What you need to have and do

Apple Intelligence in iPhone: How to Get Started

You can create unique emojis, AI-generated images, get summaries, and writing assistance. But Apple Intelligence also comes with pitfalls to avoid.

Erik Mörner

Published 2 April 2025 - 17:19

Apple's AI services have been delayed, but still arrived in Sweden earlier than many expected. They offer both opportunities and pitfalls, so here we go through what you can expect. A major drawback is, of course, that you have to switch your phone to English for it to work at all.

With Apple Intelligence in your iPhone, you can now create your own emojis based on chosen keywords, create AI-generated images, summarise messages and email threads. You can also use visual intelligence, which means that AI interprets or answers questions about what the phone's cameras see.

Apple Intelligence was introduced at the developer conference WWDC in early summer 2024. When the iPhone 16 series was presented last autumn, it was said to be built from the ground up to take advantage of Apple's AI. This also applied to the recently launched slightly cheaper model, the iPhone 16e.

What you need

To use Apple Intelligence, you must have one of the latest iPhone models. This is because some, but not all, of Apple Intelligence is handled locally on the device and therefore requires a modern system chip and generous system resources.

This is probably the reason why all iPhone models in the iPhone 16 series were equipped with the new A18 chip and A18 Pro. In the previous generation of iPhones, only the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max meet the system requirements.

To be able to test Apple Intelligence, you need one of the following iPhone models:

iPhone 16e
iPhone 16
iPhone 16 Plus
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 16 Pro
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 15 Pro

How to get started

First and foremost, the phone must be upgraded to iOS 18.4, which is available now. To then use Apple Intelligence, you need to set your phone to English today. This applies to both English as the system language and the United Kingdom as the region. Only after you have done this can you activate Apple Intelligence in the phone's settings menu, or Settings, as it is then called.

This means that everything on the phone will be in English. You will have Siri in English instead of Swedish. You will need to retrain Siri and read phrases aloud so that she can understand and recognise your voice.

However, you can still write in Swedish. By activating both Swedish and English as input languages, but choosing a Swedish keyboard with åäö, you can write fluently in both English and Swedish and get autocorrection that works in both languages.

Everything related to AI still only works in English, so if you want to create an emoji with AI, you have to do it in English, and for example, summaries and writing tools always only work with English messages.