Apple Intelligence is still not very smart, and Apple is okay with that

Siri: “Here’s what I found on the web for ‘The smart assistant Apple promised’.”

Welcome to Apple Intelligence, where “intelligence” is still a work in progress.

Apple will release iOS 18.1 next week, bringing its long-awaited generative AI tools to iPhone 15 Pro models and the new iPhone 16 line. It will also be available for most new iPads and Macs.

If you’re expecting AI fireworks, get ready for AI… sparks. At the company’s annual developer conference in June, executives showed off do-it-yourself emojis, ChatGPT integration and a Siri that can remember the name of a person you met months ago. Apple has even been running ads for some features. There are none in this version.

“This is a big promotion,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told me at the company’s headquarters. “You could put something out there and it’s kind of a mess. Apple’s point of view is more like, ‘Let’s try to get every piece right and release it when it’s ready.'” (You can see our full interview at video here.)

Yes, while other companies rush to release generative AI tools, sometimes controversially, Apple is moving cautiously. Federighi denies the company is behind, saying it prioritizes privacy and accountability.

I’ve been testing Apple Intelligence on my iPhone and iPad. Apple’s ability to build tools directly into operating systems is undeniably powerful and convenient. But many are half done. I asked Federighi to explain Apple’s broader AI features and strategy.

Smarter Siri?

When you invoke Siri in iOS 18.1, the edges of the screen light up with a rainbow glow and a more human voice answers. You can even type your queries by tapping on the bottom of the iPhone screen.

It’s like a Hollywood remake: fancier special effects but the same old plot holes. Siri is still the best for basic commands (timers, weather and music, etc.) and often falls back on “This is what I found on the web” or admits it doesn’t understand. That is, unless you’re asking about how to use your Apple. device, for example, how to adjust screen time limits is when generative AI kicks in and the “new” Siri shines.

So where is this smarter Siri, the one that can pull together the context of your calendar, email and messages to take action? What can you call ChatGPT if you don’t know the answer?

“Siri is adopting it in stages and will benefit in stages over the next year,” Federighi said.

OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft recently gave their chatbots strangely human-like voices, allowing them to hold long conversations and answer questions about the world.

Apple’s Assistant is built differently, Federighi said, noting that it processes 1.5 billion requests a day. These other chatbots are great if you want to ask a question about quantum mechanics, he said, but they won’t open your garage or send a text message.

“There is a trade-off between capabilities,” he said. “Will these worlds converge? Of course.”

Writing tools

Confession: I used Apple Intelligence to help write some of what you just read. I pasted the interview transcript into the Notes app, highlighted the passages about Siri, tapped the Writing Tools pop-up, and selected Summary.

It’s convenient: you can use it in most applications where you work with text. But while Apple’s results are decent, other chatbot apps offer more control, allowing you to specify the length of the summary or provide detailed rewriting instructions. Apple’s writing tools are the convenient drive-thru right down the highway; OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the best restaurant within a few miles of your route.

Apple will soon offer deeper integration of ChatGPT directly into writing tools, but you may want to lean on Apple for its privacy benefits. ChatGPT and most other chatbots based on large language models send everything you type to their servers in the cloud.

Apple does a lot on the device, but when it needs more processing power—summarizing a long email, for example—it uses private models based on encrypted clouds. With Private Cloud Compute, Federighi promises that your device’s privacy extends to its cloud servers and that data is not stored.

Summary of notifications

My favorite part of Apple Intelligence? Notification summaries. Instead of seeing 10 alerts about my garage opening and closing, I get a simple update: “Multiple status changes for garage door, recently closed.” You can opt into this feature and choose which types of notifications you want to summarize. All the summary passes to the device.

It’s certainly useful, but the occasional glitches and impersonal summaries are pretty funny too. How did you summarize a series of texts from my wife about our toddler’s tantrums?

“The child is not behaving well.”

Federighi acknowledged that sometimes the brief may not be fun.

A recent viral post showed Apple translating a breakup text thread as “No longer in a relationship; wants apartment belongings.” Federighi says Apple Intelligence didn’t do “a horrible job” of it, but acknowledged the bigger problem: “There are a variety of types of communication that can occur, and sometimes they’re sensitive issues.” In some cases, Apple won’t automatically summarize a notification because it might not handle it well, he says.

Apple also added summarization in other places, including the Mail app and voice recordings in the Notes app. Tim Cook told my colleague that the email summary changed his life. Wow! Wait for Genmoji to arrive.

Clean up photos

Apple Intelligence will let you create images and emojis with a text message. Except, you guessed it, it doesn’t appear in this release either. Instead, there’s a tool to remove unwanted parts of a photo, similar to Google’s Magic Eraser.

Select Cleanup in the Photos app and tap the objects or people you want to remove, and the device’s generative AI model will do its job. It works well when the object or person is placed against a plain, solid background, such as a blue sky. But with more complex backgrounds, it struggles, leaving behind visible errors.

Many generative AI imaging tools allow you to generate new parts of a photo. Apple doesn’t, and that’s intentional.

“People see photo content as something they can trust as indicative of reality,” Federighi said. “It’s important to us that we help provide accurate information, not fantasy.”

This is reassuring. Apple may be lagging behind AI rivals, but most of these companies have not shown that they prioritize privacy or the thoughtful deployment of these powerful tools.

Few new and upstart competitors have more to lose than Apple, which trades on the trust of more than a billion people. Who wants an iPhone experience where Siri talks about the meaning of life but forgets to set the alarms?

“This is an arc of many years, frankly, even decades of development of this technology, and so we’re going to do it responsibly,” Federighi said.

Until then, now let’s say it all together: “Here’s what I found on the net”.

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Write to Joanna Stern at [email protected]