iOS 18.2 releasing with Genmoji and support for Canadian English

Apple is releasing iOS 18.2, macOS Sequoia 15.2 and iPadOS 18.2 today, bringing the next wave of Apple Intelligence features to the masses. This includes the highly sought-after Genmojis, ChatGPT integration, support for Canadian English and more.

I’ve been testing these features in the iOS 18.2 beta for a while and have found it to be a nice step up over the first wave of Apple Intelligence. However, there are still limitations since the tools are still in their preview state. Apple will continue to refine the models, and now that it’s out in its official preview, the company may adjust things behind the scenes.

The one major update that is still missing from the Apple Intelligence suite is the new and improved AI-backed Siri, and new reports suggest that it might appear in April 2025.

All the Apple Intelligence updates are only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 series, along with M-series MacBooks and all M-series iPads, plus the new iPad mini from 2024. The Apple AI models need to be downloaded to your phone once you update and will take up around 7GB of space.

As of the time of writing, we haven’t seen the updates on any of our non-beta-enabled devices, but they are slated to drop Decemebr 11th. Since many users likely didn’t turn on Apple Intelligence because it wasn’t available in Canadian English, here’s a list of what was available in the first update earlier this year. You can now access all of those features and the ones listed below.

Genmoji

From our prior reporting, we know that people are really excited about Genmojis, so I’ll start with that. You can create Genmoji from the iOS keyboard in select apps. For instance, it works in Messages, Slack and Facebook Messenger, but Meta still hasn’t added support for it in Instagram Messenger.

To make a Genmoji, navigate to the Emoji section of the keyboard and then type what you want to make in the text bar along the top of the keyboard. While it’s not perfect, it will attempt some ambitious emojis, and I’ve had a ton of fun with it so far. It can even make emojis based on the people you have saved in your Photos app. So if I want to make an emoji of ‘Alex and an orange cat eating soup,’ that’s all I need to type, and the phone is smart enough to know who Alex is and what she looks like from her label in the Photos app. However, you can’t do two people at once, and it doesn’t recognize pets, so I need to describe my cat as just “an orange cat.”

It also struggled to make Dean from MobileSyrup. For the last few years, Dean has had blonde hair, but Genmoji and Image Playground will always default him to dark hair even when I feed it pictures of him with his blonde hair. If I specifically ask it to make him blonde, it very rarely accurately portrays him and usually just gives him wacky, longer blonde hair.

There have also been some edge cases where the emojis have weird partial backgrounds, but for the most part, it’s super fun. I’ve been sending tons of custom emojis since I started playing with it, and I don’t see myself stopping any time soon. Hopefully, Apple will refine the models over the next year to make them more accurate to the people they’re trying to represent. Still, they’re usually close enough, and their flexibility is unmatched. These are also saved as Stickers so you can share them repeatedly, and your friends can save the ones you make.

Image playground

Image Playground is a separate app on Apple Intelligence-equipped hardware that allows you to generate things similar to Genmoji. Here, you can use more art styles and workshop your images a little more. I’ve used this app less than the standard Genmojis, but you can use it if you need to generate an image for a presentation or get a point across in a chat.

All of the Genmoji and Image Playground features also run locally on your device, and during my time with it, the iPhone 16 Pro Max heats up quite a bit. It also runs a lot faster on the M4 iPad Pro which is to be expected, but is interesting to see that Apple’s advanced chips really do run AI tools better.

Image Playground can generate images with two art styles, and a third will launch at some point in the future. Today, you can make images with an ‘Animated’ style that looks like modern 3D animation or an ‘illustration’ style that harkens back to hand-drawn art.

While there was a waitlist for the beta to start using the generative AI-based tools, there will be no waitlist for the full launch later today.

ChatGPT in Siri

Once you have the new update, Siri can backdoor into ChatGPT to answer more complex questions. If you ask something like “When was the Toronto airport built?” a popup will appear asking if you want to search the web or use ChatGPT. If you choose ChatGPT, the OpenAI tool will answer your question.

This is free and doesn’t save your history, but if you already have a ChatGPT account, you can sign into it within the Apple Intelligence settings. You will get access to your paid features and a history of your requests. There is also a toggle here to make it so Siri stops asking if you want to search the web and will just use ChatGPT by default.

ChatGPT in Writing Tools

In the first wave of Apple AI tools, the company added the ability to reformat, summarize, and proofread text, but now there’s another option that uses ChatGPT to compose text from scratch.

I haven’t tried it yet, but Apple’s press release mentions that you can use ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities in the compose window to add AI-generated images next to your text.

Image Wand with Apple Pencil

Strangely, the Image Wand feature is locked to being an Apple Pencil feature. Therefore, in iPadOS 18.2, you’ll see a new wand tool alongside the other Apple Pencil brushes. This new tool allows you to draw a circle around words, a doodle or nothing to generate an image right in the Notes app.

If you draw your magic circle around words or a doodle, it will try to recreate what is within the circle, but if you draw a circle at the end of a note with nothing inside it, the wand will take stock of what the note is about and attempt to generate an image based on what you’ve written.

I get that Apple needs to find some way to add AI to the Apple Pencil, but this feature feels like a vast stretch to be limited to the stylus. I get restraining certain brushes and art tools to the Pencil since it’s hard to paint and draw with just your finger, but since Image Wand only requires you to draw a circle, it feels annoying to need to use the Pencil for it.

Visual Intelligence on the iPhone 16 series

On the new iPhone 16 series phones with a Camera Control button, you can now hold down the new button to bring up a camera meant to help you learn about the world around you. It can reverse image search things you take pictures of, copy text from the real world, translate text, and interact with phone numbers/emails. You can also take a photo of something or someplace and ask ChatGPT to teach you more about it.

I’ve played around with this feature in the beta, but I often forgot that it’s there. While I like the ability to interact with an email address from a photo, moving these features to a separate camera app hidden behind Camera Control feels very un-Apple. Usually, the company is quite good at integrating helpful features into its OS, but I worry that it is trying too hard to justify the camera button when it should have just added most of these features to the photos app or default camera like it did with the QR code scanner and Visual Look up in Photos.

Other notes and upgrades

Beyond the Apple Intelligence features in this list, there are a few smaller updates coming to all phones that support iOS 18.2:

• Most of the things you ask Apple Intelligence to do happen locally on your phone, but complex tasks like rewriting large chunks of text and creating memory movies in the Photos app will reach out privately to Apple’s cloud servers. You can learn more about how Apple keeps this cloud data private here.
• Now that Apple Intelligence is localized to Canadian English, it better understands our spelling, food and local holidays.
• There are now new categories for sorting emails.
• Apple has revamped the photo viewer in the Photos app to utilize more of the screen real estate.
• Favourites album is now also in the Utilities collection.
• You can now see downloading files from Safari as a live activity.
• New background images to customize the Safari start page.
• Voice Memos supports layered recording, allowing users to compose simple songs in the basic recording app. It only allows two tracks, though.
• You can now share the location of a lost AirTag from the Find My app to more people.
• Better natural language search in Apple TV and Apple Music.
• New settings to use Camera Control to lock focus on a part of the image.