iPadOS 18.1 is available today, and brings the first set of Apple Intelligence features, Apple’s suite of artificial intelligence tools, to iPad users. At WWDC 2024 introduced that Apple Intelligence features will be rolling out of the course of the next year (a point many people seemed to have missed).

Requirements

On iPadOS, Apple Intelligence is only available on the following devices:

• iPad Pro (M1 and newer)
• iPad Air (M1 and newer)
• iPad Mini (A17 Pro)

Apple Intelligence is launching in beta, and Apple has implemented a waitlist to gradually allow users access. Once you upgrade to iPadOS 18.1, you’ll want to go into Settings -> Apple Intelligence & Siri, and flip the switch to opt into Apple Intelligence.

Writing Tools

The first set of Apple Intelligence features are focused around writing, and are referred to as Writing Tools. Writing Tools are a variety of AI powered capabilities that become available when you are interacting with text.

• Proofread – Provides grammar and spelling improvements. Changes are applied in line, so you won’t get to see the changes before the system makes them. You’ll need to toggle through the changes one by one, or revert the whole action to undo them.
  
• Rewrite – Apple Intelligence provides three options for rewriting your text with one of three different writing tones:
  
  • Friendly
  • Professional
  • Concise

These are fun to play with, and can provide some great recommenations that you can use to tweak your writing to get the vibe you’re going for.

Underneath these key writing tools, there are options for summarizing text.

• Summarize – Provides a concise summary of the text you’ve highlighted.
  
• Key Points – Summarizes text content into a bulleted list of key points
  
• Table – Summarizes content into a table format
  
• List – Summarize text into a list

To be completely honest, I’m not really sure what the value is for the Table and List options. Please let me know if you have a use case.

Notifications

Notifications have long been an area of complaint from the inception of the iPhone, where notifications were modal alerts that disappeared forever once they were dismissed. Apple Intelligence provides maybe the most substantial improvement to notifications in years.

• Notification Summaries – Apple Intelligence can now present summaries of your notifications. You’ll mostly encounter this on the Lock Screen, but they also surface in Messages and Mail conversations. Often the summaries are useful, sometimes the summaries are less useful, and other times, the summaries are kinda funny.
  
• Reduce Interruptions is a new Focus setting that allows that attempts to prioritize notifications, and only alert you withwhat the system deems is an “important” notification. The determination for what is “important” is determined by analyzing the content of the message (on device) combined with the sender of the notification, and your usage patterns with that app or contact. In addition to being a Focus mode itself, Reduce Inturruptions is also a setting that can be turned on for your existing Focus modes.
  

Siri

Siri gets a few improvements in iPadOS 18.1, but this isn’t the big Siri improvement we’ve been waiting for. The update that allows Siri to tap into your personal context will likely come in iPadOS 18.4 in 2025.

The first thing Siri change you’ll notice is a refreshed interface. When you invoke Siri, you no longer get a floating orb in the corner. The sides of the display light up in the beautiful multi-colored interface, and it respond to your voice as you speak.

Type To Siri

Double tapping the home bar or the bottom of the display brings up a new interface for typing to Siri. This isn’t completely new, there’s been an accessibility option to enable a type to Siri experience for a little bit now. This expands on that option to lets you more discreetly issue commands and queries to Siri. As you’d expect, if you type something to Siri, its responses back to you will be textual and not spoken.

Scribble To Siri

Because this is iPadOS, you’re also able to use Type To Siri with the Apple Pencil, which is nice because it helps you stay in the Apple Pencil flow while still being able to discreetly use Siri.

Siri learns about Apple Products

Siri has learned a lot about Apple Products. You’re now able to ask Siri a number of questions about Apple Products.

Photos

• Clean Up is a feature that will be familiar to Google Photos users. With Clean Up, you can use AI to remove unwanted elements from your photos. The results can be mixed, and will hopefully improve over time.
  
• Photos now lets you describe the photos your looking for, and the system will interpret your natural language search terms to figure out what you mean o search.
  

Smart Reply

• In Both the Mail app and Messages app, the Smart Reply feature analyzes the content of your message to suggest relevant replies that you can quickly tap to use in your response.
  

Control Center

Control Center underwent a major overhaul in iPadOS 18, and in iPadOS 18.1, we get a few nice refinements.

• If you’re familiar with the connectivity platter which has your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Cellular options, those controls can now be added individually in Control Center. So if you want to get rid of that platter, you now can!
• I’ve seen plenty of videos on social media about how difficult it can be to arrange your Control Center tiles. To help out (slightly), Apple added a reset option in Settings that at least makes it easy to start over if you get to a weird point in your layout. You get to this by going to Settings -> Control Center.

Notes

If you’re taking advantage of audio recordings in Notes, like for college lectures or meetings, Apple Intelligence will provide a summary of the contents of your recording, without having to go into the recording itself.