Apple Intelligence: Writing Tools

Technology is consistently entertaining new crazes. Some examples include blockchain, subscription juicers, netbooks, 3D televisions, hyperloop, and "hoverboards", just to name a handful of examples. All of these were going to be "the next big thing", but none of these have panned out as the inventors intended.

There has been a term bandied about that people think may be the end-all for computers. Said term is "Artificial Intelligence", or "AI". The term "AI" can mean a variety of different things, depending on whom you ask. However, when most use the term AI, what they are expecting is a fully conscious and sentient entity that can think, act, and rationalize as a human would. This is called "Artificial General Intelligence". Today's technology is nowhere even close to being able to come to this reality. It is not yet known whether or not Artificial Intelligence will actually live up to its ultimate expectations.

Apple is not known for being jumping on bandwagons and being the first to create new categories of technology; they typically leave that to others. However, if there is a technology that they can put their own spin on, they might do so. At their World Wide Developer Conference 24, they introduced one of these types of technologies, called "Apple Intelligence".

Apple Intelligence is not a single item; in fact, it goes against the grain of other AI assistants and only works on your data. Apple Intelligence consists of a variety of tools to help you accomplish a specific task. When introduced, Apple indicated that the initial features of Apple Intelligence would be released over the course of the iOS/iPad 18 and macOS Sequoia releases.

The items that comprise Apple Intelligence include: Writing Tools, Image Generation, and Personalized Requests. Initially, Apple wanted to have the first items available with iOS 18; however, during the beta, Apple realized that the features would not be far enough along for an initial iOS/iPadOS 18.0 and macOS Sequoia (15.0) release, so they were pushed to iOS/iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1.

Not every device that can run iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, or macOS Sequoia 15.1 is able to support Apple Intelligence. To be able to run Apple Intelligence you need to have one of the following devices:

• iPhone 16/Plus (A18)
• iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max (A18 Pro)
• iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max (A17 Pro)
• iPad mini (A17 Pro or later)
• iPad Air (M1 or later)
• iPad Pro (M1 or later)
• Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later)

The reason that these devices are the minimum is a combination of needing 8GB of memory, as well as a neural engine.

This article is part of an on-going series that covers the features of Apple Intelligence, as they become available. This article focuses on the Apple Intelligence feature called "Writing Tools".

Writing Tools

As you might have been able to surmise, the written word is one of the most common forms of communication. This may have started out as handwritten, but now, most of today's writing is in electronic form. Often, this is via a messaging service, like SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, or a countless number of other messaging services. These work well for shorter messages, but for longer forms of work, there are other applications. One example is a word processor. Word Processing applications have been around since the mid-1970s and have come a long way since then.

When modern computers first came about, they were quite limited and truly for the hobbyists. However, as they gained traction within enterprises, their utility became more apparent. The first word processing software was called "Electric Pencil” and first went on sale in 1976. The first popular word processing application was "WordStar" created by MicroPro International.

WordStar became the market leader but was not the only word processing application available. In the mid-1980s, WordPerfect started gaining traction and became quite popular during the 1980s and 90s. Of course, as you might have surmised, WordPerfect had challengers, specifically one, who still dominates the market today, that is, of course, Microsoft Word.

If you were to attempt to create a word processor today, you would have a lot of work ahead of you. This is not just because it would be a difficult task, because it would be, but also because of the sheer number of features that one would expect. Some of these features you might be able to get right from the operating system, like printing, formatting (bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, etc.), and open/save dialog boxes. However, the remaining feature would be needed. One of those features would be spelling and grammar, which are staple features of any word processing application.

Spelling correction, along with autocorrect and grammar checking, has been integrated into word processors since 1992, when Microsoft added it to Microsoft Word. While Microsoft Word was the prominent word processing app on the Mac, it is not the only one. Apple introduced its own word processor as part of the iLife suite. This app is called Pages.

Pages has become an ever-present application that works across Apple's platforms, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. As you might expect, Pages does include the ability to perform spelling and grammar checking. These work quite well, but this may not cover all situations. For other situations, the new "Writing Tools" may become useful. Let us look at those next.

Writing Tools is a set of functions that allows you to perform a number of actions. These actions include:

• Proofreading
• Rewriting
• Summarization
• Key Points
• List Creation
• Table Creation

Writing Tools is available system-wide in any application that supports Apple's standard controls. This is a boon in that the features are available across the operating systems. This means that you can easily use the features not only in Apple's own apps, but also in third-party apps. Before we dive into each function, let us look at how to access Writing Tools.

Invoking Writing

The way that you invoke Writing Tools is quite straightforward. Simply perform the following steps:

1. Select the block of text you want to use Writing Tools on.
2. Right-click on the text.
3. Hover over the "Writing Tools" menu option. Alternatively,
4. Select the tool that you want to use.

Let us look at each of the tools in turn, starting with Proofreading.

Proofreading

When you select the "Proofread", the highlighted text will be checked for both spelling and grammar. When the check is complete, there will be a popup that will show you the changes that have been made, with said changes underlined in red. The popup toolbar will also have a button with three lines and a left arrow. This button will allow you to easily switch between the original text and the replaced text.

The total number of changes will be shown in a toolbar, so you know whether or not anything has been changed. Along with this, you can also switch between the individual changes, which will allow you to review each change individually. If you like the changes, you can click on the "Done" button; however, if you do not like the changes, you can click on the "Revert" button, and the changed text will be reverted.

