After a long wait, Apple surprisingly seeded iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 betas for developers to try out Apple Intelligence. While we expected to see Apple Intelligence become available in beta at some point, we certainly didn't expect it to debut in this fashion. There are currently three lines of beta builds for macOS: the macOS Sonoma beta, the macOS 15 Sequoia beta, and the macOS 15.1 Sequoia beta. I've been running the latter, which includes the waitlisted option to access Apple Intelligence, for about a week — and I have some thoughts.

For starters, Apple Intelligence is very much in beta. Some features are incomplete or unavailable at all, and the AI suite is actually delayed entirely. Being that Apple Intelligence is bundled with macOS 15.1, it will not launch with the regular public builds of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. It will come later in the year, missing the launch of new iPhones. As such, the Apple Intelligence beta is limited at the moment, lacking features like Generative Playground, Genmoji, and ChatGPT integration. There are a few cool tools available now, and I tried five of the biggest ones.

5 Transcripts in Apple Notes

You'll need an iPhone and iOS 18.1 to take advantage of this useful feature

iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 can work together to show you transcripts of audio recordings and calls. When you make a phone call from an iPhone running iOS 18.1 or higher, there will be a new option on the call screen that starts a recording. It plays an automated message informing both parties that the call is being recorded, and then it starts the recording. From there, you can start taking notes alongside the recording and transcripts in Apple Notes. With iCloud syncing, the call recordings, transcripts, and associated notes are available on macOS 15.1.

As a reporter, this is quite useful for me. Before call recordings were natively supported in iOS and macOS, I manually used a Pixel phone and the Google Recorder app to record calls and interviews. Now, I don't have to. This feature will come in handy in other situations, too; I plan to use it while calling customer support representatives for documentation and accountability purposes. It's nice that the transcript and audio features follow Apple Notes to the Mac.

4 Apple Mail summaries & priority messages

I have over 100,000 emails, and this feature is a godsend

Apple Mail was forgotten about for a while, and that's why many macOS users switched to other third-party alternatives. However, the new Apple Intelligence features might be useful enough to make me switch. I receive tens of emails a day, and Apple Intelligence can pick out the ones considered priority apart from the rest, placing them at the top of your inbox. Going a step further, the app can use AI to generate a one or two-sentence summary of the emails contents. This beats the default shortened email preview every single time, and it helps me figure out whether a message really needs my attention.

Notifications summaries are my favorite Apple Intelligence feature so far, even if they're not as powerful as something like Writing Tools. Unfortunately, notification summaries on macOS Sequoia seem to be restricted to the Mail app for now. In the future, I'd love to see them cover macOS notifications and synced iPhone notifications.

3 Natural language search in Photos

It's easier to search through your photos and find what you need

You can now search through your photos using natural language, and this Apple Intelligence feature has already come in handy. I needed to find my license plate number for a document, and since I had just bought a new car, I didn't have it memorized yet. So, I simply searched "license plate" and a bunch of pictures that included license plates from my camera roll popped up. In the past, I may have had to search "Arizona" or "New Jersey" to try and find the state names on my plates via text recognition. Search in Photos is already smarter, and it's going to be helpful.

2 Siri

It's still not perfect, but it's getting there

For many, the highlight of Apple Intelligence will be a smarter Siri. There's still work to do, but the version of Siri in macOS 15.1 is already better than the current one in macOS Sonoma. The biggest change is arguable Type to Siri, which lets you use text instead of voice commands to interact with Siri. Looking back, it's comical that Siri ever was voice-dependent on a desktop operating system. This change, plus the Apple Intelligence smarts that can find files or provide product knowledge, makes Siri more like Spotlight than a typical voice assistant.

You can even move the Type to Siri text box to the center of your screen, although you can't pin it there permanently. I found some oddities while using the new Siri, like how asking it for a photo would pull up random images from Google instead of searching your photos. But it was better overall, and the in-depth product knowledge is already starting to become part of Siri's repertoire. Siri and Apple Intelligence have the potential to be what Microsoft tried to be with Copilot before discontinuing it: simple and quick tech support. I still think a supercharged Siri could be a Spotlight replacement, it's just not there yet.

1 Writing Tools

This is the best Apple Intelligence feature you can use today

The most polished and thorough Apple Intelligence feature you can use today is clearly Writing Tools. This name represents a wide variety of generative AI writing tools, and not all of them are available right now. However, Writing Tools can already summarize content, rewrite content, and change the structure and length of content. In a few tests, I had Apple Intelligence summarize entire articles down to a few sentences, and it did an excellent job. Rewriting could be more hit-or-miss; I found that Writing Tools would swap words for other synonyms, making sentences more wordy but not materially different.

Still, there was a lot to like. The best part of Writing Tools is that they're available throughout macOS Sequoia. You can use Writing Tools anywhere there is selectable text or a text box. The possibilities are endless, and this is true system-wide integration. Apple Intelligence might not be more powerful than Gemini for Workspace or Copilot, but it is certainly better integrated.

What about all the other Apple Intelligence features?

These are the Apple Intelligence features that are available today in the macOS 15.1 beta, but more are coming. With that being said, the ones available now are actually some of the most useful. Generative Playground and Genmoji are flashy, but they won't improve your productivity. By comparison, the revamped Siri, Writing Tools, and Apple Mail features are sure to make using any of the best Macs easier.