iOS 18.4 has arrived with a bunch of new features, including some important updates for Apple Intelligence. The new update may lack the upgraded version of Siri, which has been delayed indefinitely, but Apple’s AI does offer a bunch of AI upgrades for you to take advantage of.
Notifications have been given a vital boost, to help you sort the good from the bad, while Image Playground now has a brand new (and slightly overdue) artistic style. Apple also added summaries to the App Store, new AI languages, and official support for the EU. To top it all off, Visual Intelligence, which was previously an iPhone 16 exclusive, has landed on older phones — even ones without a Camera Control button.
Here are all the new Apple Intelligence features that have arrived as part of iOS 18.4
Visual Intelligence comes to more phones
Visual Intelligence was first announced as an iPhone 16-exclusive feature, utilizing the brand new Camera Control button. But the iPhone 16e launch mixed things up a bit, promising that the new AI vision feature would be available on the phone — albeit through the Action Button.
iOS 18.4 activates that feature on iPhone 16e, alongside iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. All iPhones capable of running Apple Intelligence now have access to the full suite of AI features.
Priority notifications
Apple’s Notification Summaries have been a little controversial, on account of them getting things wrong on more than one occasion. A similar, but hopefully less problematic, notification feature came alongside iOS 18.4 — Priority Notification alerts.
Essentially, this tiers your notifications into two categories, and if Apple Intelligence believes it’s essential, then it’ll try and make the alert more noticeable. The new Priority Notification alerts are displayed more prominently, and in a special new highlighted area.
The feature can be manually switched on and off on a per-app basis, letting you personalize which notifications are most important to you.
Sketch finally arrives in Image Playground
Back when Apple first announced Image Playground, it promised that three unique styles of image generation would be available: Animation, illustration and Sketch. However, with the release of iOS 18.2, Sketch was nowhere to be found. iOS 18.4 fixes that issue.
This means when you give the app an image generation prompt, you can now make the results look as though they’ve been pencil-drawn.
App Store review summaries
Reading through reviews is a good way to get an idea of what a product or service has to offer. But it can be a pain to have to read through them all, and following Google’s rollout of review summaries in Google Play last year, Apple is offering the same to the App Store.
You can still browse all the reviews in full, the new summary gives you a glimpse of what people have said about a specific app. That way, you can get an idea of what they’ve all been saying in no time at all.
AI comes to the EU
When Apple Intelligence first launched last year, it did not make its way to the EU. According to Apple, this was due to the Digital Markets Act, a piece of EU legislation that had already had a big impact on Apple’s businesses by forcing the company to allow third-party app stores on iOS and iPadOS.
But that has changed with iOS 18.4, now allowing users within the EU to access AI officially — and in a language other than some variation of English.
Languages other than English are available
Opening up AI to new regions would be a little pointless if the local lingo wasn’t supported, and that changed with iOS 18.4 as well. Apple intelligence now understands eight new languages: French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Localized English is also available in both India and Singapore as well.
These languages are available everywhere, not just in specific countries. So if you’d rather get Apple Intelligence in something other than English, you can.
