iOS 18.1 is reportedly coming on October 28, and if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16, that's the day you'll be able to access the first six Apple Intelligence features.
I've used all of them in the developer betas, and here are my personal experiences and the AI features I think are the most impressive:
What AI features are coming on October 28?
Assuming Mark Gurman is right about dates, then it is on this day that those who are not participating in beta versions will be able to try the first six Apple Intelligence features:
- A couple of elements of the new Siri
- Writing tools
- Notification summaries
- Creating a memory in Photos
- Cleaning up in Photos
- Intelligent breakthrough with notifications
What was my experience of each?
I should note that I can’t comment on the last one: when my phone is in Do Not Disturb mode, I don’t look at it at all.
But for the other five, I’ll work from the ones I found least impressive to the ones that stand out.
Photo Memories
Before Apple Intelligence, the Photos app created Memories pretty randomly, in my experience. It was generally good at recognizing that travel was a safe bet and bringing back happy memories of various trips, but some of its other offerings weren’t what I was ever looking for.
Additionally, its actual selection of photos often seemed completely random. In particular, it couldn't seem to judge which photos were the best, even without using a crude metric like favorites.
The big news with Apple Intelligence is that you can now specify the memories you want. That's great in principle, but in my experience, it's not any better at judging which photos to pick.
For example, when I asked for “Winter Memories,” I was hoping to see winter-themed photos. That is, snow, me and others bundled up in thick coats, and so on. Instead, it just picked a bunch of random photos that were taken during the winter months.
Similarly, asking for “stunning shots from tall buildings” just showed a bunch of very random ones, including some taken not from tall buildings, but from them.
So I wouldn't exactly be thrilled with that.
The New Siri Features
Don't hold your breath here, either: an all-new, truly intelligent Siri powered by generative AI isn't coming anytime soon.
The only two elements included in iOS 18.1 are a new visual interface (which is admittedly extremely beautiful) and greater tolerance for poorly formed queries.
For example, Siri can now handle something as garbled as this:
What's the weather like in Los Angeles right now? Uh, no, actually I mean, what time is it in Chicago?
I would say that Siri is now very good at recognizing the actual speech patterns used to make requests, so gone are the days of having to mentally rehearse your question or command before speaking it.
That's great, and I'm impressed – but that's it. For the vast majority of queries, the results are exactly the same as before. Don't expect to see any fewer results on the web than before!
Notification summaries and other summaries
Summaries fall into a very awkward category to categorize! They're generally really impressive. Message and email summaries tend to get the point across well and highlight the most important elements. Notification summaries are the same. As a technical achievement, they're fantastic.
However – and this is a huge “but” – they sometimes miss an important point or get something important wrong. This means they can’t be relied upon, and if they can’t be relied upon, then unfortunately that makes them essentially useless. Because whether you read the summary or not, you’ll have to read the whole thing to check for errors and omissions.
Like I said, I’m impressed and fully expect this feature to continue to improve, but if you rely on it today, something will go wrong.
Clean Up in Photos
It’s certainly not Photoshop-level, but we didn’t expect it to be. It’s a consumer-grade tool designed simply to remove distracting elements from your photos.
So some of the problems are just too big. For example, my attempt to remove the boat on the right side of the photo was, er, unsuccessful.
Removing the people from this photo was a valiant attempt, but left a shadow of one of the people on the right and very noticeable artifacts on the left:
Here I asked it to remove the skyscraper behind. It did a good job of removing most of it, but it failed to do a good job of the railing on the bottom right, and actually then tried (poorly) to continue it. But honestly, for a snapshot from a holiday, I don't think it's terrible.
Removing the white junction box from the wall was somewhat better. Sure, there are artifacts, but if you only saw the finished result, I'm not sure it would stand out.
Finally, removing the name and graphic from the wall took a few passes, and I left the very tip of the wifi-like symbol at the top to show that another pass was needed, but this is a very decent result:
It wasn't hard enough to do the same for the reflection, but I didn't expect it to be.
Overall, I think this is a very solid start that will only get better, but in some cases it's already a useful feature.
Writing Tools
I'll mostly point you to my previous article on this here, since my impressions haven't changed since then.
In short:
- The proofreading is good and definitely worth using
- The rewriting is impressive and I can definitely see a use for it
- The summaries are technically impressive, but not perfect
(I've already addressed the summaries issue above.)
Conclusion
An important note is that my experience is with the developer betas, but the current version is probably close to what we can expect from the final version.
Don't expect much from Photo Memories or Siri, and treat all summaries with caution – certainly don't rely on them.
But I think you'll likely find Photo Clean Up useful even in its current form, and Apple's reviews If you do, you'll likely see it improve very quickly.
For me, the writing tools are currently the standout feature, and that's coming from the person you might least expect welcome them!
If you have also used beta versions, share your experience in the comments.
