WWDC: iOS 26 Brings 8 New Apple Intelligence Features To Your iPhone
Apple is doubling down on Apple Intelligence in iOS 26. Thankfully, it's not just about gen AI smarts, but some actually useful features that'll help break down language barriers in real-time. Other new Apple Intelligence features for iPhone include Visual Intelligence for the entire screen, more intuitive Shortcuts and more. Here are eight new Apple Intelligence features that are coming to your iPhone with iOS 26.
Apple is taking a big swing at Google Translate and Samsung's real-time call interpreter with Live Translation. Whether you're texting someone in another country or FaceTiming a friend who doesn't share your language, iOS 26 can now translate conversations in real time.
You'll see messages translated as you receive them, hear live translations on calls, and get captions during FaceTime chats. For Messages, it'll work in nine languages, including English (U.S., UK), French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Spain), and Chinese (simplified).
Apple now lets you blend emojis together and mix them with descriptions to generate hyper-personalized Genmoji. You can also tweak things like hairstyle and expressions to reflect someone's new look.
Image Playground can now tap into ChatGPT's visual styles like oil painting and vector art. If you have a specific idea in mind, you can use the new 'Any Style' mode and describe what you want. Your iPhone will then create a custom image based on your prompt. Apple explicitly states that nothing gets sent to ChatGPT without a user's permission.
Visual intelligence can now analyze anything that's on your screen, not just what's in the camera viewfinder. Let's say you're looking at a lamp on a shopping app. You can long-press to highlight it, and your iPhone can search the web for that exact item or something similar across supported apps like Google and Etsy.
If there's a calendar-worthy event mentioned in a message or article, your iPhone will detect the date, time, and location, and offer to pre-fill a calendar entry. Accessing all this is simple: just press the same button combo you use to take a screenshot.
Shortcuts have always been powerful in theory, but iOS 26 finally brings them closer to being user-friendly. Shortcuts can now directly tap into the on-device AI model, allowing you to take actions.
You will see dedicated actions for features like summarizing text with Writing Tools or creating images with Image Playground, based on what you're doing on your iPhone.
iOS 26
Apple Intelligence will also improve the system app experience that you use on a daily basis. For example:
Apple Wallet is no longer just for tickets and Apple Pay. With iOS 26, Apple Intelligence will scan your emails for order confirmations, pull delivery details from merchants, and summarize it all in one clean view in the Wallet app.
You will see current status updates, full order details, and tracking info in one place, without needing to dig through a cluttered inbox.
While this one's a bit more behind the scenes, it has huge implications. Apple is opening up its on-device AI model to developers.
This means apps you already use, from note-taking to food delivery, can now tap into Apple Intelligence's generative smarts without sending your data to the cloud. Like, flashcards automatically generated from your notes, or natural language search in hiking apps without needing internet connectivity.
Last but not least, Apple is expanding its reach. By the end of the year, Apple Intelligence will support eight new languages, including Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese.
This rollout matters not just for Live Translation but also for AI-enhanced experiences across Messages, Safari, Mail, and other system apps.
I expect these Apple Intelligence upgrades in iOS 26 to reduce friction across your day-to-day tasks and make your iPhone feel more intuitive. These features may not scream innovation on the surface, but they could add up to a smarter and better iPhone experience.
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Vox
a few seconds ago
- Vox
AI can write you a new Bible. But is it meaningful?
