PRESS RELEASE
12 December 2024
Apple Intelligence is available today for users in Australia and New Zealand
CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Apple today released iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia 15.2, bringing Apple Intelligence — the easy-to-use personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence while protecting users’ privacy — to iPhone, iPad and Mac in Australia and New Zealand.
With today’s software updates, Apple Intelligence begins language expansion with localised English support for Australia and New Zealand, in addition to Canada, Ireland, South Africa, the UK and the US, and brings a brand-new set of capabilities that elevate users’ experience with iPhone, iPad and Mac. Now, users can remove distracting objects from images with Clean Up, explore creative new ways to express themselves visually with Image Playground, create the perfect emoji for any situation with Genmoji and make their writing even more dynamic with Writing Tools. Building on Apple Intelligence, users with an iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro can now instantly learn more about their surroundings with visual intelligence with Camera Control. And now with ChatGPT integrated into Writing Tools and Siri, users can tap into ChatGPT’s expertise without having to switch between apps, helping them get things done faster and easier than ever before.
In addition to the first wave of expanded language support available today, additional languages — including Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Vietnamese — will be coming throughout the year, with an initial set arriving in a software update in April.
Clean Up Photos and Relive Moments with a Smarter Photos App
The Photos app is even more intelligent with many new capabilities. Natural language search gives users the ability to search for just about anything by simply describing what they are looking for, like “Maya skateboarding in a tie-dye shirt”. This works across videos too, so users can search for something that happened in a specific segment of the video and go right to it. Search also offers smart completion suggestions to help users quickly complete a search.
For those times when an unwanted object or person ends up in the frame of a photo, the Clean Up tool gives users a way to remove distracting elements while staying true to the moment as they intended to capture it.
The Memories feature now gives users the ability to create the movies they want to see by simply typing a description. Using language and image understanding, Apple Intelligence will pick out the best photos and videos based on a user’s description, craft a storyline with chapters based on themes identified from the photos, and arrange them into a movie with its own narrative arc.
Design Fun, Original Images with Image Playground
The Image Playground experience allows users to easily create fun and unique images, with concepts like themes, costumes, accessories and places. Users can add their own text descriptions, and can even create images in the likeness of a family member or friend using photos from their photo library. Image Playground generates images in distinct styles, including Animation — a modern, 3D-animated look — and Illustration, which offers images with simple shapes, clear lines and colourblocking.
The experience is integrated into Messages, making it easier than ever to create images for conversations, as well as into apps like Freeform, Keynote and many others. Image Playground is also available as a brand-new dedicated app.
Create Genmoji to Fit Any Moment
With the power of Apple Intelligence, emoji is taken to the next level with Genmoji, making conversations with family and friends more fun and playful, and opening up entirely new ways to communicate.
By simply typing a description into the emoji keyboard, a Genmoji will appear, including multiple versions to choose from. With images from their photo library, users can take Genmoji even further by creating one that is inspired by a friend or family member. Personalised Genmoji can be customised with accessories, like a hat or sunglasses, and can reflect themes or activities to make them even more personal and unique. Just like emoji, Genmoji can be added inline to messages, or shared as a sticker or reaction in a Tapback.1
Take Notes to the Next Level with Image Wand
The Notes app gets new tools to make note-taking more visual and dynamic. With Image Wand in the tool palette, users can quickly create images in their note using the written or visual context already captured within the note.
Image Wand transforms a rough sketch into a polished image by simply circling it. Users can even circle empty space within a note, and Image Wand will gather context from the surrounding area — using on-device generative models to analyse the handwritten or typed text — to create a relevant image that complements the note and makes it more visual. Users can create images with the Animation, Illustration and an additional Sketch style in Image Wand.
Proofread, Rewrite and Summarise Text with Writing Tools
Deeply integrated across iOS, iPadOS and macOS, Writing Tools allow users to refine their language by rewriting, proofreading and summarising text virtually everywhere they write, including Mail, Messages, Notes, Pages and third-party apps.
With Rewrite, Apple Intelligence allows users to choose from different versions of what they have written and adjust the tone — professional, concise or friendly — to suit the audience and task at hand. Proofread checks grammar, word choice and sentence structure while also suggesting edits — along with explanations of the edits — that users can review or quickly accept. Users can also select text and have it summarised in the form of a digestible paragraph, bulleted key points, a table or a list.
