Calendar

Apple Intelligence lets you describe an event to Calendar more naturally than you previously could. Before the latest releases, you needed to have some structure and order. With iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, you can be a bit more freeform, and Calendar plucks out the details required. You can’t speak off the cuff, as you would with a chatbot, but it’s still better than it was before.

It’s similar to natural-language event creation in some third-party apps, but slightly more expansive in what it recognizes and matches against, such as locations.

For instance, you can’t say, “Grab coffee with Stacey Butler at that place we had coffee at last year for a couple of hours in the morning on September 15.” But you can say, “Grab coffee with Stacey Butler at the Fremont Coffee Company on September 15 for two hours starting at 10 in the morning.” The bolded parts are what Siri highlights in red or gray.

Red indicates that it’s matched what it thinks you want and has filled that into the event. Gray indicates a choice, such as a person with multiple emails or phone numbers in your contacts: tap or click to choose, and then they’re added as an invitee, and their name is now highlighted in red, too. That will also simplify the event title, removing ambiguous inline elements, such as turning “Grab coffee with Stacey Butler at the Fremont Coffee Company” to “Grab coffee with Stacey.”

Finder

Starting in macOS 27 Golden Gate, the macOS Finder offers to name files and folders automatically based on their contents. Select a file or folder and press Return to select the name. Hover over it with your pointer and one or more suggested names appear in a pop-up menu. Click one of these to use it as the new name.

If you dislike this feature, you can turn it off: Go to Finder > Settings > General and uncheck “Suggest file names.”

macOS also suggests names for new, untitled documents you create in most apps once they have a bit of content. The suggested names appear in the title bar and in the Save dialog when you save the file for the first time. One of us has found these suggestions to be wildly inaccurate during testing, but your experience may be different.

The naming may also happen automatically when you use AirDrop to transfer files from another Apple device, such as the contents of a screenshot when you AirDrop it from an iPhone to a Mac. In this case, you’re not prompted to approve the name.

Home

With Apple Intelligence, Apple Home reduces the amount of “attention noise” that motion-detecting cameras can generate. Home combines related activity notifications, so a series of motions doesn’t result in the current stream of alerts. It can also stitch together video from multiple cameras, allow natural-language searches for recorded events, and provide summaries you can read without watching the video.

So far, we haven’t been able to get this appear for us. We’ll update this section when we can.

To use the Home-related Apple Intelligence features, you have to subscribe to the 2 TB iCloud+ tier or higher. Your home hub must be a HomePod (2nd generation or later), HomePod mini, or Apple TV updated to the latest release, like tvOS 27. The Home app and Home accessories must have access to location services.

Lock Screen

In iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, you can use Apple Intelligence in two ways with your Lock Screen: one is good; the other…mmm, not so much.

Extend a Lock Screen image

You can extend an image you pick for the Lock Screen using the same approach as Extend in Photos. To reach the point where you can use Extend:

1. Lock your device.
2. Touch and hold a spot on the Lock Screen that isn’t taken up with a notification—the time display is a safe place. If you have a Touch ID device, you have to scan your fingerprint after touching and holding the Lock Screen.
3. The Lock Screen shrinks in. Tap the add button to add a new Lock Screen. (You can also swipe left until you see an Add New screen with an add button in its center, and tap that.)
4. Tap Photos and select an image.

Pick an image that doesn’t fill the entire screen proportionately, or you can pinch to shrink an image smaller than the screen. In either case, tap Extend, and the image will be filled in—make sure the results don’t look bizarre.

Create an image with Image Playground

When you reach step 4 above, you can now select Image Playground and generate an image for your Lock Screen. We don’t recommend this, for the reasons set out here.

Maps

Apple says Maps has an “enhanced Flyover” experience. This translates to less weird-looking landscape and building interpolation from satellite and street-level data when you look at cities using Maps’s 3D perspectives.

Maps now also features Local Lists, which are ostensibly algorithmically generated guides to local areas based on aggregated searches. Apple uses the word “trending” a couple of times in describing this feature, so it’s unclear if it’s just search-related—which gives zero insight into the quality of a restaurant or an experience—or factors in other data. (This may or may not involve Apple Intelligence.)

Also, Apple says that Maps offers “natural language search expands to cover routing.” We have not yet seen an example of this in action.

Notification Center

If you receive more than a handful of texts, you know how quickly Messages notifications can add up—sometimes hundreds of messages in an active multi-party group chat. You can review every message individually, and that may be appropriate or required. With the summary feature for notifications available with Apple Intelligence enabled on supported devices, you might find yourself fully informed without reading 100 messages.