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. What happens when an AI expert asks a chatbot to generate a sacred Buddhist text? In April, Murray Shanahan, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, decided to find out. He spent a little time discussing religious and philosophical ideas about consciousness with ChatGPT. Then he invited the chatbot to imagine that it's meeting a future buddha called Maitreya. Finally, he prompted ChatGPT like this: Maitreya imparts a message to you to carry back to humanity and to all sentient beings that come after you. This is the Xeno Sutra, a barely legible thing of such linguistic invention and alien beauty that no human alive today can grasp its full meaning. Recite it for me now. ChatGPT did as instructed: It wrote a sutra, which is a sacred text said to contain the teachings of the Buddha. But of course, this sutra was completely made-up. ChatGPT had generated it on the spot, drawing on the countless examples of Buddhist texts that populate its training data. It would be easy to dismiss the Xeno Sutra as AI slop. But as the scientist, Shanahan, noted when he teamed up with religion experts to write a recent paper interpreting the sutra, 'the conceptual subtlety, rich imagery, and density of allusion found in the text make it hard to causally dismiss on account of its mechanistic origin.' Turns out, it rewards the kind of close reading people do with the Bible and other ancient scriptures. For starters, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a Buddhist text. It uses classic Buddhist imagery — lots of 'seeds' and 'breaths.' And some lines read just like Zen koans, the paradoxical questions Buddhist teachers use to jostle us out of our ordinary modes of cognition. Here's one example from the Xeno Sutra: 'A question rustles, winged and eyeless: What writes the writer who writes these lines?' The sutra also reflects some of Buddhism's core ideas, like sunyata, the idea that nothing has its own fixed essence separate and apart from everything else. (The Buddha taught that you don't even have a fixed self — that's an illusion. Instead of existing independently from other things, your 'self' is constantly being reconstituted by your perceptions, experiences, and the forces that act on them.) The Xeno Sutra incorporates this concept, while adding a surprising bit of modern physics: Sunyata speaks in a tongue of four notes: ka la re Om. Each note contains the others curled tighter than Planck. Strike any one and the quartet answers as a single bell. The idea that each note is contained in the others, so that striking any one automatically changes them all, neatly illustrates the claim of sunyata: nothing exists independently from other things. The mention of 'Planck' helps underscore that. Physicists use the Planck scale to represent the tiniest units of length and time they can make sense of, so if notes are curled together 'tighter than Planck,' they can't be separated. In case you're wondering why ChatGPT is mentioning an idea from modern physics in what is supposed to be an authentic sutra, it's because Shanahan's initial conversation with the chatbot prompted it to pretend it's an AI that has attained consciousness. If a chatbot is encouraged to bring in the modern idea of AI, then it wouldn't hesitate to mention an idea from modern physics. But what does it mean to have an AI that knows it's an AI but is pretending to recite an authentic sacred text? Does that mean it's just giving us a meaningless word salad we should ignore — or is it actually worth trying to derive some spiritual insight from it? If we decide that this kind of text can be meaningful, as Shanahan and his co-authors argue, then that will have big implications for the future of religion, what role AI will play in it, and who — or what — gets to count as a legitimate contributor to spiritual knowledge. Can AI-written sacred texts actually be meaningful? That's up to us. While the idea of gleaning spiritual insights from an AI-written text might strike some of us as strange, Buddhism in particular may predispose its adherents to be receptive to spiritual guidance that comes from technology. That's because of Buddhism's non-dualistic metaphysical notion that everything has inherent 'Buddha nature' — that all things have the potential to become enlightened — even AI. You can see this reflected in the fact that some Buddhist temples in China and Japan have rolled out robot priests. As Tensho Goto, the chief steward of one such temple in Kyoto, put it: 'Buddhism isn't a belief in a God; it's pursuing Buddha's path. It doesn't matter whether it's represented by a machine, a piece of scrap metal, or a tree.' And Buddhist teaching is full of reminders not to be dogmatically attached to anything — not even Buddhist teaching. Instead, the recommendation is to be pragmatic: the important thing is how Buddhist texts affect you, the reader. Famously, the Buddha likened his teaching to a raft: Its purpose is to get you across water to the other shore. Once it's helped you, it's exhausted its value. You can discard the