character of the movie, that made the protagonist fall in love with her without seeing her; The answer was clear to him. Samantha’s voice was completely natural instead of being robotic! This made Siri in iOS 11, which was released about four years later, have a human (Terry) voice.

But Samantha was not just a natural voice, she was so intelligent that you thought she really had the power to think, and Siri iOS 11 was supposed to be more than just a natural voice; Or at least that’s what Apple wanted to show us. In the demo that Apple released that year of its programs for Siri, it showed a normal day in the life of Dwayne Johnson with his best friend Siri. While exercising and tending to her potty, Johnson asked Siri to check her calendar and reminders list, get her a Lyft cab, read her emails, show her photos of the clothes she designed from the gallery, and finally Rock in an astronaut suit. Suspended in space, we see that he asks Siri to make a Facetime call and take a selfie with him.

In almost all of Siri’s more or less exaggerated advertising, Apple tried to present its voice assistant as a constant and useful companion that can handle anything without the need to run a program ourselves. Siri was so important to Apple that Phil Schiller introduced it as “the best feature of the iPhone” at the iPhone 4S unveiling ceremony and said that we would soon be able to ask Siri to do our jobs for us.

But this “soon” took 13 years and we still have to wait at least another year to see the “real Siri” that was shown in the demos; I mean when Siri tries to get to know the user better by monitoring the user’s interaction with the iPhone and makes us unnecessary to open many applications every day.

For now, what the iOS 18.2 beta version of “smarter” Siri has given us is the integration with ChatGPT and a tool called Visual Intelligence, which offers something like Google Lens and ChatGPT image analysis together. To use Apple’s image generators such as ImagePlayground, Genmoji, and ImageWand, you must join a waiting list that will be approved over the coming weeks.

With this account, Apple Intelligence not only joined the artificial intelligence hype later than its competitors and currently has almost no new and unique features to offer, but it is perhaps the most incomplete product that Cupertino residents have offered to their users.

Still, better late than never, and the future of Apple Intelligence looks even more exciting than its current state.

The integration of Siri with ChatGPT means that instead of relying on Google to answer complex requests, Siri will now rely on the popular OpenAI chatbot (of course, permission must be obtained first; however, for faster responses, this option can be disabled by unchecking “Confirm ChatGPT Requests” In the ChatGPT section of the settings, disable it).

The quality of the answers is what we expect from ChatGPT, and Apple even gives you the option to download this chatbot application in the Apple Intelligence & Siri section of the settings; But the good news is that using ChatGPT is free and there is no need to create an account. If you have a Pro account, you can log into the app, but if you don’t, OpenAI won’t be able to save your requests and use them to train its chatbot later.

The real intelligence of Siri is where it determines what request to answer by itself, what request to ask Google, and what request to give to ChatGPT. For example, a question about the weather is answered by Siri, a question about the news of the day is usually left to Google, and if you have a request to produce text or image, Siri goes to ChatGPT; Of course, if you get bored and start your question with “Ask ChatGPT”, Siri will go straight to the chatbot.

The new Siri has a good feeling and the color change of the keyboard and the color halo around the screen when interacting with Siri is eye-catching; More importantly, we no longer need to call Siri to ask her name, and by double-tapping the bottom of the screen, the keyboard will pop up and you can type your request to her (a feature that shy people like me appreciate). However, the use of chatbots, which are also the most famous, is not a new thing, and it is unlikely that Siri’s connection with ChatGPT will excite anyone, at least until this moment.

We have to wait until 2025 for the story to become exciting; When Apple promised that finally ” real Siri ” will make us unnecessary to deal with different applications.

Apple Intelligence is only available for iPhone 15 Pro and later users and iPads and MacBooks equipped with M-series chips; But the access to the Visual Intelligence feature in the iOS 18.2 version is even more limited and will only be available to iPhone 16 series users; Because of the “Camera Control” button.

Visual Intelligence is a mouthful for a feature that is not Apple’s initiative and we experienced it a long time ago with Google Lens (of course, the Circle to Search feature of Samsung phones has a similar situation). By holding down the camera control button, the camera view will open. If you tap on the Search option on the right, the subject you see in the camera will be searched in the Google Images section to find similar ones on different websites. If you select the Ask option on the left side of the screen, ChatGPT will come into action and analyze the image for you.

The user interface of Visual Intelligence is minimal and eye-catching, and it shows both the subject search results in Google and the ChatGPT answer in a card on the recorded image. In addition, after submitting the image to ChatGPT, you can continue the discussion about the subject of the image with the chatbot integrated in Siri. The results are useful and practical in most cases (for example, when you are looking for the name of a certain plant), but remember that artificial intelligence is not always reliable. For example, when I took a photo of a notebook with an external hard drive design, ChatGPT mistakenly thought that what it was seeing was really an external hard drive and started explaining its specifications.

