The Photos app has numerous Apple Intelligence features.

Collections

Collections is a mix of manually created items, metadata-sorted categories, pre-Apple Intelligence on-device machine learning selections, and new Apple Intelligence groupings. Click or tap Collections to see categories like Albums (created by you); Media Types (metadata); and People & Pets, Memories, and Trips (all machine learning). Featured Photos also appears, which is an album that adds new images daily from your library based on some kind of hidden algorithm about what Photos thinks you’d like best.

Collections includes a Utilities section, which is where you’ll find Apple Intelligence features.

Utilities

The Utilities section is a grab bag of things, including media that Photos can’t upload to iCloud, duplicated items, and recently saved ones. Apple Intelligence also makes use of this section by including categories it creates by analyzing your photo library.

You may not see all of these Utilities sets, depending on what’s in your Photos library.

Here are the Apple Intelligence-related groupings:

• Receipts: Photos of receipts as identified by Apple Intelligence appear here. On one of our devices, this category also showed a variety of other things, such as a junior-high report card, shipping labels, and even a plastic stake that came with a potted plant. The other saw letters photographed at library archives, shipping labels, and even pages from a book—but mostly receipts.
• Handwriting: Any photo containing what Apple Intelligence identifies as handwritten text is in this category. For one of us, this category was slightly more successful than Receipts, but not uniformly so. The other sees a fair number of images that had a handwriting font, and pictures of sushi and holiday cards.
• Identity Documents: Photos of passports, driver’s licenses (more formally, driver licenses), ID cards, debit and credit cards, and other documents that might serve to prove one’s identity appear here, with mixed success.
• Illustrations: Apple Intelligence apparently has a broad and eclectic view of what might be considered an illustration. Among other things, One of us saw photos of artwork from museums alongside drawings his kids made in first grade, graffiti, and even a furnace wiring diagram. The other, a printing and comics historian, found many printed cartoons and old line-drawing illustrations in his set.
• Documents: As with the Illustrations category, this shows anything vaguely document-like, as guessed by Apple Intelligence. For one of us, that included posters, menus, and signs—along with a carton of milk, a ketchup packet, and one of our kids holding a bag of chips. The other found the detritus of menus, screen captures, and pictures of his children being read books when young.

Generate reworked images

Apple offers three tools for taking a photo and generating new versions that add or remove information using generative imaging.

To use any of these tools, first select a photo and click Edit or tap the Edit button. Then click the Tools tab or tap the Tools button.

The first time you use any of these features, Photos must download the tool from Apple, which may take a few seconds to a few minutes. You should see a dialog that explains the delay.

All of these tools create new imagery based on existing data—you’re inventing parts of an image. That may be appropriate for personal images, or, once you consider it, you might not want to use any of these tools. Think about how the images will be received when shared, or if used in a professional, web, or print context, too.

Photos edited using artificial intelligence features (Clean Up, Extend, and Spatial Reframing) are invisibly tagged with a SynthID watermark.

Clean Up

The Clean Up tool in Photos lets you remove people and objects from the background of photos, automatically filling that space with new image information that blends seamlessly with the surroundings.

After selecting Clean Up, Photos may highlight certain areas of the photo with an animated, glowing effect. To remove one of those areas, click or tap it. You can also circle an object or brush over it with your pointer, finger, or Apple Pencil to remove it; the area may glow to indicate the selection. On a Mac, if the width of the Clean Up “brush” is too large or too small, use the Size slider.

Click or tap Clean Up to apply the changes. If and when you’re satisfied with the results: on a Mac, click Save Changes, then Done; on an iPhone or iPad, tap the yellow checkmark, then tap Done.

In this section, there’s also a Retouch brush that lets you smooth out details. However, it doesn’t use Apple Intelligence.

Reframe

If a photo was taken from an inauspicious angle, you can now adjust the angle—within limits—for a more pleasing effect, thanks to the Spatial Reframing feature of Apple Intelligence.