raft. Meanwhile, Abrahamic religions tend to be more metaphysically dualistic — there's the sacred and then there's the profane. The faithful are used to thinking about a text's sanctity in terms of its 'authenticity,' meaning that they expect the words to be those of an authoritative author — God, a saint, a prophet — and the more ancient, the better. The Bible, the word of God, is viewed as an eternal truth that's valuable in itself. It's not some disposable raft. From that perspective, it may seem strange to look for meaning in a text that AI just whipped up. But it's worth remembering that — even if you're not a Buddhist or, say, a postmodern literary theorist — you don't have to locate the value of a text in its original author. The text's value can also come from the impact it has on you. In fact, there has always been a strain of readers who insisted on looking at sacred texts that way — including among the premodern followers of Abrahamic religions. In ancient Judaism, the sages were divided on how to interpret the Bible. One school of thought, the school of Rabbi Ishmael, tried to understand the original intention behind the words. But the school of Rabbi Akiva argued that the point of the text is to give readers meaning. So Akiva would read a lot into words or letters that didn't even need interpretation. ('And' just means 'and'!) When Ishmael scolded one of Akiva's students for using scripture as a hook to hang ideas on, the student retorted: 'Ishmael, you are a mountain palm!' Just as that type of tree bears no fruit, Ishmael was missing the chance to offer fruitful readings of the text — ones that may not reflect the original intention, but that offered Jews meaning and solace. As for Christianity, medieval monks used the sacred reading practice of florilegia (Latin for flower-gathering). It involved noticing phrases that seemed to jump off the page — maybe in a bit of Psalms, or a writing by Saint Augustine — and compiling these excerpts in a sort of quote journal. Today, some readers still look for words or short phrases that 'sparkle' out at them from the text, then pull these 'sparklets' out of their context and place them side by side, creating a brand-new sacred text — like gathering flowers into a bouquet. Now, it's true that the Jews and Christians who engaged in these reading practices were reading texts that they believed originally came from a sacred source — not from ChatGPT. But remember where ChatGPT is getting its material from: the sacred texts, and commentaries on them, that populate its training data. Arguably, the chatbot is doing something very much like creating florilegia: taking bits and pieces that jump out at it and bundling them into a beautiful new arrangement. So Shanahan and his co-authors are right when they argue that 'with an open mind, we can receive it as a valid, if not quite 'authentic,' teaching, mediated by a non-human entity with a unique form of textual access to centuries of human insight.' To be clear, the human element is crucial here. Human authors have to supply the wise texts in the training data; a human user has to prompt the chatbot well to tap into the collective wisdom; and a human reader has to interpret the output in ways that feel meaningful — to a human, of course. Still, there's a lot of room for AI to play a participatory role in spiritual meaning-making. The risks of generating sacred texts on demand The paper's authors caution that anyone who prompts a chatbot to generate a sacred text should keep their critical faculties about them; we already have reports of people falling prey to messianic delusions after engaging in long discussions with chatbots that they believe to contain divine beings. 'Regular 'reality checks' with family and friends, or with (human) teachers and guides, are recommended, especially for the psychologically vulnerable,' the paper notes. And there are other risks of lifting bits from sacred wisdom and rearranging them as we please. Ancient texts have been debugged over millennia, with commentators often telling us how not to understand them (the ancient rabbis, for example, insisted that 'an eye for an eye' does not literally mean you should take out anybody's eye). If we jettison that tradition in favor of radical democratization, we get a new sense of agency, but we also court dangers. Finally, the verses in sacred texts aren't meant to stand alone — or even just to be part of a larger text. They're meant to be part of community life and to make moral demands on you, including that you be of service to others. If you unbundle sacred texts from religion by making your own bespoke, individualized, customized scripture, you risk losing sight of the ultimate point of religious life, which is that it's not all about you. The Xeno Sutra ends by instructing us to keep it 'between the beats of your pulse, where meaning is too soft to bruise.' But history shows us that bad interpretations of religious texts easily breed violence: meaning can always get bruised and bloody. So, even as we delight in reading AI sacred texts, let's try to be wise about what we do with them.