The images you take with Visual Intelligence are not recorded on the iPhone, and Apple assures that it will not have access to these images; But if you’re logged into your ChatGPT account, OpenAI is likely to store a copy of the image on its servers for analysis.

The only headache of visual intelligence is specific to Iranian users (of course, except that this feature is limited to new iPhones); While image search in Google does not need to change IP, to analyze it in ChatGPT, you will probably have to change your IP. Sometimes this change causes Google search to not work properly, and constantly switching between VPN on and off can be annoying.

Apple was a latecomer on the AI ​​train, but the void for a tool to effortlessly remove distracting objects from an image was felt more than any other AI feature on the iPhone. I remember when Google first introduced Magic Eraser, I was quite surprised by its performance. iPhone’s Clean Up function, which has now been added to the Photos application, has exactly the same function, but it no longer has that sense of wonder, because it was released three years late.

Of course, iPhone’s Clean Up tool works cleaner than Galaxy’s Object Eraser in most cases, and if what you want to erase is small, it’s hard to notice its blank spot in the photo. The Clean Up tool automatically detects disturbing objects and draws a line around them. All the processing is done on the phone itself and therefore, it does not take more than a few seconds.

But Clean Up does not have a new feature to offer, and probably most iPhone users who needed such a feature have been using the same Magic Eraser of Google Photos for a long time; Especially since they don’t need new iPhones and Apple Intelligence to use Magic Eraser.

The iPhone artificial intelligence writing tool (Writing Tools), which is now available as a new option after Copy in the Safari environment and also next to the pen option in the Notes application, is exactly what we have experienced with Google, Microsoft, and ChatGPT products so far; Of course, with this limitation that it does not support the Persian language and therefore, it will not be widely used for Iranian users.

The tool itself consists of various options, including text correction, rewriting, friendly tone, professional tone, summary, summary, key points, listing, and table creation, the last four options in addition to the “Describe your change” bar, which gives users more freedom of action. For example, you can convert the text format to poetry), are still missing in the iOS 18.2 beta version; But it will probably be available with the release of the public version.

If you need to rewrite English texts, Writing Tools has a relatively satisfactory performance; However, Apple’s language model has a habit of using buzzwords and flashy descriptions like “eye-catching”, “unique” or “innovative”, even in summaries! And this issue clearly shows the traces of artificial intelligence in the text.

But the most important features of Writing Tools are the ones that are not yet available in the beta version of iOS 18.2, and I guess they will completely transform the note-taking experience in the Notes application.

Apple Intelligence is full of smaller features that may be less obvious than linking Siri with ChatGPT and Clean Up, but are likely to be important in simplifying a wide variety of tasks.

Read more: iPhone 16 Pro Review

Smart search in the gallery

Searching images in the gallery has become smarter and understands natural language. For users whose gallery is unorganized and searching among thousands of photos has always been considered an impossible mission, artificial intelligence is really helpful. The results are not always related to the search term, but at least one or two are close to what you are looking for. Interestingly, the new search also recognizes facial expressions such as frowning and smiling and can find specific moments in video clips.

Intelligent Focus Mode

Apple introduced Focus modes to reduce distractions in iOS 15, and now a new mode has been added to the set of Apple Intelligence features; The Reduce Interruptions mode, which uses artificial intelligence, prioritizes notifications based on the degree of importance and displays only those that are really important from the point of view of artificial intelligence. It is possible to customize this mode like other Focus Modes and you can filter the apps and pages you want.

Smart notifications

Speaking of notifications, let me add that Apple’s AI now categorizes notifications and displays a one-sentence summary of their content. Summary of notifications works both with the iPhone’s own apps such as iMessage, and with third-party apps. When you enable Apple Intelligence, the notification display automatically becomes smart, but you can turn off the notification display completely or just for a specific app by disabling Summarize Previews from the Notifications section in Settings.

Summary of articles in Safari

When you enter Reader mode to read an article in Safari (English articles, of course!), at the beginning of the article you will see an option called “Summarize”, by tapping on it you can read a summary of about 50 words of the entire content within a few seconds.

For the most part, abstracts of non-app articles have a more neutral tone

The summaries of the articles are useful in most cases. For example, when you open the Dragon Age: The Veilguard game review article, you just want to know whether a certain website has a positive or negative opinion about this game. The tendency of Apple’s artificial intelligence to use emotional words can be seen here, and for example, regarding the article about the launch of the M4 Mac minis, seeing adjectives such as “impressive” or “stunning” in the summary seems a bit excessive. However, Summarize seems to be a useful feature for people who are busy and whose English is relatively good.