Apple is using Apple Intelligence, a suite of tools for generating images and text, to upsell the iPhone 16 – but you can get similar features elsewhere. — Sisi Yu/The New York Times
The latest iPhones, unveiled by Apple at a marketing event Monday, look virtually identical to last year’s models. But Apple hopes that what’s underneath – new software that brings what it describes as artificial intelligence to the new phones – will persuade people to upgrade.
Apple Intelligence, the company’s new suite of AI services, automates tasks including generating images, rewriting emails and summarising web articles. Only the iPhone 16s unveiled Monday or last year’s iPhone 15 Pro can run the new software because older models are too slow to handle those tasks, according to the company. The faster iPhone 16 devices start at US$800 (from RM3,999 in Malaysia) and will arrive in stores later this month.
But what if I told you there was another way to get the same perks?
Long before Apple introduced Apple Intelligence at a software conference in June, many apps for automatically producing text and images had been widely available. Relying on a technology known as generative AI, which predicts what words and images belong together to write a catchy poem or generate a realistic-looking image of a cat on a windowsill, for instance, these types of services have been trendy for the last two years.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
By downloading a handful of apps, iPhone owners can get similar benefits and hold on to their older devices longer. After I tested dozens of generative AI apps in the last year, here are my recommendations.
Summarising text
One of Apple Intelligence’s most anticipated features is its ability to take large blocks of text and distil the main points into a few sentences. This capability could be useful for summarising a lengthy web article or lecture notes.
But there’s already a popular tool for summarising web articles: Arc Search, a free browser developed by a startup. To test it, I loaded an 8,000-word feature from ProPublica about a chemist who blew the whistle on the manufacturer 3M. When I pinched the screen, the app generated a one-sentence overview of what the article was about, followed by three bullet points summing up the highlights. While the bullet points glossed over important details you would have gotten from reading the full article, I found the summary accurate.
For summarising notes, the free web app Humata AI has become popular among academic researchers and lawyers. By visiting Humata.ai on a web browser, you can upload a document such as a PDF, and from there, you can type requests in a window to ask a chatbot to summarise the most important points. In response, the chatbot will show a digital copy of the PDF and highlight relevant portions of the text.
Writing tools
Apple Intelligence also includes tools to rewrite text – to make an email sound more professional, for instance. Lots of free apps can handle this task proficiently.
The best known include the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI, along with rivals like Gemini from Google and Bing AI from Microsoft – all apps that can be downloaded in the App Store. Just paste text into the app and ask the chatbot to rewrite it in a different tone by typing, for instance, “Make this email sound more personable for a client I’ve known for many years.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, last year for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train chatbots.)
For help with writing, I prefer a lesser-known tool, Wordtune, from the startup AI21 Labs. Its interface, accessible on wordtune.com, is designed like a word processor for composing and editing text. You can type in a paragraph and click on buttons to expand, shorten or rewrite sentences to sound more casual or formal; the app will show a list of rewritten sentences to choose from.
Image generation
Another of Apple Intelligence’s hyped features is its ability to generate fun images, such as an emoji of yourself eating pizza, to send to friends.
Many options for generating images exist, including a tool that most iPhone users are likely to already have: Meta AI, Meta’s free chatbot that is included inside Instagram, WhatsApp and its other apps. In the search bar at the top of Instagram, you can ask the chatbot to conjure images by typing “/imagine” followed by a description.
I typed “/imagine me eating steak.” Meta AI then loaded a tool to take photos of my face from multiple angles. It produced an obviously fake rendering of me salivating over a large, rare steak inside a restaurant.
Other similar tools for typing prompts to generate images include Adobe Firefly, found on firefly.adobe.com, and ChatGPT.
Photo editing
Another new Apple Intelligence tool can automatically remove photo bombers with the tap of a button.
Google has offered a similar editing tool, Magic Eraser, inside its Google Photos photo album app for iPhone and Android users since 2023. Inside Google Photos, select your photo, tap the “edit” button and select the Magic Eraser tool. You can then circle the distracting objects or people you would like to erase.
I used Magic Eraser on a photo of my corgi, Max, in a dog park – to remove a citation form from a police officer for letting Max run off leash without a permit. It replaced the maddening piece of bureaucracy with some pine needles. – The New York Times