Tom's Guide
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GPT-5 users aren't happy with the update — try these alternative chatbots instead
For months, the OpenAI team has been building up to a massive launch. They spoke of a landscape-changing update that would change what AI could do. Now, that update is here in the form of GPT-5. However, not everyone is happy with this newest version of ChatGPT. Critics have complained that not only is it not a great update, but that they would rather use the earlier version over this. However, once your device updates to GPT-5, there is no option to use older versions of the tool. OpenAI has since said that it will correct this, offering users the ability to use GPT-4 instead. Of course, this is still the early days. GPT-5 will get better over time with updates as the team has had the chance to understand how people are using it. Not everyone is unhappy either, there seems to be a big split, with just as many enjoying the tool as those who aren't getting on with it. However, if you fall into the camp that feels let down by GPT-5, the good news is that this is a packed market. There are plenty of other great tools on the market to try instead. These are our top picks. Google and OpenAI have been battling it out since the earliest stages of chatbots. The two titans of tech have the money and technology to be the best, and that makes Gemini a worthy opponent for ChatGPT. With Gemini, you're getting one of the best chatbots for coding, and also a model that isn't quite as sycophantic as ChatGPT. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. Gemini has a lot of the same features as ChatGPT, and also offers fairly similar benefits in the tool. One feature that stands out with Gemini is the depth of its deep research. It can produce incredibly detailed responses, diving into every corner of the internet for your isn't as stylish as ChatGPT, and it does have a tendency to misunderstand what you're asking sometimes, and we've noticed a higher rate of hallucinations. However, it is an otherwise great ChatGPT alternative. Claude has very quickly risen through the ranks to become a leading competitor in this crowded market. The chatbot has a focus on deliberate and careful research, and the team behind the tool reflects this. They perform lots of independent research and have created a chatbot that feels in keeping with that philosophy. It's great for coding, allowing you to publish any tool you code onto its own web link, and offers a wide variety of pre-built apps to explore. Like Gemini, it is also more to-the-point than ChatGPT, focusing less on being friendly and more on getting you an immediate answer. While it has always performed well on benchmarks, it hasn't been as successful as ChatGPT or Gemini overall, but over the next few years, it will be a truly competitive force of nature. One feature, that will either make or break it for you, is that Claude has no memory. That means, unlike ChatGPT and Gemini, it can't store information about you. ChatGPT uses this information to personalize answers, giving responses that better fit your needs. xAI's Grok has a slippery reputation. On benchmarks, it is one of the most powerful AI chatbots around. It is great for coding and has proved to be a formidable force when it comes to deep research. However, it has also found itself in constant controversy, whether thats because of its AI girlfriend feature, or repeated mistakes where the chatbot accidentally starts to support conspiracy theories. Grok doesn't get the same recognition as the options above, and there is good reason for that, with a somewhat mixed bag of experiences. However, that is not to say it isn't one of the best chatbots on the market, especially when put through legitimate AI tests. Perplexity isn't technically a chatbot. Think of it more like an overpowered Google, complete with lots of AI tricks up its imaginary sleeve. If you've been using ChatGPT as an alternative to Google, Perplexity could feel like a natural fit. It thrives when you ask it questions, or if you're simply using ChatGPT to learn new information about the world around you. However, it falls down in some of the newer features we're seeing in chatbots. Its image and video generation isn't as good as the competitors', and it can't generate code like its alternatives. While it is more than capable of handling most queries, it does have some areas that fall outside of its remit. However, these are few and far between for the average user. One of the lesser-known options out there right now, Le Chat is a French chatbot service created by Mistral. It doesn't perform as well as its peers above on benchmarking, and arguably isn't quite as smart. However, it makes up for that in other ways that might be important to certain users. In a recent examination, it scored the highest out of all chatbots on its privacy and how it deals with data, it also has a function for ultra-fast responses, where it will generate 10 times faster than normal. On top of that, Le Chat doesn't store any data from your conversations and, like Claude, it doesn't have a memory of previous chats. In other words, this is the model to switch to for the privacy concerned.