In addition to the options to rewrite, proofread and summarise text with Writing Tools, users can specify the change they’d like to make using the new Describe Your Change option. Describe Your Change gives users even more flexibility and control when they’d like to make their writing sound more expressive, such as to add more dynamic action words to their resume or even rewrite a dinner party invitation in the form of a poem and more. Just like all of the features with Writing Tools, this new Describe Your Change option is available systemwide across Apple and many third-party apps.
Prioritise and Stay Focused
Priority Messages, a new section at the top of the inbox in Mail, shows the most urgent emails, like a same-day invitation to lunch or a boarding pass. Across their inbox, users can see summaries without needing to open a message, and for long threads, they can tap or click Summarise to view pertinent details. Additionally, Smart Reply provides suggestions for a quick response and will identify questions in an email to ensure everything is answered.
Apple Intelligence also helps users prioritise and stay in the moment with notification summaries that allow users to scan long or stacked notifications with key details right on the Lock Screen, such as when a group chat is particularly active. A new Focus, Reduce Interruptions, surfaces only the notifications that might need immediate attention.
In the Notes and Phone apps, users can now record, transcribe and summarise audio. When a recording is initiated while on a call in the Phone app, participants are automatically notified, and once the call ends, Apple Intelligence generates a summary to help recall key points.
Get More Done with a More Natural and Conversational Siri
With the power of Apple Intelligence, Siri becomes more natural, flexible and deeply integrated into the system experience. A brand-new design with an elegant glowing light wraps around the edge of the screen when active on iPhone, iPad or CarPlay. On Mac, users can place Siri anywhere on their desktop to access it easily as they work. Users can type to Siri at any time on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and can switch fluidly between text and voice as they use Siri to accelerate everyday tasks. With richer language-understanding capabilities, Siri can follow along when users stumble over their words, and maintain context from one request to the next. In addition, with extensive product knowledge, Siri can now answer thousands of questions about the features and settings of Apple products. Users can learn everything from how to take a screen recording, to how to easily share a Wi-Fi password.
Learn More About Surroundings in One Click with Visual Intelligence
A new visual intelligence experience builds on Apple Intelligence and helps users learn about objects and places instantly, thanks to the new Camera Control on the iPhone 16 line-up. Visual intelligence can summarise and copy text, translate text between languages, detect phone numbers or email addresses with the option to add to contacts and more. Camera Control also allows users to search Google so they can see where they can buy an item, or benefit from ChatGPT’s problem-solving skills to ask for an explanation about a complex diagram, such as from class notes. Users are in control of when third-party tools are used and what information is shared.
Tap into ChatGPT with Siri and Writing Tools
Apple is enabling ChatGPT access in Siri and Writing Tools experiences within iOS, iPadOS and macOS, allowing users to access its expertise — as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities — without needing to jump between applications. With the ChatGPT integration, Siri can suggest a user access ChatGPT for certain requests, and Siri can provide the response directly.
With Compose, users can ask ChatGPT to generate content for anything they are writing about from the systemwide Writing Tools. They can also use ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities to add images alongside their written content.
Users can choose whether to enable ChatGPT integration, and are in full control of when to use it and what information is shared with ChatGPT. By default, a ChatGPT account is not required to use this integration. When using ChatGPT without an account, OpenAI will not store requests, and will not use the data for model training. Additionally, users’ IP addresses are obscured to prevent their sessions from being linked together. For those who choose to connect their account, OpenAI’s data-use policies apply.
Even More Capabilities Coming Soon
Additional Apple Intelligence capabilities will be available in the months to come. Siri will be even more capable, with the ability to draw on a user’s personal context to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to them. Siri will also gain onscreen awareness, and will be able to take hundreds of new actions in and across Apple and third-party apps. Priority Notifications will also surface what’s most important. In addition, users will be able to create images in Image Playground in a Sketch style, an academic and highly detailed style that uses a vibrant colour palette combined with technical lines to produce realistic drawings.
A Breakthrough for Privacy in AI
Designed to protect users’ privacy at every step, Apple Intelligence uses on-device processing, meaning that many of the models that power it run entirely on device. For requests that require access to larger models, Private Cloud Compute extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud to unlock even more intelligence. When using Private Cloud Compute, users’ data is never stored or shared with Apple; it is used only to fulfill their request. Independent experts can inspect the code that runs on Apple silicon servers to continuously verify this privacy promise, and are already doing so. This is an extraordinary step forward for privacy in AI.
Availability
- Apple Intelligence is available now as a free software update with iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia 15.2, and can be accessed in most regions around the world when the device and Siri language are set to localised English for Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK or the US.
- Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later, and Mac with M1 and later.
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- Genmoji creation is available on supported iPhone and iPad models, and will be available on Mac in the coming months.