The first Apple Intelligence features have finally arrived. Kind of.

On recent iPhones and Macs, you can set your language to US English and download tools that kick off Apple’s long-promised generative AI suite, with more tools (and official Australian English support) coming in December.

Apple has a reputation for holding off on technological advancements, letting other companies stumble over the early issues and teething problems, and then delivering a more refined and usable version. But I’m not sure that’s happening here.

Technically the tools are still labelled as being in beta, which used to mean not fit for public use but recently has come to mean “might be weird or lie to you”.Credit:

The language tools on Google and Samsung phones feel nascent and unreliable. They give the impression that the systems understand how to make nice sentences but have no clue what anything actually means, that the people who designed them view conversations as purely informational and transactional, and that the companies behind them have sent the features live specifically so they can gather feedback on how to fix them.

The first Apple Intelligence features have the same problem.

In a purely practical sense, these tools have been promoted as part of an ecosystem of features that can save you time and energy while you get things done, limiting your need to deal with busywork. But they could only ever start to do that if you could comfortably rely on them without double-checking their work. For now, you can’t do that.

The ability to summarise a long passage of text, or multiple messages, into a short sentence is one of the more promising........

© The Age