Apple has announced a new feature called Visual Intelligence that will be part of iOS 18’s Apple Intelligence suite of AI features “later this year.” The feature works much like similar features offered by other multimodal AI systems from Google or OpenAI.
Visual Intelligence lets you “instantly learn about everything you see,” Apple’s Craig Federighi said during the company’s September event today. Federighi said the feature is “enabled by Camera Control,” which is the company’s name for a new capacitive camera button that’s now on the side of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro phones. To trigger it, users will need to click and hold the button, then point the phone’s camera at whatever they’re curious about.
iPhones use a “combination of…