New Apple Intelligence tools go online with iOS 18.2's beta release

Key Takeaways

Apple has just seeded its first beta release of iOS 18.2.
The iOS 18.2 beta introduces Genmoji, Visual Intelligence, and ChatGPT integration.
Apple’s AI roll-out is expected to take several months, with some Apple Intelligence features not expected until next year.

Apple Intelligence represents the titular company’s first major push into the consumer AI market. Following in the footsteps of other industry titans, Apple promises that it’s suite of generative tools and functions will deliver on the promise of a more intelligent computing future.

iOS 18.1 is set to launch soon, and with it, the first batch of Apple Intelligence features. Now, the company has seeded its first beta release of iOS 18.2, which brings with it even more AI tools to play around with.

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iOS 18.2 brings more Apple Intelligence features to the iPhone

The beta release includes Genmoji, Visual Intelligence, and integration with ChatGPT

Apple / Pocket-lint

With this first beta release of Apple’s upcoming iOS 18.2 iPhone update, we’re able to get our first hands-on experience with some of Apple’s AI features. Genmoji is one such feature, which generates any number of unique emoji designed based on your text prompts. For example, typing ‘a smiling dog blowing a whistle,’ should, in theory, generate precisely this imagery in an emoji-friendly format.

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The company’s Image Playground app is also included in the new beta, which allows you to generate fun and imaginative images on the fly, and do so on-device. The long-awaited ChatGPT integration for Siri is also on offer here, which is an opt-in feature that can tap into OpenAI’s impressive knowledge base when Siri simply can’t process a query.

The long-awaited ChatGPT integration for Siri is also on offer here.

And, finally, we have Visual Intelligence, which is an iPhone 16 series exclusive. This tool is similar to Google Lens in that it lets you point your camera at the real world and then surfaces contextually relevant results, and it works via the new iPhone’s Camera Control button.

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The first batch of Apple Intelligence features are expected to hit the market alongside the public version of iOS 18.1, tipped for release early next week. iOS 18.2 will likely reach finalization sometime next month, bringing with it some of the aforementioned AI additions first teased by Apple at its WWDC conference back in June.

It appears that the full roll-out of Apple Intelligence will be delivered over the course of several months.

It appears that the full roll-out of Apple Intelligence will be delivered over the course of several months, with some features perhaps not appearing until as late as March 2025. This is in contrast to other tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which have rapidly accelerated their AI portfolio in the past number of months.

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“We weren’t the first to do intelligence. But we’ve done it in a way that we think is the best for the customer,’ says Apple CEO Tim Cook in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Apple has placed a strong emphasis on user privacy over the past few years, which is arguably at odds with the data-hungry nature of artificial intelligence. It’s unclear how deeply the company’s ‘slow and steady wins the race’ approach will resonate with customers, but Pocket-lint will be following along closely.