Select the Reframe tool. A glowing animation passes over the image. You can use your mouse or fingers to drag the image in any direction and watch as Photos dynamically fills in bits that were otherwise obscured. On a Mac, you can use Rotate, Pan, Straighten, and Zoom sliders, which also show the extent of the limits of how you can reframe the image. On an iPhone or iPad, use two fingers for zoom.

When you have the angle you want, click or tap Reframe.

Extend

Suppose a photo is cropped too narrowly, or that the subject is off-center. Photos can use Apple Intelligence to fill in areas adjacent to the area actually captured by generating new pixels that seamlessly blend in with what’s already in the photo. Select the Extend tool. Drag the frame to resize and/or reposition it and click or tap Extend. The results can be seemingly accurate or wildly disturbing.

Make Memories from prompts

You can make memories—rather, Memories with a capital M—using Apple Intelligence. Type a description, and Apple claims the feature will tell a coherent story sculpted from your photos and videos. To try this out, choose File > New Memory Movie, type a description, and wait to see what Photos comes up with.

One of us has had poor results with this feature, especially with music that bears no relation to the subject matter, but your experience may differ.

Use descriptive searches

Even if you never add a title or other metadata to an image in Photos, the app has long been able to figure out what (and who) is in it, so you could search for bridge or rainbow or dogs and usually get reasonable matches. Descriptive searching expands this concept, enabling you to type a whole phrase describing what you’re looking for, even if it involves a combination of attributes.

In our testing, this feature has been frighteningly accurate and helpful. We entered things like Morgen with the kids, Soren playing music, and California scenery and got results that meet those descriptions precisely.

Safari has several features that rely on Apple Intelligence, ranging from subtle (page highlights) to dramatic (describe an extension).

View page summaries

Safari offers Apple Intelligence-generated summaries for most webpages. Click or tap the Page icon on the left side of the address bar, then click or tap Summarize. Safari switches into Reader mode, with a brief summary at the top of the page.

Organize tabs automatically

Drowning in tabs? Safari can reduce clutter by grouping them. Enable this feature on a Mac by going to Safari > Settings > Tabs and choosing Automatically Create Topics from the “Organize tabs” pop-up menu; on an iPhone, tap the Tab Overview button, then tap the Filter button and choose Organize Tabs > Automatically Create Topics; on an iPad, tap the Tab Overview button, then tap the More button and choose Organize Tabs > Automatically Create Topics.

Having done that, browse normally—which, for most of us, means opening lots of tabs. Safari examines the contents of each page and groups them by similarity, reducing the amount of space open tabs take up. Click a group to expand its contents. (This grouping type apparently has no name.)

Use Notify Me to monitor pages for changes

Safari can monitor a webpage and let you know when it changes. To set a notification, click or tap the Page icon in the address bar and choose Notify Me. Describe the type of change you’re looking for (such as a new news article or a change in a particular number), click Edit to adjust when and how often Safari should check, and click Done. When Safari notices the change in question, a notification appears.

You can close the tab, but you must enable notifications for Safari in Settings > Notifications on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Notifications on a Mac to receive these…notifications.

Safari checks daily by default. You can tap Edit—either while creating the notification or afterward—to switch to hourly, weekly, or monthly checks, and set the time of day. Manage these notifications in Settings > Apps > Safari > Notify Me on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Apps > Safari > Notify Me on a Mac. Delete a notification by clicking or tapping the Edit link on the tracked page, then clicking and tapping Delete and confirming, or via the Settings link.

Describe an extension to create it

Can’t find the extension you need? Safari can create a custom extension for you on the fly. It syncs to your other devices via iCloud but can’t be shared with anyone else. To create an extension, click or tap the Page icon in the address bar and choose Describe an Extension. A new dialog appears.

Here, you can click one of the existing categories to get ideas or start from scratch by typing something in the “Describe something else” field at the bottom and clicking Next. Safari then displays a new page that may include existing extensions from the App Store that perform a similar function. Ignore those and click the Create button at the bottom. Safari churns for a bit, with a progress indicator at the top of the page. When it’s ready, you can click Try.

