Yesterday with iOS 18.2 Apple Intelligence was officially released in Australia. I acknowledge that it is Apple's current cornerstone feature, however I'm just not that excited by it.

I'm not much of a Siri user as it is, other than setting the occasional timer or adding items to my shopping list, and I can't really see Apple Intelligence changing that.

Notification summaries could be useful, and I might give the writing tools a go for proof-reading now that I am endeavouring to write more.

I'm not interested in Image Playground or Genmoji at all.

This is not to say that Apple Intelligence isn't useful. I can certainly appreciate how other people could use it and get real value from it, and from that standpoint I will continue to follow the progress of the suite of tools. Apple's approach to AI is distinctly 'Apple' with a focus on privacy and being 'useful' in a more focussed way.

There is a lot of potential for ‘personal intelligence’ - especially in the health space. I am excited about the hidden parts of Apple Intelligence and its machine learning foundations that are already a part of the Apple ecosystem. We're already seeing it with Apple Watch features like Vitals, that learn over time and start to highlight outliers that are specific to you. Indeed, I experienced this firsthand a month ago when I developed pneumonia from a bacterial infection - Vitals picked up that something wasn't right while I was still feeling okay(ish).

We're not far off from Apple Watch with on-device (or at least the connected device) intelligence being able to provide tailored monitoring, with accurate health and fitness advice akin to the WHOOP band. Perhaps the more advanced features (and computation) would be rolled into a Fitness+ subscription, perhaps not. Regardless of the details, that is the potential use of Apple Intelligence that I am excited about.