Transcription
All the rumors are that Apple Intelligence is going to get way better with iOS 27 and Gemini. But what can it do right now? Well, I'm going to show you 10 ways you can use Apple Intelligence right now in iOS 26 that are pretty good, like generating music playlists with Apple Intelligence, automatically sorting reminders, there's some sneaky features in visual intelligence and screenshots, some powerful photos features. And yes, we'll round that out with some powerful shortcuts that use Apple Intelligence.
First up, this was a recent feature in iOS 26. But Apple Intelligence can generate playlists. Remember you do need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer and Apple Intelligence enabled. But in the music app go over to the library tab and when you tap the create new playlist button here at the top it's actually going to go into this mode where you can prompt Apple Intelligence to make a playlist. You can actually choose a suggested song and it will make a playlist around that or one of the playlist ideas here like morning coffee music. It's going to generate the playlist and in a few moments it'll put together the playlist for you. You see it all here and you can add it to your library by just tapping the check. But you can you can also prompt it to make a completely custom. And the longer the prompt or more specific, the better. Create an 80s funk playlist inspired by Earth, Wind and Fire, Tower of Power and Stevie Wonder. So I kind of gave it a genre and style and gave it some artists to include. And let's see what it comes up with. And here we go. It included some songs from artists that I mentioned like Tower of Power and Earth, Wind and Fire, but some other songs that also match the prompt. You can even go in and customize it further if you want it to maybe remove an artist or add songs from an artist and just refresh it to run it again.
All right, next up. And just like that, we've separated into content planning and writing, miscellaneous, promotion, sponsorship, and now it's all organized. And when you add a new task, let's say I want to post a tic-tac-toe. it should automatically sort it to the right category, post tic-tac-promo. So if I add that task here to the reminders list and hit the blue check, after a second, you'll see Apple Intelligence kind of grabbed that task and it moved it into the right section. Now going forward, any new tasks that get added to this list will be automatically sorted.
Next, I've been using this one pretty often, which is to pull dates from a screenshot. So let's say you're browsing social media and you see a post, maybe with a concert or event that you want to attend. but as Instagram and other social media platforms does, you can't just tap the date and add it to your calendar. But if you take a screenshot and Apple Intelligence is enabled, if you wait a second, you'll see here at the bottom the ability to add to calendar. If you tap that, it's going to pull information from the screenshot and automatically add that event. It even adds the location, the date and time, and any additional information will be put in the notes section of that event. It pulled all of that just from the screenshot. Now one unfortunate part of that visual intelligence feature is if there are multiple images, it's only going to pull the first or the most prominent date. So you'll see here at the bottom, there's only one add to calendar option, and if I tap it, it will find the April 9th, which was the first date. So it won't let you add multiple events at once, but you could create a shortcut for that.
Another thing visual intelligence can pull from a screenshot is a URL. So here on TikTok, when I share a shortcut, they just don't make links clickable. So what I have to do is put it down here in a comment. But if you take a screenshot, give visual intelligence a second, it will recognize links. They appear here at the bottom. And if you tap it, it'll load it and you can download the shortcut. This works for any URL you see in any screenshot.
Now in addition to screenshots, you can hold the camera control and that opens Visual Intelligence here. I did a whole video on all the features of Visual Intelligence. You can scan this QR code and watch that video or I'll link it above. But there's actually a new feature that more and more third-party apps are adopting. So if you take a picture with Visual Intelligence, you can ask ChatGPT anything about the image, but you can do the search button and that does a reverse image search. Now you'll see the Google results for images, but depending on what apps you have installed on your phone, there's actually a lot of options up here. And you can do things like browse the Etsy store for whatever it is that you're looking at. And an app that I just saw added support for this feature in visual intelligence is Amazon. Now, unfortunately, Amazon is not gonna show you the results here in the tab. You do have to tap more results from Amazon, but then it will open the Lens AI feature and you can use that to try and find the product you're looking at on Amazon. You can also just do that in the Amazon app by tapping the camera icon here. But you can also use that reverse image search via the screenshot. So if you take a screenshot of something and you want to try and find it, you can still tap that reverse search button. You'll see the Google images, and that's actually where this Apple logo is, it's an Etsy product. And if you go over to the Etsy tab, you have to have the Etsy app on your phone. Unfortunately, somehow it doesn't do as good of a job as the Google reverse image search, but you can see social media posts with that image and tap one of the links there, or find that image posted on social media so you can try to find where to buy.
