Apple Intelligence is finally available on iPhone – in certain regions, anyway – with a handful of new AI skills available to play with.
This includes big new features like the ability to remove people from your images and recording and transcribing phone calls to smaller, yet still useful features, like Writing Tools.
Writing Tools is essentially what it says on the tin; it’s a selection of AI-powered features that allow you to not only proofread your texts and emails but rewrite them and even reformat them on your behalf.
It’s a seriously useful tool, especially for those of us who take notes and send important emails from our iPhones. Here’s how to get the most out of it on your iPhone running iOS 18.1.
If you’re unsure whether your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, we’ve got you covered there too.
Apple Intelligence can proofread those important messages for you
Whether you’re sending an important email or a meaningful text message to a friend or family member, it’s always nice to get a second pair of eyes on the text to make sure that your message is being properly conveyed.
It’s the reason why we sub-edit the content at Trusted Reviews before anything goes live on the site – sometimes it takes a different perspective to pick out holes in your grammar and wording.
Thankfully, you no longer need to rely on someone else to give your important messages the once over with Apple Intelligence’s proofread function.
To use the proofread feature, simply select the text you want to refine and tap Writing Tools (you may have to tap > to see it) or tap the Apple Intelligence button in the toolbar in first-party apps like Messages, Notes and Mail.
From the Writing Tools menu, simply tap Proofread to get Apple Intelligence to check for grammatical and spelling errors.
From here, you’ll see a new version of your text, with any changes underlined. You can view changes and even an explanation of why it has been changed by tapping the up and down arrows at the bottom of the screen.
If you’re happy with the rewrite, tap Done to replace your text with the more polished text.
Use Apple Intelligence to rewrite texts, emails and more
Sometimes, you need more than a rewrite, especially when it comes to class notes, draft blog posts and other content that might need a little more pizazz.
Apple Intelligence can not only rewrite text to make it clearer, but it can actually change the tone of the text to make it more friendly, more professional or more concise depending on what’s required.
To get Apple Intelligence to rewrite chunks of text, simply highlight the text and tap Writing Tools or the Apple Intelligence logo as above, but this time, you want to tap Rewrite. This will automatically rewrite the text in a similar style, albeit more clearly.
If, however, you want to change the tone of your text, tap either Friendly, Professional or Concise. The text will then be rewritten, and if you’re not happy, you can generate another version by tapping Rewrite.
Once you’re happy with your rewrite, simply tap Done to save your changes.
Apple Intelligence can summarise and format blocks of text for you
Apple Intelligence doesn’t stop at simply proofreading and rewriting your messages – where’s the fun in that?
If you’ve got a super long block of text, say in the Notes app, that you want to summarise, Apple Intelligence can do that for you too. Simply access the Writing Tools as described above and tap Summarise Text to generate a paragraph-long summary, while tapping Key Points will generate a list of key points discussed within the text.
It goes even further, however, by being able to reorganise your content into a more easily digestible form. I was able to take a long list of email contacts I had stored in Notes and create a more easily usable table with all the information I needed, just by tapping Table.
And, finally, if your text describes a process or a to-do list, you can tap List to organise the original text in list form.
Once you’re happy with the generated summary or layout change, tap Replace to add it to your text.
The good thing about the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools is that you’re not limited to just Apple’s first-party apps like Messages, Mail and Notes – though it’s arguably in those apps that it’ll work at its best.
In fact, Apple itself claims that the feature should work in most third-party apps, and while that is true, WhatsApp is an outlier at the moment. There’s simply no way to activate Writing Tools from anywhere within the app, and it’s currently unclear whether this is Apple or WhatsApp’s doing.
Either way, it’s not ideal for the hundreds of thousands of iOS users who use WhatsApp every day, and we hope that changes in future.
Elsewhere though, it works in third-party mail apps like Gmail and it can summarise chunks of text on websites in Chrome using the same tech.
