Apple Unveils Visual Intelligence to Enhance iPhone AI Features

At WWDC 2025, Apple unveiled Visual Intelligence, a new feature that allows iPhones to analyze what users are viewing on their screens and take specific actions based on that content. This marks a significant step forward in Apple’s AI capabilities, bringing multimodal intelligence beyond the camera and into everyday phone interactions.

Users can highlight objects on their screen, such as a lamp, to search for similar items online through platforms like Google or Etsy. They can also ask AI assistants like ChatGPT questions about the screen content to gain more information, enhancing the interactive experience.

While these features are not entirely novel compared to competitors like Google’s Gemini, Apple’s approach emphasizes on-device AI processing, which improves user privacy by keeping data local rather than sending it to the cloud.

This on-device AI capability is crucial as smartphones become more feature-rich and complex, often leading to bloated interfaces. Visual Intelligence aims to cut through this complexity by enabling agentic AI that can perform tasks for users, streamlining interactions and reducing friction.

In addition to Visual Intelligence, Apple introduced AI-powered Live Translation in Messages and FaceTime, allowing real-time translation during conversations. Updates to Genmoji and Image Playground also bring new customization options and art styles for generated images and emojis.

Apple is also opening its on-device foundation model to third-party developers, enabling them to build AI features that work offline, protect user privacy, and avoid cloud API costs. For example, educational apps can generate personalized quizzes from notes, and outdoor apps can offer natural language search without internet connectivity.

Despite these advancements, Apple’s AI progress still feels cautious and incremental, especially compared to competitors. Notably absent was an update to Siri’s AI capabilities, though Apple promised more news later in the year.

Overall, Visual Intelligence and the expanded AI features represent meaningful steps toward more intelligent, privacy-conscious user experiences on iPhones. While not revolutionary, these updates help Apple keep pace in the evolving AI landscape and offer developers new tools to innovate within Apple’s ecosystem.