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Comment by llm_nerd | Hacker News Reader

"- camera adds events to calendar!"

I'm on iOS 18.0 on my iPhone 15 Pro, rather that the 18.1 with the "AI". Recently had an eye doctor appt for one of my children and they scheduled a follow-up, giving me a little card with the details. I was in a hurry so took a picture of it intending to enter the calendar event later, and it immediately pulled up a fully-filled in, completely accurate new calendar event. Little affordance that is just so nice.

Indeed, in general the camera is getting...crazy. We have a pair of Maine Coon kittens and every picture is tagged with Maine Coon, despite the cats barely even coming into the breed's features yet. Constantly amazed at the stuff the built in camera is identifying.

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I have a hilarious list of animals that my cat has been misclassified as by my iPhone. Everything from a beetle to a nematode. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in these features!

You reminded me that I used to have Wilson (a volleyball) and Queen of Hearts in my faces album for years.

My devices have finally figured out that a volleyball and photo of a hand of cards aren't people. I do miss getting a solid chuckle checking that tab.

Beetle and Nematode a perfect kitty names though.

Chihuahua or Muffin?

As opposed to Adobe [R] Photoshop [R] Lightroom [TM]* Classic's person identification feature which has identified my dog as no fewer than 5 different members of my family, ranging from ~5 years old to > 90 years old.

* I think I got that name right...

on device text recognition, and on device text pattern recognition allows you to call phone numbers, select dates, copy text, copy qr codes, etc.

but few times, there are instances where it doesn't recognize the date and time. I guess this is now a supported feature, instead of accidental feature.

Yeah I took a photo of a weird moth in my house the other day, and accidentally scrolled up the next day to realise that the iPhone had categorised it as the exact species - a Poplar Hawk Moth. I was stunned. Didn’t even have to google for 5 minutes, the camera already knew.

oh so you're saying this is not an Apple Intelligence feature? its a little hard to tell

They have their big generative AI push with 18.1, broadly called Apple Intelligence, but they've been building so many AI inference features for a few iterations now, with the camera and Photos getting loads of those additions. Object detection, subject identification, text extraction, etc, though this was the first time I've taken a picture of an appointment card and had it automate extraction like this.

I feel like loads of these features just quietly appear to be randomly discovered by users.

So it's AI, but not the big hype stuff that gets most of the attention.

It‘s Apple Intelligent, not Apple Intelligence! When are you finally getting it! And no, we don‘t abbreviate it ever! Look, a new button! runs away

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