Writing Styles

There may be occasions when you want to adjust the tone of some text. This could be because your writing style is a bit relaxed and you need something a bit more professional, or it could be that you think the text needs to be a bit more user-friendly. There is a feature designed just for this type of situation. You can convert text into three different styles: Friendly, Professional, or Concise.

The manner in which this is accomplished is similar to using Writing Tools; you perform the following steps:

1. Select the block of text that you want to convert.
2. Right-click on the text.
3. Select the "Writing Tools" menu item.
4. Select the writing style you want to use.

Just like Proofreading, you will be able to see the changes made and flip back and forth between the versions. Writing Tools is able to perform a few more actions, like List Creation.

Create a List

Being able to proofread and change the writing style of the text is quite useful. Yet, there may be times when you wish to be able to change some text around. As an example, you may have some steps that you initially thought might be concise enough to have in a paragraph, but then realize it would be better to have it as a numbered list. Let us say that you have the following text as instructions:

Select the text you want to convert, right-click on the text to bring up the menus, click on the "Writing Tools" menu item, select the "Make List" option.

This would be easy enough to follow, but it would look better as a numbered list. To accomplish this, you can actually use the above steps and it should result in something like this:

• Select the text
• Right-click on the text
• Bring up the menus
• Click on "Writing Tools"
• Select "Make List"

Now, this is not exactly what was intended. Therefore, you would need to convert it to a numbered list. If you use Notes, this is easy enough to accomplish by going to "Format" -> "Numbered List", and it will be converted for you. This is currently a limitation of Apple Intelligence, it can only make bulleted lists. I hope that there will be a future option to select the type of list to create.

Summarization

When you create a large body of text you may also want to be able to quickly provide a brief overview. You can easily write out a brief summary. This approach might work well for a couple of pages, but if you have a 10-page item, it might be nicer to have it summarized for you. This is entirely possible to do with Writing Tools. To summarize some text, perform the following steps:

1. Select the text you want to summarize.
2. Right-click on the text to bring up the menu.
3. Select the "Writing Tools" menu item.
4. Select "Summarize".

I performed a test using my introduction article about Apple Intelligence. That article is just over 4700 words and 228 paragraphs. Apple Intelligence reduced the entire article down to the following:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims to create machines that can think and act like humans, but current technology is far from achieving this. AI systems use neural networks to process data and make decisions, with training methods like supervised and reinforcement learning helping them learn and improve. Despite its potential, AI has yet to meet the idealistic depiction of fully conscious machines, and its use cases vary from automated cleaning to image generation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool that can be used for both positive and negative purposes. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Image Generators are two examples of AI technologies that can be used for various tasks, including generating text and images. Apple has been working on its own AI technologies, known as Apple Intelligence, which prioritizes privacy by processing requests on-device or on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute platform.
Apple’s Private Cloud Compute service protects user data through target diffusion, which anonymizes requests and prevents replay attacks. Apple Intelligence, powered by Private Cloud Compute, will be available on select devices starting in late 2024, with some features not available until 2025.
Apple Intelligence requires Apple Silicon Macs, iPads with M1 or newer, and iPhones 15 Pro or Pro Max or newer.

Given everything that I wrote in that article, I do not think that the summary is all that good. It is missing some key information, but then again, maybe it is that I would choose a different set of summary text.

Table Creation

From time to time, you may have some data in a format that would look better in a table. Here is an example of some data that was used within my iPhone 16 Pro Max review.

Device Chip CPU Single Core CPU Multi-Core GPU (Metal) iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024) A18 Pro 3497 8581 32822 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2024) M4 3585 12603 55769 iPhone 15 Pro Max (2023) A17 Pro 2749 6713 27661 14-inch MacBook Pro (2023) M2 Max 2707 15148 127761 Mac Studio (2022) M1 Max 2439 12825 103224 6th generation iPad (2021) A15 Bionic 2157 5285 20183 Mac mini (2020) M1 2394 8810 34575

If I attempted to create a table from the data, this is what was previewed:

As you can see, Apple Intelligence completely missed the mark. It added a column that was not present, the header row seemed to be duplicated, and the first row of data was ignored. When it was not formatted properly, I thought that maybe replacing the tabs with commas might allow it to be formatted properly, but it was the same result.

I then thought that maybe there were too many rows, so I opted to only use three rows of data. When I did that, I got the following popup:

The fact that the table could not be created properly, and that it does not seem to understand that the text I have is in English, means that, at least as of this writing, the "Make Table" functionality is not helpful or useful in any way.

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Closing Thoughts on Writing Tools

The new Apple Intelligence Writing Tools can be useful in some situations, but not all. If you need to proofread a block of text, Writing Tools will accomplish the task. The same goes for making a list, provided that you want a bulleted list, and not a numbered one.

Writing Tools is able to rewrite a block of text using one of three styles, friendly, professional, or concise, depending on your needs.

Writing Tools is available in any application that uses Apple's standard controls, like Pages, Notes, and even Xcode. However, it is not limited to Apple's own apps; any third-party app that uses a text field should also have access to Writing Tools.

Apple Intelligence should be available on iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sierra 15.1, on any device that has an M1, or newer, as well as the iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max, iPhone 16/Plus/Pro/Pro Max.

Be sure to check out all of the other articles in the series:

• Introduction to Apple Intelligence
• Apple Intelligence: Type with Siri
• Apple Intelligence: Summarization and Mail

You can also check out all articles about Apple Intelligence