What is Apple Intelligence and how can it help blind and low vision people?

Apple Intelligence is how Apple has branded a range of features powered by Artificial Intelligence which began to appear in late 2024 on some iPhone, iPad and Mac models.

Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 15 Pro models and iPhone 16 models and later. It is also available on iPhone Air and iPhone Duo. It is available on iPads with M-series chips or A17 Pro chips. Apple intelligence is also available on all Macs with M-series chips and on the MacBook Neo. 

Currently available features include writing tools, summaries of messages and notifications, live translation, much improved photo and video searching and clever photo editing, AI image generation and the integration of the ChatGPT AI chatbot into Siri.

The most significant Apple Intelligence feature for visually impaired users will be Siri AI, which will begin rolling out in English when iOS 27 is released in September 2026. Although the current test version is still a little unreliable Siri AI is hugely more capable than the old Siri and can perform many tasks which would previously have required several Voiceover steps. I'll be updating the site for Siri AI soon after the roll out begins after the launch of iOS 27 on 14 September 2026.

As for the currently available Apple Intelligence, I've been using the first generation of Apple Intelligence since it became available in the UK. For me, one of the most helpful feature so far is the option to have summaries of email messages shown in the Inbox list in place of the first few lines of the email. The summary is often enough to let me decide to delete the email or decide that I can safely leave it until later. That's a real boon to anyone who has either to read slowly with large text or to have VoiceOver speak all the text.

I've also found Siri's integration with ChatGPT to be useful. ChatGPT is one of the pioneering Artificial Intelligence systems that have emerged over the last few years. It is developed by a company called OpenAI. It's an AI Chatbot that can conduct a very convincingly human conversation with its user and has been trained with a huge array of information. For many enquiries that Siri can't handle, it sends them on, with your permission, to ChatGPT. You can decide whether or not to sign in to a ChatGPT account. If you don't sign in, then the activity is totally private. ChatGPT has a version offering what Apple calls "advanced capabilities" and it looks as if I'm always getting that version for now with my free ChatGPT account and it answers questions about current information fully and mostly accurately. I suppose that we may get less frequent access to advanced facilities as increased numbers of keen users descend on it. Access to advanced capabilities has a daily limit and I seem to be under the limit whenever I check in Apple Intelligence & Siri settings. Taking out a paid ChatGPT subscription will presumably increase the daily limit. Siri can now be used for any general information request and if Siri doesn't do a great job and doesn't pass your request on to ChatGPT automatically, you can instruct Siri to ask ChatGPT for the information. Always remember that ChatGPT uses generative AI which sometimes comes up with plausible but totally incorrect answers. 

Although Siri's integration with ChatGPT is useful it can be a bit frustrating too since it doesn't offer a full conversation with ChatGPT and it's Siri that is converting your spoken words to text and passing it on to ChatGPT with Siri's frequent mistakes. You get a much better service by speaking directly to ChatGPT using the ChatGPT app. This has a full conversational mode and, crucially, your speech is interpreted directly by ChatGPT which is hugely more intelligent than the current Siri. Hopefully Siri's unreliable conversion of speech to text will improve dramatically when we get the full modern AI version of Siri powered by Google's Gemini.

I've not been motivated to use the writing tools for any real writing task but their proof reading and ability to change the style of text may be helpful to many.

The AI tool in Photos to remove unwanted distractions from photos is impressive but probably of little interest to many of us. The improved search in photos may help those of us who want to show specific photos to friends. You'll be able to ask for things like "child wearing a green T shirt on a trampoline" and it can even locate specific scenes in videos. If you want detailed descriptions of photos you can also instruct Siri to ask ChatGPT to describe this photo.

The image generation app, Image Playground, lets you create illustrations from a text description. Live translation is available in the Phone, Messages and FaceTime apps. I haven't had an opportunity to test live translation yet.

I don't recommend rushing out and replacing your iPhone with an iPhone 16 or later just for the current versions of Apple Intelligence but if you find VoiceOver difficult the imminent upgrade to Siri may make your life a lot easier. On the other hand, if you need to replace your phone, consider an iPhone 16 or later unless you are certain you won't benefit from the improved version of Siri when it turns up. 

Apple has announced that there will be two tiers of Apple Intelligence in iOS and iPadOS 27. The full features will be available only on iPhones and iPads with 12 Gigabytes of unified memory, that is the temporary working memory used by the processors. Please see selecting an iPhone for a visually impaired user for more detail about this.

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last updated 14 September 2026