To say that AI has entered the smartphone industry alongside many others in real life might be an understatement at this point. Apple, though not the first, like some of its previous features and collaborations, brought some AI flavour for users with the iOS 18.1 (as well as iPadOS and macOS) update. Now, with iOS 18.4, the update releases the early AI features for English (India) users other than the languages originally supported. I have been using the company’s latest iPhone – the iPhone 16e on and off – to check what Apple Intelligence is really about and here’s how the experience been so far:
The iPhone 16e has the Action button (like the regular iPhone 16 series) that can be configured to open Visual Intelligence with a single click. Or you can add it as a lock screen shortcut, if you are a frequent user or want to access it quickly from there. You can tap the bottom bar twice to bring up Apple Intelligence. Firstly, you have visual intelligence where you can point the phone’s camera on to something – it could be a printed document, a card, or an object in front of you – Apple Intelligence can read and give you text, recognise the image and give you web search results for it or give you things similar to the one detected.
Next, writing tools allow you to summarise some selected text or make a new message giving it context; you can also use it to proofread something already written for spelling and grammatical errors. Or, rewrite the whole text that you have written yourself. I found the proofreading for any errors more reliable than the rewrite feature as the latter still seems a little too AI-y and not from an actual human being, if you really want to incorporate it into some work of yours. You can also get summaries of some message or email received.
You can now also create new stickers called Genmoji from any app after having made one within iMessage using Image Playground – you can upload your images and Apple Intelligence would turn it into a custom Genmoji sticker that can be used in third party apps such as WhatsApp later.
Apple Intelligence has two modes or sources for now – Apple’s own “private cloud AI” and OpenAI’s ChatGPT integration with iOS.
Whenever Apple’s own AI isn’t up to your satisfaction or it itself doesn’t understand the query enough, you’re asked if you want to check with ChatGPT. You can choose to use your own OpenAI Account within iOS for this integration or continue to use it without signing in, too. By default, you get the free version of ChatGPT, wherever LLM model is available for users with no paid plans at the time. It would have been nice to have some extra perks given for iOS user from the ChatGPT Integration or have another LLM with some paid features available, but it wasn’t to be. Another thing, Siri with Apple Intelligence throws an error message every now and then even when there’s no connectivity issue and the query is just some question.
When it comes to usefulness and user experience, I found visual intelligence to scan and extract documents to be the most reliable other than proofreading. For generative AI, more often than not, you might have to go beyond Apple’s own AI and check what ChatGPT has to offer. Apple is prioritising on-device AI/ML processing and has been vocal about it perhaps more than any name in the industry so far, but at the same time, you could well opt for cloud services if you want to, including Siri with the ChatGPT integration.
The iPhone 16e, when used for some of these AI features, became a bit warm over continuous usage of 20-25 minutes and nothing alarming. It was smooth and responsive for these Apple Intelligence features, though it’s not the fastest if compared to the iPhone 16 Pro. The A18 is a capable chipset and Apple’s brand new in-house C1 5G chip is a pretty good start for a first try at integrated modem with stable and fast 5G network receptions in areas where it’s available and other devices, from flagship ranges, were able to hold on to it.
