One of the big features that was announced alongside the iPhone 16 series last Fall, is finally starting to roll out. That’s Visual Intelligence, which is part of iOS 18.3. Visual Intelligence is essentially the same as Google Lens, which has been around for a long time. But on the iPhone 16, you can use the Camera Control button to activate, and then easily identify things, add events to your calendar from a poster and much more.
Also available with iOS 18.3 are some changes to notification summaries. Apple says that you can now easily manage settings for notification summaries from the lock screen. There’s also an updated style for notification summaries. They are now italicized, so you can more easily identify that it’s an AI-generated summary versus an actual notification’s content.
Additionally, notification summaries for news and entertainment apps are temporarily unavailable. Users who opt-in will see them again when the feature becomes available, according to Apple. This is an important change, as the AI summaries for notifications were sort of exaggerating a bit.
iOS 18.3 also brings in quite a few bug fixes
Of course, with iOS 18.3, we’re getting a boatload of bug fixes. Including a fix for the calculator repeating the last mathematical operation when you tap the equals sign again. Apple also fixed an issue where the keyboard might disappear when initiating a typing Siri request. And it also resolved an issue where audio playback continues until the song ends even after closing Apple Music.
This update is available now, and it’s a pretty large one. On our iPhone 16 Pro, which was already running on the developer beta, got an update for 587.2MB. So it’s a hefty one. Make sure that you are connected to WiFi before you start downloading, as this is going to use up a lot of bandwidth, and if you don’t have unlimited data, you might have a bad day.
