iOS 27

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 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.

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.

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.

The FaceTime, Messages, and Phone apps offer real-time, two-way translation—as long as you and the person on the other side of the conversation are using languages your operating system knows about. And all translation occurs on your device, with nothing sent to Apple’s servers.

The other party or parties don’t need an Apple Intelligence-equipped device, but certain translation features will be limited, as described in the sections below.

Live Translation supports English (UK and U.S.), Chinese (Mandarin, simplified), Chinese (Mandarin, traditional), French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain) for FaceTime, Messages, and Phone; Messages also supports Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Presumably, more languages will be added over time. In Messages, since you’re communicating in text, Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional) apply to multiple forms of Chinese.

Live Translation works quite similarly in FaceTime and Phone, so we tackle those together, then explain how to use it with Messages.

Live Translation in FaceTime and Phone

Live Translation of audio calls may be one of the most remarkable new features in FaceTime and Phone. With Live Translation enabled, two people speaking in different supported languages can hear and read real-time translations of what the other is saying in a language they don’t understand or know well.

Live Translation appeared as a beta in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26. Apple removed the beta label in version 27.

Here’s how to enable Live Translation on a call, including a call using the Phone app:

1. After starting a FaceTime audio or video call or a regular phone call in Phone, make sure you are in full-screen mode on an iPad or iPhone—that’s the only place you can select Live Translation. On a Mac, FaceTime or Phone resizes as needed.
2. Tap or click the More button and choose Live Translation.
3. The Live Translation dialog preselects the From language as the most recent used (if any), and uses your device’s language of choice for the To option. You can use the popup menus to change these.
4. Your device must download a translation library the first time you use a language. After selecting the options from From or To, wait until the Downloading Language message changes before proceeding.
5. Tap or click Start Translation.

Either party can enable Live Translation and gain the benefit. The translation is spoken on the conversation so both parties can hear it.

You can disable Live Translation by tapping the Translating Language menu and choosing Stop Translation, or tapping the More button and tapping Stop to the right of the Live Translation menu item.

Live Translation in Messages

For quite a while, you could touch and hold a message (iPhone/iPad) or select its text (Mac) and choose Translate. This option remains available. Now, Live Translation can also translate an entire conversation in real time inline in Messages.

With Live Translation enabled, when you touch and hold a message on an iPhone or iPad, you’re prompted to choose between Translate This Message and Translate Conversation. Choosing Translate This Message opens a translation panel.

To enable Live Translation, either touch and hold a message on an iPhone or iPad and choose Translate Conversation, or on any device, tap or click the avatar at the top of the conversation and enable Automatically Translate. Pick the language to translate from the pop-up menu. A download icon appears next to any language that hasn’t yet had its translation library downloaded to your device.

Choose Manage Languages to load translation libraries you might need now or in the future. You can also remove downloaded libraries.

You can then choose a language for Translate To if the one shown isn’t your preferred language. By default, both the original text and the translated version appear for each translated message.

As you converse, messages are translated as they’re received. You can use the pop-up menu above the message field to choose just your chosen Translate To language or to stop translation. You can also use the conversation info pane, where you can choose Off from the Automatically Translate pop-up menu.

Even better, you can enable translation on one side and it works on both. In our testing, one participant had an Apple Intelligence iPhone with Live Translation enabled for the conversation, while the other was on an iPhone 11 and could not turn the feature on—they still got the benefit.