Hands-on with Image Playground, ChatGPT, and Genmoji in iOS 18.2

iOS 18.2 is out to developers

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The first developer beta of iOS 18.2 includes several new Apple Intelligence features, like Image Playground, Genmoji, and ChatGPT integration. Here's how they work.

Apple hasn't even released iOS 18.1 yet, but we've already gotten a new beta with plenty of Apple Intelligence features. The iOS 18.1 update included Writing Tools, a new Siri UI, a Clean Up tool in Photos, and more.

This update brings a lot more and what we'd call the fun parts of Apple Intelligence. However, it's still a very early beta, so things will likely change and improve by the time it's released.

We tested this on our iPhone 16 Pro, which took just a few minutes to download and install the 7GB update.

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Genmoji in iOS 18.2

The first thing we wanted to try out was creating new Genmoji. Essentially, fully customizable emoji based on what you think of.

Describe any emoji you want and it will create it

Need a picture of a cinnamon apple latte — cool, Genmoji can do that for you. Want a Genmoji of a person keeping bees — it can do that too.

If you suggest a Genmoji containing a person, you’ll first be asked to choose an image source to base it on.

You can choose a photo of someone in the Photos app, or just use a regular emoji. You can also choose the emoji’s gender, age, and skin tone.

Here are some of the Genmoji we've created

We tried all sorts of things, and it consistently gave us crisp, well-designed Genmoji to play with. There were only a few times when they looked shaky, which is to be expected with any image generation.

Image Playground

Image Playground lets you generate larger images beyond just emoji characters. They're saved at 1024 by 1024 resolution and can be shared like any other photo on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

To create an image, describe it and choose a few modifiers to go with it

When you open the Image Playground app, you can write a description of the image you want to see. A person doing something, a landscape, an object, pretty much anything.

There are guardrails in place so you can't do anything inappropriate or use any protected images. But they can be based on you, your friends or family.

Then you can add some modifiers, like wearing a red baseball cap, being on the beach, or doing something. We tried generating ourselves at a party in NYC with fireworks.

Does this look like Andrew O'Hara? We're not sure how similar it is

It doesn't exactly look like us, but that's the general idea. We tried with a few other people on our phone and the results were still… mixed.

The generated images don't always match the original very well

They're all in an animated style, which is nice, but they don't look very close to the original. We tried showing ours to people and no one guessed it was supposed to be us.

Like we said, this is an early beta and all of this could improve.

Other than that, Image Playground is fun. People will have a lot of fun coming up with images to try out.

It’s mostly limited by your imagination. Apple provides quite a few spinning suggestions for accessories, activities, places, and more to help.

This also works with the Image Wand built into Notes. You can use it to turn your sketch into an actual image, or create an image based on your content.

ChatGPT and Siri

This beta also showed off ChatGPT integration for the first time. When you ask Siri a question it thinks ChatGPT can answer better, it will ask you for permission before sharing it.

ChatGPT works with Siri when you want it to

ChatGPT will then process the request and give you an answer. It’s super slick, fast, and best of all, private.

Apple has made sure that none of your information is stored, your query is not used for training, and your IP address is hidden. If you sign in with ChatGPT, you will be bound by OpenAI's privacy policy.

Here are some toddler costume ideas ChatGPT gave us

We asked Siri to write a check for sweet potato fries, then some toddler costume ideas. ChatGPT gave us solid answers to both questions.

It works for both talking and typing. It’s by far the best way to use ChatGPT on iPhone right now.

Other improvements with Apple Intelligence

For iPhone 16 users, there’s a new Visual Intelligence. This is enabled by long-pressing the camera controls.

It opens the camera and scans the world around you. We scanned a soda can for nutritional information, pointed it at a LEGO set to get shopping suggestions on Google, and it identified the dog’s breed.

Visual Intelligence scanned our LEGO set

You can also scan a poster to add it to your calendar, automatically translate or read text, or identify a storefront to find out its opening hours.

This update brings changes to the Mail app. It has been slightly redesigned with new filters for promotions, updates, and transactions.

The new Mail app has different filters

This follows on from the previous update, which added a priority indicator for important messages.