Apple has finally jumped into the AI race with Apple Intelligence. The company’s suite of AI features was unveiled at WWDC 2024, and some of Apple Intelligence’s features are now available in the iOS 18 beta. While Apple has been slow to roll out AI features, writing tools powered by generative AI are available in the iOS 18.1 beta. Apple Intelligence is still in beta, and you’ll need to sign up for the waitlist to get the feature. However, it didn’t take long for us to get approved on a device that supports Apple Intelligence.
There is no additional button to enable the writing tools. Once you enable Apple Intelligence in Settings, the writing tools will start appearing in all the places where you can write text on your iPhone, iPad, and macOS. The writing tools are not limited to native apps, you can also use them in third-party apps like WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc.
To start using the writing tools, simply select some text by double-tapping it, then choose Writing Tools from the context menu that appears.
- On iPhone and iPad, select the text, then tap ‘>’ next to the cut, copy, paste, and format options. Tap Writing Tools.
- On Mac, select the text, right-click, then click Writing Tools.
Apple Intelligence’s writing tools offer several options: Proofread, Rewrite, Summary, Highlights, List, and Table. I tried each of these tools to see how they perform.
Eliminate typos with Proofread
The first tool in the suite is Proofread, and it works as expected. As someone who literally makes a living making content appear error-free, the Proofread tool built into the keyboard makes my life a little easier. Apple Intelligence’s Proofread tool in Writing Tools highlights typos, grammatical errors, and missing punctuation.
You can tap the arrows to see the changes, which are also highlighted in the text. To accept all the changes suggested by Apple’s AI writing tools, tap Done, or navigate through the suggested changes and choose “Use Original” if you don’t want to apply the suggested change. To reject all the changes and keep the original text, just tap Revert.
Be careful, once you accept the changes, there is no way to revert to the original text, unless the application you are using has an option to undo (e.g. Notes).
Rewrite the text in a friendly or professional tone
The second tool is Rewrite which allows you to rewrite the selected text. You can also choose to rewrite the text in a professional or friendly tone. Select the text, go to Writing Tools, and then tap Rewrite to rephrase it. If you want the text to be rewritten in a friendly or professional tone, choose one of the two options below.
Although it’s in beta, the feature works flawlessly, and I was able to turn a random text into a professional email using the Rewrite feature. It’s by far the most useful tool I’ve used in Apple Intelligence’s Writing Tools feature.
Concise text
There are situations when you want to concise the text to post on social media with a word limit (X, I’m looking at you). Here, the Concise feature of Writing Tools works perfectly. I tried it on a long text of 120 words and the tool shortened it to 70 words, which is great. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can try again or go back to the original text completely.
Summarize and transform a long text into key points
The Summary and Highlights features are also a great addition to Apple Intelligence’s writing tools. I use them a lot in my daily tasks. The Summary feature works great and gives you a summary of a long text in the form of a sentence. The Highlights feature, on the other hand, turns a long text into bullet points that highlight the most important things.
The list function simply transforms the text into a list format but does not summarize it; very useful in cases where paragraphs seem terribly long.
The advantage is that you can copy the summary text or key points and share them anywhere.
Quickly transform numbers into tables
If you work with data and numbers, the Table feature in Writing Tools can make your life easier. I was surprised at how well it works for turning bulleted text into tables. Take a look at the screenshot and see how it transforms the data into a tabular format. As you can see in the screenshot above, it also automatically labeled the table headers. However, the tool doesn’t work very well when applied to a large chunk of text.
Apple Intelligence Writing Tools Don’t Work With Controversial Text
To put the tools through extensive testing, I tried using the tools on controversial texts containing swear words and other unaccepted words, the tool returned no results. Instead, it says that the writing tools were not designed to work with this type of content.
Screenshot
Well, these are all the writing tools of Apple Intelligence and they are undoubtedly useful.
What do you think about Apple Intelligence?
How to turn off writing tools in Apple Intelligence?
Unfortunately, at this time there is no other option to disable this feature other than disabling Apple Intelligence completely.
Do Apple Intelligence writing tools work with third-party keyboards like GBoard?
Yes, Apple Intelligence writing tools work with third-party keyboards. We tried it on Gboard and all writing tools worked fine.
