The Biggest iOS 18.1 Features Launching Next Week

Apple made a big deal of Apple Intelligence when the iPhone 16 launched late last month. And yet, the iPhone maker’s first foray into AI, exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro and above, has yet to arrive. That’s set to change next week, according to reporting from The Verge and the Wall Street Journal, when iOS 18.1 releases to the public. Based on the currently accessible iOS 18.1 beta, we already know what to expect from Apple’s debut AI offerings, so here’s a quick breakdown of what will be coming to compatible iPhones in just a few days. Even if you don’t have an Apple Intelligence-compatible phone, it’s worth reading on: There are some non-AI features, too.

With Writing Tools, you can use AI to rewrite, proofread, and summarize your text. These features offer assistance with crafting emails that sound more professional, correcting grammar mistakes, and making your drafts more concise. You’ll also get a bulleted list or table with key points from your draft.

An upgraded Siri

Siri will get a new look in iOS 18.1, plus the ability to accept written prompts. The digital assistant will also get a new language model that should make it better at understanding natural language, in addition to the ability to send more difficult requests to the cloud for more help. (Apple promises that it won’t keep your data.) Lifehacker will also get some competition, as Siri will be able to offer some tech support for certain Apple products.

Smart Reply

Smart Reply will give you contextual reply suggestions when texting or writing an e-mail. This is nothing new for many email users: Gmail, for example, offers contextual replies based on the content of the original message. If you’re really pressed for time, and want to give a quick answer and move on, these replies can be useful, but for complex emails without easy responses, they’re likely not so convenient.

Call transcriptions

iOS finally gets call recording in iOS 18.1, and it looks a bit more generous than expected. Despite initially billed only for the iPhone 15 Pro and above, the most recent iOS 18.1 beta showed it working on iPhone models as far back as the XS. That’s a bit surprising, as it’s supposed to use Apple Intelligence, which should exclude iPhone 15 and older.

Regardless, Call Recording adds a button to the Phone app that notifies all parties that you’ve started recording, then saves your call’s audio for you and generates a transcript of your call. The iPhone 15 Pro and above will also be able to summarize calls, as well as transcribe them live, thanks to Voice Recording in the Notes app.

Notification summaries

Notification summaries can be customized to group related notifications together and use AI to quickly share key details from all of them at once. For instance, you might get a single notification letting you know about your electrical bill, your payment receipt, and payment received confirmation, rather than having to scroll through each individually.

Summaries in Mail and Messages

Similar to the above, the Mail and Messages apps will summarize long threads for you, so you can get caught up more quickly. One beta tester in particular went viral after they found out how notification summaries handles being broken up with over text.

Photos updates

The Photos app is getting a number of AI-powered updates, including the ability to “Clean Up” photos by removing unwanted objects from them (similar to Google’s Magic Eraser), search through your photo library using natural language, and create a “Memory movie” by prompting Apple Intelligence to create a custom collage based on a natural language description.

Intelligent interruption in Focus mode

Apple Intelligence can surface alerts it deems important even when you’re in Focus mode.

Non-AI features in iOS 18.1

Even if you don’t have an Apple Intelligence compatible iPhone (again, iPhone 15 and older), there are still a number of upgrades to look forward to in iOS 18.1. Beyond Call Recording, which seems to be coming to older phones despite its use of AI, there’s a new reset option for the fully customizable Control Center, in case you’re not happy with the changes you’ve made, as well as dedicated tiles for connectivity options like wifi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, and cellular data; the ability to drag and drop files when mirroring your iPhone to a Mac; and greater access to your phone’s NFC chip for third-party apps, opening it up for use with transit cards or hotel room keys.

iPhone 16 models can also use the Camera Control capacitive button to quickly swap to selfie mode.

What’s not quite ready yet

iOS 18.1 is just an exploratory dip into AI on Apple’s part, so expect more features to come down the line. These include image generation features like Image Playground and Genmoji, ChatGPT integration, an even more contextual Siri, the ability for Siri to help you out in third-party apps, and Visual Intelligence, which offers useful context about your surroundings just by snapping a photo of where you are.

Apple Intelligence will also be limited to U.S. English at launch, and currently has no timetable for an official release in the EU or mainland China.