If you like what you see, click Save; if not, click Edit to describe changes. Each extension has its own toolbar icon, which you can use to invoke it later. If you use this extension on a page other than where you created it, you’ll be prompted to grant permission.

This is a cool feature, but a word of caution: you can’t create anything complex, like an ad blocker. Instead, it’s for small things like modifying the contents of a page or taking action on various text or graphics.

iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 feature not only Siri as an underlying capability but also an app named Siri that lets you see, continue, and manage previous Siri interactions and conversations—and even start a new one right in the app.

Revisit old conversations

The app automatically shows every request and conversation you’ve had with Siri. (These appear in a sidebar on a Mac or iPad, but they’re the first thing you see when you open the app on an iPhone.) You can scroll through them and select one to see what was said. You can also do the following:

• Switch views: To toggle between list view (the default) and grid view, click or tap the Filter button and choose Grid or List.
• Search: Click or tap the Search button to search past conversations.
• Continue a conversation: Select a conversation and type in the Ask Siri field at the bottom.
• Add a file or photo: Click or tap the plus button and choose either Photos or Files, then navigate to whatever you want to add to the conversation. On an iPhone or iPad, you can also choose Camera from this menu to take a photo or video.
• Delete a conversation: On a Mac, select one or more conversations and choose Conversation > Delete Conversation, press ⌘-Delete, or right-click/Control-click and choose Delete from the contextual menu. On an iPhone or iPad, you can either swipe left and tap the Delete button, or touch and hold and then tap Delete; you can also tap Filter > Select, tap or drag to select multiple conversations, and then tap the Delete button at the bottom of the list. In all cases, click or tap Delete to confirm.
• Pin a conversation: You can pin a selected conversation, which anchors it at the top of the list. To pin on a Mac, choose Conversation > Pin Conversation, or right-click or Control-click and choose Pin from the contextual menu. On an iPhone or iPad, you can swipe left and tap the Pin button, or touch and hold and choose Pin.
• Share a response: To share a specific response—not a conversation as a whole—as a PDF, you can click the Share button on a Mac, or touch and hold the response on an iPhone or iPad and choose Share.

In any conversation in the Siri app, you can click or tap the microphone button to speak your request rather than type it.

Start new conversations

To start a new conversation in the app, click or tap the New Conversation button and start typing.

Sync conversations across devices

As long as you’re signed in to your Apple Account on each of your devices—and have Sync this Device turned on in Settings > Your Name > iCloud > See All > Siri on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Your Name > iCloud > See All > Siri on a Mac—all your Siri conversations sync automatically via iCloud. To prevent syncing conversations from any of your devices, turn that switch off.

Conversations that you have while your iPhone is connected to a CarPlay system are marked with a little car icon.

Set retention time

Your device can store all your Siri conversations indefinitely, or it can delete them after 30 days or a year. To configure this, go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > See All > Siri on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Your Name > iCloud > See All > Siri on a Mac, then choose 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever from the Keep Conversations pop-up menu.

The previous two generations of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS included a collection of Apple Intelligence features that were collectively referred to as Writing Tools. They enabled your device to compose, rewrite, or proofread text and were available in nearly every app that provided text-editing capabilities. Starting in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, the term Writing Tools has disappeared, and in its place are Write with Siri and Edit with Siri, depending on the context. The underlying capabilities are broadly similar, but the interface has changed significantly.

Users can write and edit with Siri AI virtually anywhere they type by just describing what they need.

Write with Siri AI

Thanks to Apple Intelligence, Siri can compose text out of thin air. If you want a snappy reply to an email or text message, a report on any imaginable subject, a résumé or cover letter, a fairy tale to tell your grandchildren, or pretty much anything else that can be built out of words, you can simply describe what you want and, usually within seconds, Siri will write it for you.