Some great features and photos that use Apple Intelligence as well. But as you use Apple Intelligence, you might notice your phone getting a little warm and that battery takes a hit. Well, that's where today's sponsor comes in. Basis. Basis has a new line of AM52, one of the thinnest Qi 2.2 magnetic power banks delivering that 25 watt of fast, safe wireless charging. Listen, I am no stranger to MagSafe power banks. I've tried a ton and Basis is always my go-to for powerful, fast power banks and even really small, compact versions. You can their latest AM52 power banks with and without a built-in cable too. Also, Basis offers a two-year replacement on their power banks and the Basis AM52 has a slim profile compared to all those large, bulky power banks you see elsewhere. It has that soft touch inside so you know it's not going to scratch your phone. I love that it's contoured so it feels good in the hand when it's on the back. And those Qi 2 25 watt charging speeds. I've tested lots of different power banks and Basis has some of the best and coolest performance of a power bank. I did in-depth charging tests on the AM52 and it will go to 3 to 51% in just 42 minutes. And just over an hour on wireless charging can get you close to 80. And the surface temperature of the AM52 gets nowhere near as hot as other models and Basis uses a triple loop cooling to ensure a stable performance and safer charging. And the AM52 is super solid, it's not coming off the back of your phone. And if you need even faster charging, you can get the AM52 with the built-in cable acts as a lanyard or carrying handle when you're not using it. And there's an additional USB C port on the bottom so you can charge your phone, charge a pair of AirPods. You see the light right there. You can even plug in that third device. And now you're charging your iPhone, AirPods, and something else. Getting you up to 65% in just 30 minutes. And if you want to get even thinner, Basis has a Qi 2, 5,000 milliamp hour MagSafe battery. Super thin, even looks good on the iPhone Air. And one of my favorites to this day is the Pico Go, which actually has a built-in kickstand, either portrait or landscape mode. And you still get Qi 2 charging speeds. That's the new Basis MagSafe Power Bank lineup. You can scan this QR code or check the link below and you can find links to all of these. Stay charged and do all the Apple Intelligence stuff on your phone without draining your battery. My thanks to Basis for sponsoring this video.
Now let's go to actual photos and see what Apple Intelligence can do. First up, if you wanted to obscure faces in a photo, Apple Intelligence can do that right here in the photos app. Just tap the settings icon and then enable the cleanup feature down here at the bottom. It'll take a second for the photo to process. And let's say you want to obscure someone's face in the picture. Well, you can literally just scribble over the face and give it a second and it will actually blur it out, kind of using that sensor. Now that person's face is covered. You can always undo it right over here. You can also just circle the face like this and it will do the same thing, pixelating it.
Also, if you're looking for a photo, you can actually use more natural language search right here in the photos app. You can actually see some suggestions already. I can look for an activity and a location like skateboarding in Lakeland, and it showed me all my videos and photos from the skate park. You can also say dinner with a person, a location and a time. And so maybe I'll search for photos at restaurants with my kids. It actually did a pretty good job of that. You can also search for objects, a laptop with audio interface, and it did pretty good. Found something like that here. Here's another photo. This was me in a hotel room recording Primary Technology. That's my tech podcast. By the way, new episodes every Thursday, scan here to listen or watch. And you can even search for specific years. Show me pictures of me and Jordan from 2014 so I can put that search term in. These are photos from that year and it includes me and my son's face. This is why it's helpful to actually go to the collections of your photographs library and then go to the people tab here and actually identify people, name them, maybe reorder them. I also favorite some of them like my family. This way photos of those people show up more and in your search you can actually say me and my kids, me and my parents, things like that.
Next, Apple Intelligence works for things like live translations in messages and it even works in person using things like AirPods. My wife had to communicate with someone actually from Brazil who spoke Portuguese and she used her AirPods Pro with live Translation and the other person can read what my wife was saying in Portuguese from my wife's iPhone. It actually works surprisingly well. I did an entire demo of it in my AirPods Pro 3 review, which I'll link above and below.