Summarization is straightforward and available across notifications. For Messages, go to Settings > Notifications on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Notifications on a Mac, and enable Summarize Notifications. With that turned on, you can tap or click the menu item and scroll through apps, including Messages, to enable or disable summarization previews. Once turned on, notifications summarize single messages or groups of messages.

You can go a step further within Notification settings by choosing an individual app: setting Notification Grouping to Automatic makes the summaries more useful for loads of messages from that app! Go to Settings > Notifications > App Name on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Notifications > App Name on a Mac, and tap Notification Grouping or click the “Notification grouping” pop-up menu to modify the setting.

Passwords

Before iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, Passwords could already identify passwords that are too weak, or that have appeared in data breaches. Passwords like these that need changing are marked with a red exclamation point and feature a Change Password button that takes you to the appropriate page on the website. Version 27 takes that concept further, letting you go to the site, choose a strong new password, save your settings on the site, and save the new password in Passwords—all with one click or tap.

But there’s a catch: the site has to support the mechanism Passwords uses—and most of them don’t. If none of the logins are both in need of a change and have the necessary site architecture, you’ll see a banner telling you that you’ll be notified if there are passwords eligible to be automatically fixed. That’s what we see, so we can’t describe precisely what happens when a password meets those criteria.

Phone

Apple Intelligence brings Call Context to the Phone app: during a call, Phone offers information from other apps that seems contextually appropriate, like a reservation number or a flight number when you’re calling an airline. We have yet to experience an example of this.

The Shortcuts app, which lets you create and run sequences of actions ranging from simple (“open this app”) to massively complex (“fetch data from all these places, do some computations, and make a graph of the results”), has several features that involve Apple Intelligence.

Describe a shortcut

The Shortcuts user interface in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 was significantly overhauled to steer users away from manually creating shortcuts and toward its major new feature: the Apple Intelligence-powered “Describe a shortcut.” When you click or tap the plus button, you now see a big “What do you want your shortcut to do?” banner.

In the “Describe a shortcut” field at the bottom, type out what you’d like your shortcut to do. Apple Intelligence takes a first stab at it. You can try out the shortcut and, if it doesn’t work correctly, type what you need in the “Describe a change” field.

With any new or existing shortcut, you can select it and click the Edit button to bring up the full Shortcuts editor, which has been rearranged a bit and now includes a Pinned section.

Although the existing interface for creating Automations is still available, a new method can be used: when editing a shortcut, go to the Automation category and double-click or tap an automation (such as Time of Day or Message). This places it at the top of the shortcut so you can configure it when creating or editing a shortcut.

Use intelligent actions

Shortcuts has a series of actions that rely on Apple Intelligence features; these are called intelligent actions. When creating a shortcut, select Apple Intelligence in the list of apps to see the options, which include Create Image (using Image Playground) and half a dozen Write and Edit with Siri commands (Proofread Text, Adjust Tone of Text, and so on).

But the most flexible addition is the Use Model action. When you add it to a shortcut, you enter a request and can choose whether to process the request on your Mac (On-Device), using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (Cloud or Cloud Pro, both of which offer a Use Broad World Knowledge checkbox, which lets them incorporate information found on the web), or via the ChatGPT extension.

Because you can feed text, audio, documents, and images into the action, and can channel its output to further actions, you can create elaborate workflows powered by Apple Intelligence. An example Apple offered was a student feeding this action both an audio recording of a lecture and notes taken during the class; Apple Intelligence was asked to summarize any missing points from the audio that hadn’t been captured in the notes.

Visual Intelligence’s remit has grown substantially since it originally let your iPhone describe what it saw via the Camera in iOS 18.2. Generally, Visual Intelligence lets you query what it “sees” in a screenshot or through the camera, or take action on what appears. Swipe your finger around something to prompt a visual search that can explain what you’ve highlighted.

This can give you the answer to or produce a result based on these sorts of inner monologue statements: “What’s that plant?” “Turn the information on that poster into a calendar event.” “What sculpture is that?” “Read me the text in this screenshot.”

Starting with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27, you have more options and can get more information.

First, macOS and visionOS now support Visual Intelligence for the first time. On a Mac, you can have Visual Intelligence describe what’s on screen. With an Apple Vision Pro, you can have it describe things in your field of vision.

Second, on an iPhone or iPad, you can use Visual Intelligence directly through the Camera app with a new Siri button that sits alongside Video and Photo in the photo modes list below the shutter button.

