How to use Visual Intelligence on the iPhone
One of the Apple Intelligence features that hasn’t been delayed is Visual Intelligence, which uses your iPhone’s camera to identify and answer questions on whatever’s around you in the world.
It lets you snap a pizza restaurant storefront and find out its opening hours, for example, or point your camera at a plant and find out what it’s called and how to care for it. If you’ve used Google Lens, you’ll get the idea.
This isn’t available to everyone, though. You have to be using iOS 18.2 on the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, or iPhone 16 Pro Max; iOS 18.3 on the iPhone 16E; or iOS 18.4 on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. You’ll also need to have Apple Intelligence turned on, via Apple Intelligence & Siri in Settings.
How to launch Visual Intelligence
If you have an iPhone 16 with a Camera Control button on the right-hand side, you can tap and hold this button to bring up the camera and Visual Intelligence.
If you’ve got an iPhone 16E, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max, you’ve got a few different options to choose from:
- You can customize the Action Button to launch Visual Intelligence: Go to Settings, tap Action Button, then swipe left or right to find Visual Intelligence.
- You can launch it from the lockscreen. With your phone locked, tap and hold on the lockscreen, then choose Customize > Lock Screen. Tap the – (minus) symbol next to either icon in the bottom corner to clear the current shortcut, then tap + (plus) to select Visual Intelligence as the replacement.
- You can launch it from the Control Center. Swipe down from the top right corner of the display. You should see a Visual Intelligence shortcut. If it’s not there, tap + (plus) in the top left corner, then Add a Control to add Visual Intelligence.
How to use Visual Intelligence
There are all kinds of ways to use Visual Intelligence. Most of the time, it’ll be able to recognize and respond to prompts about anything you show it, so try experimenting and see what you get.
- Identify animals and plants. If you’re looking at an animal or plant, Visual Intelligence should recognize this, and tell you what you’re looking at without any further input. You can then tap the animal or plant name for more information.
- Interact with businesses. Point your iPhone camera at a business location, and it should be identified in the same way that animals and plants are, with a label at the top. Tap this label to see your options, which will vary depending on what Apple’s AI can find. These options might include Schedule (to see opening times), Order (to order a delivery), Menu (to see food, drink, or services), and Reserve (to book a table). Tap the three dots to call the business, visit its website, or see more information about it.
- Scan text: Visual Intelligence can do a lot with text. Tap the capture button (the large circle at the bottom) with text in view, and you get onscreen options to Summarize, Translate, or Read Aloud the text using AI.
- Take action on text: Visual Intelligence will often pop up options for taking action on text it recognizes. It can call numbers, create calendar events from dates, message email addresses, and look up information on flight numbers.
Outside of those options, you’ve got two features you can use, which appear as buttons onscreen whenever Visual Intelligence is looking at something.
- Tap Ask to get a ChatGPT prompt box. You can then ask what an object is, how to fix something, how to solve a math problem, how to make a dish from certain ingredients, or any other image-related query you can think of based on what’s onscreen.
- Tap Search to get the standard list of Google search results for the image you’ve snapped. This can be helpful if you want to shop online for something that’s in front of you, but it also works for some of the same queries above as well (maybe identifying an actor from an image, or looking up a make of car).
To exit Visual Intelligence at any time, swipe up from the bottom of the screen.
