iOS Secret Features Explained

Apple hasn't said much about its generative AI intentions. However, other forms of AI are already heavily used in the iPhone, driving fundamental functionalities such as the Camera, Photos, and Siri, among others. At the same time, Apple CEO Tim Cook has become more outspoken about the technology, implying that the company's public AI push may finally be underway.

The business announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which often debuts new software upgrades for the iPhone and other products, will begin on 10 June. If Apple intends to add more AI features to the iPhone, we will learn about it then. Although Cook kept the facts minimal, Apple research shows the company aims towards on-device AI for its iPhones. Apple followed up with last week's unveiling of new MacBook Air notebooks, which the firm claims are the "best consumer laptop for AI."

Only Apple knows what happens next with the iPhone and its other devices. Meanwhile, here are some of our favourite iOS Secret Features available on newer iPhones.

Easily copy Text from iPhone photos: iOS Secret Features

Live Text is a front-facing AI capability already accessible on iPhones running iOS 15 or later as of 2021. It's a computer-vision application that recognises handwritten and typed Text in pictures, similar to Google Lens. Text from photos may be copied and pasted with a few simple clicks. Live Text may be pretty helpful in everyday life. Assume you have a handwritten recipe that you wish to digitise. After photographing the recipe with your iPhone, you may then copy and paste the contents into a Word document and store it as a digital backup.

Competing phone manufacturers have also jumped on board. Honor's Magic 6 Pro and Magic V2, which run the company's Magic OS 8 software, included a Magic Text function with comparable features.

Clone your Voice digitally.

Apple may not have a chatbot, but it does utilise AI in a feature introduced with iOS 17 last year. Personal Voice is an iOS Secret Features that employs on-device machine learning to allow people at risk of speech loss to mimic their Voice and interact with loved ones. The iPhone asks you to read 150 sentences aloud to learn your Voice. It then utilises AI to analyse your speech and create a synthetic imitation of it.

To converse with this new synthetic Voice, utilise the iPhone's type-to-speak features to convert Text to speech in FaceTime and third-party apps.

Photography smarts

It's no secret that complex algorithms and computational photography power many iPhone camera functions. iOS Secret Features Portrait Mode, which employs AI to recognise subjects and produce bokeh effects, is only one example. Another option is Cinematic Mode, which uses AI to approximate the proper aperture and dynamically change focus to keep your moving subject crisp. One of the latest AI-powered features in iOS 17 is the Photo app's ability to detect dogs in photos, allowing for improved photo organisation.

New and enhanced AutoCorrect.

Apple also addressed one of the most common autocorrect complaints with its most recent software update. You may now cuss without Apple changing your swear word to something less offensive, such as "duck" or "shut."

Aside from allowing you to curse easily, autocorrect has improved on a larger scale. Autocorrect may now correct mistakes more correctly and provide more personalised inline predictive Text. According to Apple, most of this increase may be attributed to the new transformer language model in iOS 17, which incorporates machine learning for word prediction. It has been educated with massive amounts of data, allowing it to understand context and patterns to offer better outcomes, or in this case, the capacity to mimic how humans sound.

Will Siri get smarter in the future as iPhone AI advances?

Siri has been available since iOS 5, introduced in 2011, but Apple's voice-activated assistant may soon become much smarter thanks to iOS Secret Features. According to a September story in the Information, Apple intends to improve Siri using big language models, a critical component of generative AI. An example in the article described how Siri would respond to basic voice commands for more sophisticated activities, such as converting a series of images into a GIF and emailing it to one of your contacts. If that scenario is correct, this is a huge step forward for Apple's digital assistant. Apple already used AI to help Siri understand language and respond in a human-like manner, among other things. Since Apple regularly introduces new iPhone software features during its Worldwide Developer Conference, we'll probably learn more about Apple's ambitions for AI on the iPhone then.