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Wait, I’m actually excited for these two Apple Intelligence features

Wait, I’m actually excited for these two Apple Intelligence features

While Apple hasn’t given any new information about its next AI upgrade for Siri, it has a handful of new Apple Intelligence features coming later this year in macOS 26, iOS 26, and iPadOS 26 that look extremely useful. The Reminders feature should be easy enough for everyone, but the new enhancements coming to Shortcuts will have a bit of a learning curve.

Reminders is getting a lot smarter

The first is something I think everyone will get behind: new improvements to Reminders. Once you have the update, you can use Apple Intelligence to sort your normal lists into smart categories. This is a lot like how the grocery list feature worked in iOS 17, but now it can apply to everything.

For example, if you had a list of things you want to pack for a trip, you could sort it by clothing, toiletries, tech, and more. This new feature will be built into the context menu in the top right of a Reminders list. In the menu, choose the ‘Auto-Categorize’ option.

Leading off of this, you can also use Apple Intelligence to scan a webpage and generate a Reminders list from the content of the page. This will be extremely helpful for moving a recipe from the web into your shopping list. However, it also works for things that aren’t formatted as a list and should be smart enough to read the page and parse the information. It’s still unclear how exactly this gathers information from a website, and if tools designed to block AI crawling will also prevent this feature from reading the page.

Shortcuts

Apple is also taking shortcuts to the next level on iPad, Mac and iPhone by adding the ability to chain in Apple Intelligence prompts among the normal if/then statements. This sounds complex and probably will be, but if you can master it, you’ll be able to pull off some clever computer wizardry.

A good example of this would be to make a prompt that says something like “read files that I place on my desktop and then sort them into the corresponding folders based on context.” If you were to make something like that, you would need to add your own contextual clues for the AI to base its reasoning on. Other instructions will also need to be added to the shortcut to make sure the AI knows which folders to use.

When I start running macOS 26, I’m hoping to be able to build a Shortcut that will help me clean up my desktops. It would be awesome to be able to get AI to sort my Photoshop exports from my desktop to a backup folder, and all my screenshots and other various files to the trash after 30 days. This can finally work on Mac now that you can make Automations within the Shortcuts app on Mac. Previously, this was limited to iPhone and iPad.

When you are using Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, there are options to have it use the built-in Apple Intelligence features that we’ve been using in iOS 18, like summarizations, proofreading, and more. On top of that, you can also just launch a plain text query at the local model on your device, Apple’s private cloud compute online model, or ChatGPT. The local model will be fine for smaller tasks, but if you’re setting up a complex task, you’ll want to use the cloud or ChatGPT.

There are a few other Apple Intelligence-related features, like the new Workout Buddy on Apple Watch and various other tools, that you can read more about in Apple’s AI-specific press release. 

Image source: Reddit, Apple

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