Apple expands its AI features
Everything AI announced at Apple's annual keynote
Apple opened WWDC25 with a bruise. Twelve months of jeers over Siri and a quiet Vision Pro shoved the crew toward one goal: prove the company still writes the future. While there were rumors that Apple wouldn’t chat much on AI this year, these were completely wrong. Nearly every section of the keynote featured subtle AI additions or upgrades.
Here’s what they just announced:
🤝 Live Translation flips the language switch. Messages, FaceTime, and Phone translate text and speech inside the device. Words land in the listener's ears while the transcript stays private.
🎨 Genmoji & Image Playground get messy. Mix emoji with words to spawn new icons or tweak a friend’s look. Image Playground now taps ChatGPT for new styles, including oil painting and vector art.
🔍 Visual Intelligence turns the screen into a search field. Press the screenshot buttons to trigger visual search. Highlight an object and find similar products via Google, Etsy, or ask ChatGPT about it. Adds smart Calendar suggestions from screen content.
🏃♂️ Workout Buddy lands on Apple Watch. Real-time, personalized fitness insights during sessions, with a dynamic voice built from Fitness+ trainers. Works offline with an AI-supported iPhone nearby.
🧠 On-Device Foundation Model opens to developers. Any app can now tap the on-device model with the new Foundation Models framework. Features native Swift support. Example: generate quizzes from notes, add natural language search offline, no cloud API fees.
⚡️ Shortcuts supercharged. New intelligent actions enabled by Apple Intelligence. Users can create workflows that tap into on-device models or Private Cloud Compute. Optional ChatGPT integration available too.
📅 Reminders get smarter. Relevant actions in emails, websites, or notes are now surfaced and categorized automatically.
🛍️ Apple Wallet now pulls and summarizes order tracking details from merchant emails. Full order history and progress are surfaced in one view.
📊 Messages polls become native. Users can create polls in any conversation. Apple Intelligence suggests polls when appropriate.
🖼️ Messages backgrounds go custom. Create backgrounds with Image Playground to match the tone of each conversation.
🌎 Language expansion. Apple Intelligence features will support eight more languages by year-end: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese.
Many AI-powered features here (flight tracking, order tracking, visual search, poll creation) will likely cannibalize entire categories of third-party apps. Apple is going all-in (again), with innumerous subtle AI features and many prominently featured ones.
Check them all out when they land on your phone and elsewhere later this year.
From where I stand — in localization and internationalization — enhanced multilingual app support is a big win for global user experience. For example, Arabic-speaking users will now be able to switch seamlessly between Arabic and English, which is incredibly common. Many users need to move between both alphabets and directions, and this update makes that much more intuitive and easy.