We are aware that lots of people, from corporate drones to university students to lazy authors, have become dependent on this type of AI writing, and as professional authors, we have…feelings about that. At a bare minimum, we would roundly reject the idea of passing off any AI-written text as our own, but more than that, it would feel like spending decades of hard work to become a great chef and then letting a robot come up with recipes and create your meals for you. That misses the whole point of the task.

So, yeah, we’re not super jazzed about letting Siri write stuff, and practically speaking, Siri has never written anything that actually sounds like the way either of us write, even if it’s otherwise accurate.

Other LLM-based tools produce better results, sometimes sounding sensible or even being fully factual. But wrestling with a chatbot when we have the knowledge, wordsmith skills, and commitment to what we do makes little sense for us.

All that said, the feature is there, and you can use it, if you like, in any of these ways:

• In most environments, including email, word processing documents, and forms on webpages, you can simply click or tap once in any spot where you can enter text, wait for the Write with Siri button to appear, and click or tap it to produce a Write with Siri field.
• If the Siri icon doesn’t appear (as is the case in Messages, for example), you can right-click or Control-click (on a Mac) and choose Ask Siri, or tap once to bring up the text menu (on an iPhone or iPad) and then tap the Siri button to display an “Ask Siri about this” field.

Then type a description of what you want into the field, and suggested text appears, which you can then revise (or ask Siri to revise) as needed.

Edit with Siri AI

To use Siri’s help with editing existing text, begin by selecting the text you’d like help with. Wait a moment, and you should see a white Edit with Siri button to its left. Click or tap that button, and it’s replaced with a series of controls.

In macOS 27 Golden Gate, there’s no longer a Writing Tools submenu on the Edit menu or the right-click/Control-click contextual menu. However, you can right-click or Control-click selected text and choose Ask Siri, which lets you access the same tools that are available in the Edit with Siri field.

Your options are as follows:

• Edit with Siri: In this field, type a description of how you’d like the text to change, and Siri offers a suggested rewrite. You can enter anything from a serious, specific request to Sprinkle in pop-culture references, Make it rhyme, or Use third-grade vocabulary, for example.
• How does this sound? Siri provides a brief analysis of the tone and structure. It may tell you the text is clear and friendly, that it’s awkward and terse, or any number of other things. (It does all this in what strikes us as an excessively patronizing way, as is common for large language models.)
• Rewrite: You’ll be shocked to learn that Rewrite commands rewrite the text! If you click Rewrite on its own, Siri tries to maintain the general tone and meaning while rephrasing the text a bit. Or, use the pop-up menu to choose the type of rewriting you want:
  • Friendly: The Friendly revision replaces the text with a more folksy version, which uses a simpler vocabulary and more informal phrasing.
  • Professional: This revision is almost the exact opposite of Friendly. The Professional revision aims to eliminate any personal touch or casual language, making the text more appropriate for business-related purposes.
  • Concise: The Concise revision is the “just the facts” version, with a minimum of extra detail and textual ornamentation.
• Proofread: This tool finds and corrects problems like incorrect verb forms, superfluous or missing words or punctuation, and other mechanical issues. When you click or tap Proofread, Siri analyzes the selected text and adjusts it to reflect everything it thinks ought to change, with altered bits showing a blue underline. Click or tap any of those blue underlines to see an explanation of the change. You can also use the left and right arrows to step through other corrections. If you want to ignore this change and revert it to the original text, click the Revert button. Click or tap the thumbs up or thumbs down button to send Apple feedback about the proposed proofreading changes.

A Proofread bar also appears, featuring an Edit with Siri field you can use to make additional requests, plus an Undo button and a superfluous, never-enabled Redo button.

Options that were formerly part of Writing Tools, such as Summary, Key Points, List, and Table, no longer explicitly appear in the Write/Edit with Siri interface, but you can still use them. In the Edit with Siri field, you can type Summarize this, or Make this into a list, for example, and Siri does just that.

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.