iOS 18.2 Brings Natural Language Search to Apple Music and Apple TV Apps

Apple has been testing iOS 18.2 for a while now, and the update brings a ton of new features related to Apple Intelligence, like Genmoji and Image Playground. However, there is one more small but important change for users of the Apple Music and Apple TV apps – the ability to search using natural language in these apps.

Natural language search coming to Apple Music and Apple TV apps

The news was confirmed by Apple itself in the iOS 18.2 RC release notes, which were provided to developers and beta testers on Thursday. In the notes, Apple says that the Apple Music and Apple TV apps now support natural language search, so users can describe what they're looking for without necessarily knowing the name of a song, movie, or TV show.

“Natural language search in the Apple Music and Apple TV apps lets you describe what you're looking for using any combination of categories, like genres, moods, actors, decades, and more,” the iOS 18.2 RC update notes read.

Users can search for things like “nostalgic 90s hits” or “songs like Espresso.” Natural search also works with Siri, so you can ask the assistant to “play songs with epic guitar solos.” At least in Apple Music, users could already search based on song lyrics when they couldn’t remember the title. For now, the feature only works in English — like other Apple Intelligence features.

With iOS 18.1, Apple introduced natural language search in the Photos app, allowing users to easily find photos or videos using specific phrases. For example, you can now search for photos of someone wearing a blue sweater. In my tests, the Photos app could even recognize videos taken from an airplane window when I searched for “airplanes” — something that wasn’t possible before.

iOS 18.2 will be released to the general public in the next few days. It’s worth noting that Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro or later, or an iPad with an M1 chip or later.