Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s suite of AI-powered tools and features, is gaining new features. Most notably, the company on Monday announced that Apple device owners will now be able to take advantage of Priority Notifcations, which allows Apple’s AI to highlight your most time-sensitive notifications in a new format. Other updates are coming to the Image Playground app and the Mac. Plus, Apple Intelligence is now available to iPhone and iPad users in the EU and on the Apple Vision Pro headset in U.S. English.
The changes are rolling out with the release of Apple software, iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4.
Apple notes that its AI features are also available in a number of new languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified). Localized English has also been added for both Singapore and India.
Though Apple Intelligence was introduced at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference last year as its new generative AI offering, the reality is that Apple was not prepared to release all its AI-powered features at once. That’s led to a slow and steady rollout of numerous AI updates since the release of iOS 18.1 where Apple Intelligence first went live. For instance, features like ChatGPT integration, Image Playground, and others didn’t arrive until iOS 18.2 (and iPadOS 18.2, macOS Sequoia 15.2) months later.
Among the new additions coming Monday, Priority Notifications may be the most useful if successfully implemented. Now, instead of having to dig for important updates across all your notifications — which often include nonessential updates and other marketing messages from apps — you’ll be able to see those that deserve attention appear at the top of the stack.
Other Apple Intelligence improvements arriving today include the ability to create a “memory movie” on Mac by typing a description, and an added Sketch style in Apple’s AI image generation app, Image Playground, for the creation of academic and detailed sketches.
Apple had previously announced that its AI suite would arrive in the EU in April 2025 — a delay Apple blamed on EU tech regulations, like the Digital Markets Act.
Meanwhile, Vision Pro users will be able to use AI features like Writing Tools, Image Playground, Genmoji and more with the expansion of Apple Intelligence to the mixed reality platform.
The update also includes a handful of new emojis, including a paint splatter, a face with bags under its eyes, a fingerprint, a root vegetable, and a shovel, among others. The recently announced recipe companion, Apple News+ Food, is arriving Monday, as well, alongside other tweaks to the revamped Apple Photos app and other Apple services.
