Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today, and of course it can’t be a keynote in 2025 without a lot of AI talk. So, Apple Intelligence has received a bunch of new features – before you ask, the smarter Siri which was first promised one year ago is still nowhere to be seen.
But what you do get is Live Translation – which competitors have had for years, but it’s good to see Apple finally catching up. It’s integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and the Phone app, and its models run entirely on-device. In Messages, it obviously translates messages, but interestingly in FaceTime you can still hear your interlocutor’s voice, this feature will add live translated captions. Only when you’re on a phone call will it use a voice.
You can now mix various emoji together and combine them with descriptions to come up with something new through Genmoji. And when you create one based on your family and friends, you can adjust stuff like hairstyle after the fact in order to match their latest look. ChatGPT is now integrated into Image Playground, Writing Tools, Siri, and Visual Intelligence.
Visual Intelligence can now take action on anything you’re seeing on your screen, so you can ask ChatGPT questions about what you’re looking at to learn more. You can also search Google or ask Etsy and other supported apps. It recognizes when you’re looking at an event and suggests adding it to your calendar, extracting the date, time, and location in the process. To use this, just take a screenshot – alongside the options to save and share it, you’ll also see a new one that lets you explore more with Visual Intelligence.
Shortcuts got smarter and more powerful with the addition of intelligent actions. For example, Apple says a student is able to build a shortcut that uses Apple Intelligence to compare an audio transcription of a class lecture to the notes they took, and add any key points they may have missed. ChatGPT is available here too, should you want to engage with it, but the default are Apple’s models.
The most relevant actions in an email, website, or other content can now be identified and automatically categorized in Reminders, Apple Wallet can identify and summarize order tracking details from emails sent from merchants and delivery carriers across all your orders, and Messages lets you create polls and can detect when a poll may come in handy and suggest one.
On the Apple Watch (when you use Bluetooth headphones only), Workout Buddy is a feature powered by Apple Intelligence, which generates personalized, motivational insights during your workout sessions by tapping into your workout data and fitness history, including heart rate, pace, distance, Activity rings, and personal milestones. A new text-to-speech model is used which has a voice built using voice data from Fitness+ trainers, “so it has the right energy, style, and tone for a workout”.
This will first be available in English for these workout types: Outdoor and Indoor Run, Outdoor and Indoor Walk, Outdoor Cycle, HIIT, and Functional and Traditional Strength Training.