But the new arrival, while imperfect, provides some useful time-saving aid.

For example, the phone call summary feature wrote that my wife “informed the caller that she had given up her car and sold the BMW.”

Sorry, no – my wife dropped off her car for an oil change and took my car home; So I parked nearby and left the keys under the sunshade. While she teased her husband for his careless attitude about car safety, she actually said, “No one stole the BMW.”

Any call can now be recorded by clicking an icon that appears in the upper left corner of the active call screen. When you click, iPhone announces to all parties on the line that the call is being recorded. After the call ends, the recording and the AI-generated transcript and summary appear in the Notes app.

AI summarization works in more places than just call recordings.

You can highlight text in almost any app and get a summary from the new “Writing Tools” menu, which pops up alongside pre-existing options like copy and paste. In applications that can edit text, in addition to summarizing, new tools also offer the opportunity to reread, rewrite, or turn highlighted text into a to-do list. I also tried highlighting a few paragraphs describing some hospital sales, and the AI ​​generated a table that I could insert into a spreadsheet with headers listing the buyer, price, and names of hospitals sold (although the format didn’t transfer perfectly).

Some Apple apps have a built-in summary feature, although it’s not always in the most obvious place. In the Safari web browser, for example, you need to click on the little Apple Intelligence icon in the web address bar and then click “show reader” on the next screen. This will take you to a simplified view of the web page and you can then click the “summary” button.

The web summaries are pretty good. The abbreviated view of the Wall Street Journal article about the Celtics’ early season success was 100 percent accurate, even citing the team’s very high average of 50.25 three-point attempts per game. The Globe’s summary of its coverage of a comic insulting Puerto Rico at former President Trump’s MSG rally was also spot-on, concluding: “The incident highlights the importance of respectful discourse in political campaigns.”

Summarization also works in Apple’s email app and backlog notification alerts. Some commentators have already I noticed a few odditiesHowever, I found the summaries generally to the point.

I also released Apple Intelligence to suggest improvements to some of my stories. I uploaded a storyboard to a text editing app called IA Writer and added a few grammar and spelling errors. After highlighting the entire text and going to “Writing Tools” in the drop-down bar, the proofreader found all the errors and suggested corrections.

But the user interface isn’t the best for reviewing longer blocks of text. Instead of walking the user through the text and highlighting errors and corrections like old spell checkers, Apple Intelligence shows its own long, corrected version without the highlights showing where it suggests changes. You can replace your entire highlighted block of text with the one the AI ​​recommends, and then the places where it makes changes will be shown in pale gray text. Want to undo the change? Look for the small backspace arrow icon at the top of the on-screen keyboard. The whole process was difficult to understand, and I was uneasy thinking that tapping the wrong little icon on the screen would delete all my work.

Along with text features, Apple Intelligence also helped iPhone capture Google’s photo magic on Android phones.

A new “clear” button appears when editing any photo. Circle something you want to remove from a photo and replace it immediately and it will be removed. The clearing process worked best when the disappearing object was in front of a simple background, such as a lawn or sidewalk.

Siri gets a new coat of paint in this update, but not much more. Instead of a glowing circular sphere at the bottom of the screen, Siri now indicates when it’s active with a glowing border around the entire screen.

But it’s the same old, meh Siri. It cannot answer complex questions and prefers to send you to a web page. We will have to wait a little longer for the new artificial intelligence-supported super Siri.

Aaron Pressman can be reached at [email protected]. follow him @ampressman.