Apple has finally done what it promised back in June and has released one of its biggest updates ever for iPhones today in the UK. Apple Intelligence, the firm’s first officially branded artificial intelligence features are available from today, 11 December 2024, to iPhone, iPad and Mac owners on these shores.

The technology aims to make your iPhone more helpful by updating voice assistant Siri, giving you new writing tools that help you compose emails, rewrite text, proofread, and summarise webpages, notifications and documents.

Apple has also updated the Photos app to be cleverer. It can now create memories, little montages, from your text or voice prompts, with iOS now smart enough to pick out pictures and videos of specific people doing specific things: “Andy playing rugby”, for example.

A new Clean Up feature works rather like Google’s Magic Editor on Pixel phones by letting you remove people or objects from photos to get the perfect shot.

The Mail app has also had an overhaul and can automatically show you priority messages first, such as emails that are time sensitive, as well as providing brief summaries of emails so you can see what they’re about without having to read the whole thing.

Similarly, stacks of notifications on your home screen are now summarised. This can be from a messaging app but also works across the whole system. You can get the gist of a series of notifications at a glance without having to read every one.

There’s also Image Playground, a new standalone app that lets you run wild with AI creations that you make from prompts. This could be an image of something, but is also open to using images in your photo library.

Other new goodies available today with Apple Intelligence include an updated Siri that lets you keep scrolling and tapping away in apps while using Siri, which you couldn’t do before, and it’s now meant to be more conversational. The assistant should remember what you were talking about so you can have a longer, contextual chat to get the information you need. Apple says Siri is now able to understand you even if you trip over your words or speak more casually to it.

It’s also able to act like an instruction manual for your iPhone, so you can ask it how to do specific things such as how to share a Wi-Fi password or how to fix a photo of someone blinking.

All of this sounds great, but there is a fairly large catch. Although iOS 18.2 is available today for millions of iPhones in the UK, only the most recent models are compatible with Apple Intelligence. The iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are the only models that will get these new smarts.

Any other iPhone dating back to 2018’s iPhone XS will get iOS 18.2, but Apple Intelligence won’t be part of it.

It means if you want to try out all these new AI tools for yourself, you may have to think about upgrading to one of the new iPhone 16 models - Apple does not sell the iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max any more. The regular iPhone 15 that Apple does still sell is not compatible.

Additionally, if you own an iPad with A17 Pro or M1 chip and later, pr a Mac or MacBook with M1 and later you will be able to get the select Apple Intelligence features in the UK on them today after a software update.

If you are lucky enough to have one of the compatible iPhones, iPads or Macs, here are Apple’s instructions on how to get Apple Intelligence working:

“To get started with Apple Intelligence after you update your device, go to Settings, and tap or click Apple Intelligence & Siri. Generative models will begin to download after users start this setup.”

After flicking this switch on in your settings app, things should start getting smarter.

“This is just the beginning of what we can expect to see from phones in the future,” Uswitch spokesman Ernest Doku said. “The battle of the AI features is likely to get more intense as competitors battle on how to differentiate, as well as offer consumers the most helpful and innovative tools.”

Samsung’s latest handsets have Galaxy AI features similar to those in Apple Intelligence, while Google is building its Gemini AI assistant that is available across many Android devices, not just its own Pixel smartphones.