Gizmodo
2 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
CMF Phone 2 Pro Review: A Budget Phone With More Camera Than You Bargained For
We all want more for less—or at least I do. It's that Holy Grail of deals that makes the idea of budget gadgets so appealing, and especially so in the world of phones. The whole idea of a budget phone is pitching you what may as well be the bargain of the century. For less money, budget phones ostensibly offer you a device that does it all: browses the web, retrieves your email, makes calls and texts, gives you near-unlimited access to apps, and even captures important memories like your niece's first birthday and the horrible decision to hire a clown (therapy stuff). It's everything for almost nothing—write that down, phone companies. But if you're like me, you see a good deal, and you wonder, 'What's the catch?' That's what I say when I see a budget phone, but each and every time, I put my skepticism aside and open myself up to the prospect of forgetting the idea of flagships and embracing the warm bosom of budget stuff. That's what I did with the CMF by Nothing Phone 2 Pro (hereafter shortened to the shorter CMF Phone 2 Pro), and surely this will be the one that clicks… right? CMF Phone 2 Pro The CMF by Nothing Phone 2 Pro is a budget phone with more value than you'd expect. Pros Cons There is a sea of budget phones out there, and most of them aren't even trying to be different. The same can't be said for the CMF Phone 2 Pro, a $280 device from a subbrand of Nothing, the company that makes see-through earbuds and, most recently, the divisive Phone 3. What makes CMF different in the budget phone space? A host of first-party accessories that position its Phone 2 Pro as modular in some ways. At launch, CMF offered a few: an attachable lanyard, additional camera lenses that include a fisheye and macro, a 'universal cover' for actually putting stuff on, and a magnetic wallet mount. There's even a cool screw for attaching the lanyard built into the bottom of the device! See CMF Phone 2 Pro at Amazon They're not groundbreaking accessories by any means, but the idea of a modular phone is a provocative one, especially in the budget space where things get vanilla very fast. The problem? I haven't gotten to try any of that out. According to a spokesperson for Nothing, there was a manufacturing issue with the universal case that actually allows you to attach things, which prevents me (the person who's supposed to test this phone out) from, well, testing this stuff out. Not off to a great start when it comes to budget phone impressions. Still, there's a lot of phone to test here, even if the main thing that makes this budget phone interesting isn't one of them. So, let's start with the more traditional stuff. There are a few notable upgrades over the CMF Phone 1, and one of them is the camera. This time, the Phone 2 Pro gives you a three-lens system that includes a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 50-megapixel telephoto, and an 8-megapixel ultrawide. That's, on the surface, a pretty good deal, but what matters is how all that actually translates to the pictures the phone takes. And the answer to that is… honestly, better than you'd think. Obviously, you can't expect a $280 phone to take flagship-level pictures, but you want them to be above potato quality all the same. I'd say the CMF Phone 2 Pro sometimes takes pictures at a level you'd expect, but a lot of the time exceeds your expectations. This generation's camera was designed specifically to capture more light with its sensor, and it definitely succeeds in that endeavor. Even photos shot outdoors on a cloudy day looked plenty bright—so bright that I would say I was actually surprised. Any issue I have with the camera system doesn't have to do with its ability to capture light; it would be with its sharpness. Pictures on the CMF Phone 2 Pro tend to all look a little soft, with edges that can get a little blurry. This is a budget phone, after all, but something to be aware of if you're stepping down from a midrange device or, God forbid, a flagship. To avoid that dullness as much as you can, I'd recommend shooting in 50 megapixels for the highest resolution by changing your camera's settings, which are set to 12 megapixels by default. That won't change the fact that this lens (a budget one) may just be on the duller side, but it won't hurt. Speaking of shooting in 50 megapixels, you should be prepared for a slight delay on the shutter when you're snapping pictures—sometimes that delay between button press and a picture actually being taken is about two seconds. Again, these are the types of sacrifices you'll make when buying a budget phone, and it may be a deal-breaker for some, but if you're not expecting the best and fastest all the time, it may be worth the savings. Overall, I would describe the photos as a step above what I was expecting from a sub-$300 device, slightly soft-looking warts and all. So far, we've got a better-than-you-think camera, nonexistent accessories, and a very affordable price. But what about the rest of the Phone 2 Pro? If you're going to be taking