Before we get to some shortcuts, I do want to sneak in one feature that I just discovered about Apple Notes. So when you add a folder here in the Notes app, you can actually make it into a smart folder and there are a ton of options for sorting notes automatically into this folder. You can see just your shared notes, notes where you're mentioned in, and you can at mention others who are collaborating on notes, just notes with checklists. And you can include any combination of these attributes. In this one feature, the edited, I had created shortcuts before for people who wanted to see what notes have been edited recently. And so you could say, what notes have I edited in the last seven days? And you can actually create a smart folder that just shows you those notes. I can call it recently edited, create this folder, and now it will show me all the notes that have been changed in the last seven days. I didn't realize smart folders had gotten so powerful with all these options. So I just wanted to point that out.
All right. For 10 plus ways to use Apple Intelligence, these are all in shortcuts. Now several of these shortcuts actually shared in past videos. And if you want to see some of my most popular, I have my top 20 of 2025. Some of my best shortcuts from the last year, I'll link that video via the QR code here and the YouTube flag above. But there's lots of great shortcuts here, many of them using Apple Intelligence.
One of my favorites is this find local food spots. Now what you can do is choose from your photos or take a screenshot. So maybe you see something on social media, a coffee place that someone shared but didn't tag. Well, this is going to use Apple Intelligence, actually the private cloud compute model, not even ChatGPT. And it's going to pass that image, plus your current location, the city and state, and look for businesses that match near your location. And any identifying markers in that image. It can also add that location to an Apple note, and even open that business in Apple Maps. This sounds wild that it works, but it totally does. And I have this shortcut in my control center, my find local food spots. This is where I can just tell Siri to take a screenshot. It hides a control center, captures the image, then I don't have to save it to my camera roll, and it will show me these search results here in Apple Maps. And sure enough, there it is. Maybe I come across this image, this is actually one of my favorite restaurants here in Tampa. I'll do the same thing, find local food spots, take a screenshot, and even though there's no address or anything visibly here in the image, it's gonna pass all that information to Apple Intelligence, and sure enough, that's the restaurant.
Now another shortcut that uses Apple Intelligence is what I call my "Remember This" shortcut. I have several different versions of this. Some goes to Apple Notes, some of it goes to Reminders. I'll do my Remember This to Reminders. And what it does is hides the control center, takes a screenshot of whatever's on screen, you can choose to add some additional context for what you're looking at, uses Apple Intelligence to pull information from what it's looking at, and then adds something to Reminders. You can choose what Reminders list you want to go to. It actually attaches the screenshot so you have some context of what you were looking at, and provides a summary. And this will work anywhere. So if there's a text message where you want to save it and remember something for later, or even a Safari web page, the Remember This shortcut works everywhere. I'm going to put links to these shortcuts down in the video description.
And another one is actually summarizing podcasts. Now this one only works in Apple Podcasts, but using Apple Intelligence, I can just tap the share button on any podcast episode, go down to my shortcuts here and use these summarize Apple Podcasts. It's going to take a minute. It's going to send that link to Apple Intelligence via ChatGPT, and then create an Apple note with a summary of that episode here. I have a multi-sentence summary. I also have the key takeaways right here. And this is way more than just what's in the description of the episode. Really useful shortcut. But again, it just works on Apple Podcasts sharing a specific episode.
Also, I have shortcuts that rename and even sort your files using Apple Intelligence. I'll put a link to this one, my rename files, Apple Intelligence. When you run it, you can actually run it from the share sheet if you want to select the files first. But if you just run the shortcut normally, you can now select multiple files and it could be different types of files. So these are text files, PDF, and audio files. And then when you select multiple, it's going to run the shortcut. Now it's going to go through each file. I'm not going to add any context. If it's a text file, it'll just grab the text from the document, the PDF. If it's an audio file, it's actually going to transcribe it first. If it's an image, it'll look at the content of that image and try to develop a name. The shortcut is going to take a minute to run because with every single file, it's going to be doing one of these processes. And then once it's done, you can go to the files and you'll see they've been renamed by that shortcut. If you try to rename a lot of files at once, the shortcut will probably fail, just so you know.
And finally, in my last shortcuts roundup video, I shared several different ones for voice memos. Either summarizing and transcribing a voice memo to Apple Notes, to Bear, even from your Apple Watch. So if you want to get those shortcuts and about 28 others, I'll link that video right up here. And don't forget to subscribe and hit that like button before you go. Lots of shortcuts content, all the updates to iOS. And when iOS 27 comes out, even the betas over the summer, I'll be covering them right here. I'll put another video YouTube thinks you'll enjoy right over here. Thank you for watching. I'll catch you next time.