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Anyone using Apple Intelligence? If so why?
- Thread starter chmania
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I really like the email and message summarization features, and the writing tools are great in Notes.
At present, Apple Intelligence can only 'speak' in American English, whereas other AIs are capable of communicating in virtually all languages. I must say, I don't believe that email or message summarisation is particularly beneficial—it's important to read one's emails and messages with due care and attention. Siri often struggles to provide direct answers to straightforward questions.
Other AIs don't integrate with my system and offer no privacy guarantees. If you get 100-150 emails per day like me, summaries are extremely effective. I can immediately tell what to prioritize and what additional materials I need to prepare. Of course one still needs to read the email, but this is a great assistant function.
Are you suggesting that you receive a large volume of emails from various individuals and would like the Apple bot to summarise them for you?
I am receiving a large volume of emails, something’s from the same individual and sometimes from different individuals, and Apple model already helps me to prioritize them and reduce interruptions to my work.
Also, writing tools make me considerably faster at writing emails.
Yesterday (show-and-tell with SO) I ran some of the AI Writing Tools on a few Notes I had (draft letters written, multiple paragraph docs, etc.) and I appreciate the functionality much more, now.
I don't know about compute-generated stuff, but using the in-built tools to refine and act-upon Content that I have personally created holds some definite plusses.
CIP: I had a tab-separated Materials/Labor doc I made for a Client last year, and I was able to plop it into a Table. Unfortunately, not all of the original data (namely, some of the most important parts) was included in the resulting matrix, so it looks like this is a WIP.
OTOH, AI Writing Tools did a decent job of re-fining old draft letters upon which I tried it.
I don't know about compute-generated stuff, but using the in-built tools to refine and act-upon Content that I have personally created holds some definite plusses.
CIP: I had a tab-separated Materials/Labor doc I made for a Client last year, and I was able to plop it into a Table. Unfortunately, not all of the original data (namely, some of the most important parts) was included in the resulting matrix, so it looks like this is a WIP.
OTOH, AI Writing Tools did a decent job of re-fining old draft letters upon which I tried it.
I tried Apple Intelligence for a while, but I didn't find it particularly useful. I don't write enough BS to benefit from text generation, and tools that transform existing text increase the proofreading burden too much to make them worth it. And because Apple Intelligence somehow added a second set of borders to the preview pane in Mail, which I found distracting, I decided to deactivate it.
GitHub Copilot is still the only AI tool I've found valuable. It's an idiot savant that often manages to guess what I'm trying to do. But it often also gets things subtly or blatantly wrong.
GitHub Copilot is still the only AI tool I've found valuable. It's an idiot savant that often manages to guess what I'm trying to do. But it often also gets things subtly or blatantly wrong.
I use the writing tools daily but what Apple is currently offering is a bit underperforming. The model is on-device, runs on ANE and consuming very little power compared to more capable models, but I am usually not satisfied with text generated by the writing tools and have to rewrite/rephrase the text changed by that tool by myself again... which makes it much less useful than it should be.
I like the notification summaries, and I often use the Writing Tools. I don't care about text generation or re-writing, but the proofreading is regularly useful to me.
I tried it for a few days and found it somewhat useless so I turned it off. I can kind of understand the use case on a Mac, but I really don't understand it for an iPhone. I mean, summarizing text messages seems pretty pointless as they are by their nature, brief. Perhaps there are other things it can do, but I'm pretty happy with iOS and my iPhone as is so I don't have a ton of interest in spending time to figure AI for what looks to be marginal improvements at best.
I won’t have a phone capable of running Apple Intelligence for a while, and that never bothered me, as I didn’t see it as compelling for an iPhone. What I have found though, running it on my MacBook Pro since it was available in beta, is that now I often start to reach for Writing Tools when on my phone. So there are certainly parts of Apple Intelligence that I miss when I’m on my phone.
Downloaded iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 today and I have to say, I'm not a fan of the AI implementation.
On my Mac, it was honestly getting in the way of what I REALLY wanted to type. It wasn't terrible at predicting good responses or phrases but it wasn't exactly helpful either. If I have to write a long and drawn out email response in a specific writing style, I might use ChatGPT on it's own but I can't see myself using baked in AI to justify keeping it around. At this point, I've turned off AI on my Mac.
On my iPhone, it's kind of been the same experience. I kind of view it as a neat party trick that will impress someone but its actual usefulness has yet to be discovered. I know Siri is smarter so that will help for those times I ask siri very specific questions but far and away, it's kind of "meh" on my iPhone too. I'll probably be turning it off.
Edit: I just realized that AI is a HUGE battery suck so definitely turning it off on my iPhone. Going from 85% to 70% in 10 minutes while idle and doing nothing...big red flag.
As for the Image Playground app...I've never been so creeped out by an image of me. Again, it's neat to play with but there is also a lot of "No...nope...no" attached to it too so I'll be deleting the app.
On my Mac, it was honestly getting in the way of what I REALLY wanted to type. It wasn't terrible at predicting good responses or phrases but it wasn't exactly helpful either. If I have to write a long and drawn out email response in a specific writing style, I might use ChatGPT on it's own but I can't see myself using baked in AI to justify keeping it around. At this point, I've turned off AI on my Mac.
On my iPhone, it's kind of been the same experience. I kind of view it as a neat party trick that will impress someone but its actual usefulness has yet to be discovered. I know Siri is smarter so that will help for those times I ask siri very specific questions but far and away, it's kind of "meh" on my iPhone too. I'll probably be turning it off.
Edit: I just realized that AI is a HUGE battery suck so definitely turning it off on my iPhone. Going from 85% to 70% in 10 minutes while idle and doing nothing...big red flag.
As for the Image Playground app...I've never been so creeped out by an image of me. Again, it's neat to play with but there is also a lot of "No...nope...no" attached to it too so I'll be deleting the app.
Yeah . . . I felt the same way.
Still (no pun intended), IP is some seriously interesting property