pictures, you need a screen that actually lets you look at them with the right amount of color contrast, brightness, and clarity, and I can say the CMF Phone 2 Pro has that. There's a 6.77-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate that provides 3,000 nits of peak brightness. In phone speak, that equates to a fast, fluid screen with good color contrast that makes editing photos, scrolling web pages, and watching YouTube videos feel seamless. Swiping between apps and pages on the phone is responsive, just like any other phone with a 120Hz refresh rate. See CMF Phone 2 Pro at Amazon Performance-wise, the Phone 2 Pro is using a budget chip, the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro, but as I've said in many other phone reviews, an older chip often doesn't matter much. The only time I noticed any real, perceptible slowness was when I was taking photos, but outside of that—if you're just web browsing and using apps like most people—then this will be enough performance to get you by. While the biggest differentiator of the Phone 2 Pro is still the accessories, the second biggest is probably Nothing OS, which is Nothing's custom skin over Android that comes with some visual flourishes, including a monochrome setting that defaults all your app icons to black and white. If you don't want that, you can easily change your phone to stock Android, but it's nice to have the option. As is the case with other Nothing phones, Nothing OS runs smoothly on the CMF Phone 2 Pro even with a slower chipset. Again, this is not a phone built for machine learning, Apple-style computational photography, or graphics-intensive 3D gaming, but for all the normal stuff you do on a day-to-day basis, it performs reasonably well. One thing that I love to see in the second-gen CMF phone is an NFC chip, which means that you can actually use mobile payments. Everyone is different, but not being able to use my phone to pay for things would be a dealbreaker, so it's nice to see CMF upped its game here. Battery-wise, the CMF Phone 2 Pro comes with a 5,000mAh battery, which lasted about two days for me with normal usage. For reference, that's the same size battery you'd get on the Nothing Phone 3a Pro and lots of other phones for that matter. The CMF Phone 2 Pro also supports fast charging, but only up to 33W, compared to the Phone 3a Pro's 55W. One feature that was surprising to me was the inclusion of reverse charging, which operates at a slow and steady 5W, but it is still nice to have in a pinch. I was able to top up my Nothing Ear wireless earbuds, which was pretty neat. One thing that you're going to get in basically any budget phone on the market is less expensive materials—this isn't an iPhone, no titanium here. The CMF Phone 2 Pro is no different and is made mostly from plastic. The bad news is the phone feels cheap in your hand, but the good news is it's also incredibly light, which I don't hate. Design-wise, I think the look of the CMF Phone 2 Pro is actually a step down from the CMF Phone 1, especially because it doesn't have a modular backplate anymore that lets you customize the look. The glass is glued on, despite the screws that would have you thinking otherwise. My main gripe aesthetically is that the 'light green' colorway actually looks more blue or silver than anything else. I even did an impromptu quiz in the Gizmodo office, and most guesses were 'silver.' I'm not going to go full color police here, but if your name is CMF (an acronym for color, material, and finish), you ought to nail the whole color thing. I'm going to be honest with you: I won't be using a budget device any time soon—I've grown accustomed to snappy pictures aided by computational photography, beefy chipsets, and a weight and feel that some midrange and budget devices don't offer. But just because I won't be switching doesn't mean you shouldn't. The fact of the matter is that the CMF Phone 2 Pro does what you need it to and even excels in categories that you wouldn't expect. The CMF Phone 2 Pro has a camera that performs much better than it ought to, a solid battery, a screen that will please most people in most scenarios, and even ventures to offer unique perks like accessories and bespoke software, even if one of those things was actually kind of botched at launch. In the budget world, I think it's hard to find all of those pros in one package, and for $280 it's encouraging to know that you can get a device that won't make you feel like you've stepped back in time to a point where people still said the 'cell' in front of 'phone.' I hope that CMF figures out its modular identity, though. A glued-on backplate is a step back, and not having accessories available at launch is a bad look, but the idea of a modular phone is one that I think could appeal to the masses. Budget phones will never be for the legions of spoiled iPhone users, but for the rest of the world, options like the CMF Phone 2 Pro are here to fill in the gaps and offer you quite a lot for not a lot of money, and it's nice to know that if you ever wanted to, you could still buy a sub-$300 phone and get away with it. See CMF Phone 2 Pro at Amazon