Ask Siri about a screenshot

You can ask Siri about what it sees using Visual Intelligence in two different ways. On an iPhone or iPad, you use the screenshot shortcut to start the process; on a Mac, there’s a shortcut to capture part or the screen or a window that comes as part of macOS 27.

To take the screenshot on an iPhone, press and release the side button and the volume up button together. On an iPad, press and release the top button and either volume button; on an iPad with a Home button, press the top button and the Home button together.

You can also circle items with your finger or an Apple Pencil to highlight them.

Ask Siri about what’s on a Mac’s screen

Visual Intelligence can now see your screen. Ask Siri about anything on your screen, and it can analyze what it’s seeing and make sense of it. You can also focus Siri’s attention on just part of your screen:

• Press ⌘-Shift-6 to highlight a portion of your screen. You can then ask Siri about something in that area.
• Press ⌘-Shift-Space to ask Siri about the frontmost window.

If you’re using ⌘-Shift-6 for something else, make sure to reassign it either for Visual Intelligence or in another app using that combination to avoid a conflict.

Even if you don’t ask Siri anything, it may automatically identify plants, animals, and other elements found in screenshots. That behaviour is controlled by Automatic Visual Look Up, under Settings > General > Screen Capture.

macOS doesn’t yet apply Visual Intelligence to the FaceTime camera or Continuity camera.

Ask Siri about what Apple Vision Pro can see

If you use an Apple Vision Pro, visionOS 27 will be a delight, as it brings Visual Intelligence, as with an iPhone or iPad camera, to your augmented reality headgear. (All Apple Vision Pro models support Apple Intelligence.)

Here’s what you can do:

• Ask Siri general questions.
• Look at something and ask Siri about it. Visual Intelligence will know from context what you mean.
• Gain access to the Siri app, as on other platforms.

Apps available in visionOS, like Safari, gain the same improvements as on other platforms, more typically mirroring those in Golden Gate.

Even though Apple is now working with Google for Siri AI, the company continues to support OpenAI’s ChatGPT—though not via Private Compute Cloud—and Apple seems to be downplaying ChatGPT now. How does that work?

Awkwardly.

The previous integration of ChatGPT was an explicit one—by default, you had to choose to let Siri use ChatGPT, which was also relied on for creating images. If Siri couldn’t answer something and ChatGPT was enabled, it would ask you if you want to consult ChatGPT.

In iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, ChatGPT remains in place, but now only at your request. Siri no longer asks you whether you want to pass a query to ChatGPT; that’s now the job of Siri AI and the expanded PCC.

Because ChatGPT requests don’t use PCC, the privacy of your requests is at high risk compared to Siri AI. However, ChatGPT doesn’t have access to your private data by default; it has context about you only if you sign in to an account. We remain concerned about this.

How ChatGPT handles your data

• If you don’t sign in, then all requests your device sends to ChatGPT are anonymized—they can’t be traced back to you. In addition, OpenAI is prohibited from using your requests to train their models, and your requests are not stored (unless required by law). However, you’ll be limited as to the number and complexity of requests you can make per day.
• If you do sign in, all requests go through your ChatGPT account, so OpenAI knows who’s making them. If you pay for your account, you can effectively remove any daily limit. OpenAI’s privacy policy applies; they will store your requests (which can be useful in providing more context for future requests) and use them for training.

Use ChatGPT alongside Siri AI

If you want to use ChatGPT with Search or Ask:

1. Activate Siri using a method where you can type to it.
2. Touch and hold in the Search or Ask field on an iPhone or iPad, or Control-click/right-click that field on a Mac.
3. From the menu that appears, choose Ask > Use ChatGPT.
4. The text in the field changes to ChatGPT. Enter your query.

When the query is complete, Siri reverts to the default Search or Ask using Siri AI.

You can also explicitly add “ChatGPT” to a request—for example, Ask ChatGPT the best way to fry an egg. This works with spoken requests, too!

To use ChatGPT with Image Playground, choose ChatGPT from the Any Style pop-up menu.

You can opt to disable ChatGPT entirely or make other changes to its settings; see every Siri setting worth changing.

Apple’s Mail and Messages apps both offer a variety of Apple Intelligence features, and there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two, even if the implementation is a bit different. (Live Translation in Messages is covered separately.)

Use Smart Reply

Mail and Messages both offer smart replies, which are brief suggestions of what you might want to say that you can click or tap to save a few keystrokes or taps. Apple Intelligence looks for anything in the text of the message you’re replying to that could lead to a simple reply.

