Today's iOS Update Includes Major New Apple Intelligence Features

Apple has released iOS 18.2, which finally brings several major Apple Intelligence (AI) features, announced as part of iOS 18, to iPhones that support it (iPhone 16 series and 15 Pro models.) This includes Image Playground, Genmoji, Visual Intelligence, and ChatGPT integration in Writing Tools. Image Playground — available both as a standalone app and within Messages — lets users generate an image from a text description and/or from a photo input. The resulting images are stylized rather than photo-realistic. Genmoji works similarly, accepting text or a photo of a person as input within the emoji keyboard, creating a completely custom "emoji" that can be added inline to messages, or shared as a sticker or reaction in a Tapback. Visual Intelligence — exclusive to the iPhone 16 series with its Camera Control — functions similarly to Google Lens. It "can summarize and copy text, translate text between languages, detect phone numbers or email addresses with the option to add to contacts, and more". It can also forward an image to Google or ChatGPT for more advanced image-based searches. ChatGPT integration in the system-wide Writing Tools enables more advanced text manipulation and generation, as well as complex image generation. Apple has added privacy protections so that a ChatGPT account is not required, OpenAI will not store requests, will not use the data for model training, and users cannot be tracked across sessions. Apple promises additional Apple Intelligence features in the coming months, including making Siri smarter, more context-aware, and more capable.