Apple’s iPhone gets some (mostly) useful AI features – The Boston Globe

But what’s just arrived provides some useful, if imperfect, time-saving assistance.

For example, the phone call summarization feature wrote that my wife “informs the caller that she dropped off her car and sold the BMW.”

Sorry, no — my wife did drop off her car for an oil change and took my car home, which I had parked nearby and left with the keys under the sun visor. “Nobody stole the BMW,” is what she actually said, razzing her husband for his carefree car security attitude.

Any call can now be recorded by clicking an icon that appears in the top left of the active call screen. Click and the iPhone announces to all parties on the line that the call is being recorded. After the call ends, the recording and the AI-generated transcript and summary appear in the Notes app.

And AI summarization works in many more places than just call recordings.

You can highlight text in almost any app and get a summary from the new “Writing Tools” menu that pops up alongside the preexisting options like copy and paste. In addition to summarizing, in apps that can edit text, the new tools also offer to proofread the highlighted text, rewrite it, or turn it into a to-do list. I also tried highlighting a few paragraphs describing some hospital sales and the AI generated a table I could add to a spreadsheet with headings listing the buyer, the price, and the names of hospitals sold (although the formatting didn’t transfer perfectly).

Some Apple apps have the summary feature built in, if not always in the most obvious place. In the Safari web browser, for example, you have to click the small Apple Intelligence icon in the web address bar, then click “show reader” on the next screen. That takes you to a simplified view of the web page and then you can click a “summarize” button.

The web summaries are pretty good. The shortened view of a Wall Street Journal article about the Celtics early season success was 100 percent accurate, even correctly citing the team’s sky high average of 50.25 3-point attempts per game. A summary of the Globe’s coverage of a comic at former President Trump’s MSG rally insulting Puerto Rico was also right on, concluding: “The incident highlights the importance of respectful discourse in political campaigns.”

Summarization also works in Apple’s email app and on notification alerts that pile up. Some reviewers have already noticed a few quirks, but I found the summaries generally on target.

I also set Apple Intelligence loose to suggest improvements to some of my stories. I loaded a story draft into a text editing app called IA Writer and added a few grammatical and spelling errors. After I highlighted all of the text and navigated to “Writing Tools” on the pop up bar, the proofreader found all of the mistakes and suggested fixes.

The user interface isn’t the best for reviewing longer blocks of text, however. Instead of walking the user through the text and highlighting the mistakes and fixes, like spell checkers of yore, Apple Intelligence shows its own lengthy, corrected version with no highlights to indicate where it suggested a change. You can replace your entire highlighted text block with the AI’s suggested block and then it shows, in faint grey text, where it made changes. Want to undo the replacement? Search for the tiny undo arrow icon at the top of the onscreen keyboard. The whole process is hard to figure and had me nervous that tapping the wrong tiny onscreen icon would erase all my work.

Besides the text features, Apple Intelligence also helped the iPhone catch up to Google’s photo magic on Android phones.

A new “clean up” button appears when editing any photo. Circle something you’d like to remove from a photo and, presto, change-o, it’s removed. The clean up worked best when the disappearing object was in front of a simple background, like a lawn or sidewalk.

Siri gets a fresh coat of paint in this update, but not much more. Instead of a glowing circular orb at the bottom of the screen, Siri now indicates it is active with a glowing border around the whole screen.

Same old, meh Siri, however. It can’t answer complicated questions and prefers to send you to a web page. For a new super Siri powered by AI, we’ll have to wait a little longer.

Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.