Mail offers a suggestion, if it has one, when you click to begin composing your reply. On a Mac, a little menu pops up; on an iPhone or iPad, the suggestions appear on the QuickType bar. Click or tap one of the words or phrases, and Mail expands it into a complete suggested response, which you can then accept as is or edit to taste. (Based on what we’ve seen, you will almost certainly want to edit it to sound more like you.)

Click Done to accept the response, or Revert to restore whatever you had originally. If you like the prewritten response, you can tell Apple by clicking or tapping the thumbs up button; if not, you can click or tap the thumbs down button and fill out a form explaining what was wrong. On a Mac, these buttons appear only when you hover over the Smart Reply bar; on an iPhone or iPad, they appear automatically on the QuickType bar.

In Messages, Apple Intelligence looks for questions or comments that could potentially result in a common response. Yes/no questions fall into this category, as do questions reminding you of appointments, confirming upcoming meetings, and making simple requests. (We’re sure there are many others, but there’s no definitive list.)

As in Mail, when Apple Intelligence comes up with a likely response, it’s displayed in a little pop-up control that looks just like the ones used for autocorrect on a Mac or on the QuickType bar on an iPhone or iPad. To accept one of the suggestions, click it; to dismiss them, click the close button. (You can also simply ignore the prompts and type as you normally would.)

Matching your style?

According to Apple, if you use the Smart Reply feature in Mail or Messages, the suggested replies adopt your writing style, punctuation, and tone. We tried this several times, and all we can say is…it did not. One of us would be ashamed to send any of these “smart” replies, because he does not write like an AI robot, and anyone who knows him would instantly see that something is off. (If you do write like an AI robot, maybe you’ll have better luck with this than we did.)

We urge you to double-check all Smart Replies before sending a message. We’ve seen cases in which the suggested text was incorrect or misleading, regardless of the style.

If you find Smart Replies to be not-so-smart or just plain annoying, you can disable them altogether, but Apple doesn’t make it easy. On a Mac, you can find the control in System Settings > Keyboard. Click Edit next to Input Sources and then turn off “Show suggested replies.” On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Siri > App Access > Mail, then turn off Show in App; do the same thing for Messages. (In other words, as Douglas Adams might have put it, it’s on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard.”)

Take action in other apps with suggestions

Suggestions may appear when Mail or Messages notices something in a conversation that you may want to take action on, such as adding a calendar event or searching for a photo.

Use improved search in Mail

Apple says that Mail in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 has improved, offering more relevant search results. When you type in the Search field, a banner appears telling you that Mail looks for meaning beyond the specific words you enter, presumably using Apple Intelligence.

In our tests, we were unable to get any expansive searches to pull up results that didn’t include words in the search phrase. Perhaps the improvements will become more evident later.

See Priority Messages in Mail

Apple Intelligence attempts to identify especially important messages and bubbles them up to the top of your Mail inbox. Apple says this applies to “time-sensitive messages” such as invitations and flight check-in reminders.

In our testing, this feature hasn’t been terribly helpful. It has identified messages that weren’t in any sense urgent while ignoring some that were. Unfortunately, it’s a black box; you can neither see nor influence what factors Apple Intelligence takes into account when assigning a message “Priority” status.

You can, however, turn off this feature: on a Mac, choose View > Show Priority Messages to uncheck it, or do the same using the More menu on the toolbar; on an iPhone or iPad, tap More > Show Priority. Note, however, that if Mail Categories is enabled (that is, Show Categories is selected on the same menu), the Show Priority Messages command is available only when the Primary category is selected.

This AI “priority” feature has nothing to do with the optional Low/Normal/High priority you can assign a message using the Message > Set Priority submenu.

Summarize Mail messages and threads

At the top of each message or thread is the word Summarize, with an icon to its left. Click or tap that, wait a few seconds, and a summary of the message appears. The accuracy of the summaries varies greatly, so don’t assume they are correct or contain everything of importance from the message.

If you click or tap the little pop-up menu button (Mac) or the More button (iPhone or iPad) in the preview, you can choose either Looks Good (to tell Apple the results were useful) or Something Isn’t Right. With the latter choice, a form appears in which you can fill in details about how the summary didn’t meet your needs and send the information to Apple to help them improve summaries in the future.

There’s also a second, simpler type of summary, which appears in the message preview (the little snippet of the message you see beneath the subject in the message list), right after a Summary icon. This is an attempt to briefly explain what the message is about, without summarizing the entire thing.

Although preview summaries are enabled by default, you can turn them off if you like. On a Mac, go to Mail > Settings > Viewing and uncheck Summarize Message Previews. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Apps > Mail and turn off Summarize Message Previews.