Over the past few years, Apple’s macOS releases have been interesting, if not particularly exciting. But that’s about to change this year with the launch of macOS Sequoia, and it’s all thanks to one feature: Apple Smart

Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform has the potential to revolutionize the way you use your Mac every day. From generating images, rewriting emails, and summarizing audio recordings to transforming Siri into a more powerful virtual assistant, Apple AI may be the most important new feature to macOS in years.

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Now that it’s available in the latest macOS Sequoia beta, I thought I’d give Apple Smartwatch a try to see if it’s worth your time. Read on for my first impressions.

Siri

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The good news is that you can try out Apple Assistant for free by downloading the macOS 15.1 developer beta. The bad news is that a large number of Apple Assistant features — most of them, in fact — are currently unavailable for testing. So while I was able to try out some parts of Apple Assistant, it was far from a comprehensive look at the new system.

Let’s start with Siri. Since its launch in 2011, Apple’s virtual assistant has squandered its early lead, falling far behind competitors in recent years. Apple’s Siri is a huge opportunity to close the gap and inject much-needed attention (and, you know, artificial intelligence) into the assistant.

Unfortunately, many of the new Siri features are clearly not ready yet, and Apple has yet to add them to macOS Sequoia. For example, awareness of the context of questions — and what’s happening on the screen — is completely absent, as is its ability to run functions inside other apps, and so on.

With that in mind, what about other new Siri features you can try? One of the most hyped additions from Apple this year is Siri’s ability to understand if you change your mind or stutter. The idea is that you can say something like “Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes… No, 5 minutes. No, 3 minutes,” and it will know to set a 3-minute timer and ignore your previous instructions.

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But in practice, this doesn’t work very well at all, at least in my testing. Every time I said the phrase, the Siri window showed that it had recorded exactly what I said—the text displayed was correct. The problem was that, across several attempts, it almost never set the correct timer. Instead, it set a timer for five minutes, an eight-minute timer, and, most bizarrely, a timer for six hours, 32 minutes, and 18 seconds. Most of the time, it misunderstood how long I wanted the timer to last, often picking a seemingly random amount of time instead of the amount I requested. Clearly, more work needs to be done here.

What else is new? Typing to Siri is much easier than before — just select the Siri icon in your Mac’s menu bar, and you can instantly start typing to the assistant. Previously, you had to dive into your Mac’s Accessibility settings to enable this feature. This change makes Siri more useful for Mac users, as you might find yourself working in a library or coffee shop and not want to bother others by talking to Siri. Oddly enough, though, I could still use the Type to Siri feature even though it was clearly disabled in my Accessibility settings. Regardless, it’s a handy addition to macOS.

Siri also has a new UI with glowing edges that flash as it processes your query, but it still feels pretty limited since most features are still missing in the macOS Sequoia beta.

Writing Tools

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<p当你想到人工智能时，写作工具可能是最先想到的之一。你知道那种类型：让像 ChatGPT 这样的人工智能重写你提供的文本或总结网页上的副本。

Now, macOS can do this kind of thing natively. And unlike Siri, this feels more fleshed out. Unsurprisingly, Apple calls this feature “Writing Tools.” Just highlight a few lines of text, right-click, and you’ll see the “Writing Tools” menu item. From here you can proofread or rewrite the text; make it friendlier, professional, or more concise; or summarize it, create a list of bullet points, convert it to a list, or convert it to a table. There’s also an option to open a small “Writing Tools” window next to your text.

<p这些工具通常都很不错，无论你是想改写文本、获取摘要还是使其更容易理解。特别是，我可以看到这些工具对于撰写正式或重要的电子邮件，或者在你进行后期编辑之前起草文档很有用。

I don’t think it’s something I’d use every day, but getting some ideas for rephrasing words once in a while could be helpful. The text manipulation tools (summarizing, converting text to a list or table) feel more useful to me, though, especially when I’m faced with a long string of text and don’t have the energy to read it all.

The best thing about the Writing Tools is that they aren’t limited to one app. Instead, they work everywhere, including in some of the best third-party Mac apps. This greatly expands their usability and ensures that you should be able to use them wherever you feel comfortable, without having to switch apps (and potentially interrupting your workflow) in order to use them. In this case, this increases the likelihood that you’ll use these tools regularly.

Transcription

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Another useful Apple intelligence feature that has made its way into the latest macOS Sequoia beta is audio transcription. This works both in phone calls and recordings, and in both cases Apple intelligence will try to generate a summary for you of what was said.

I tried it out on a 38-minute recording in the Voice Memos app. Getting started is simple: You just select the recording you want to transcribe, then select the speech bubble icon in the top-right corner of the app. For my 38-minute recording, Apple was able to create a summary in about 25 seconds.

Unfortunately, the summary is littered with mistranscribed words. That’s not uncommon — even the best AI-powered audio transcription services make mistakes. But annoyingly, you can’t correct any of these errors because there’s no way to edit the text. Apple’s AI output also doesn’t distinguish between different speakers in the recording, and since you can’t do that yourself, it’s of limited usefulness for transcribing phone calls and interviews. It’s OK for a quick and rough transcription, but for more serious tasks, you’ll need a professional or a better AI tool.

That being said, it’s more productive to use the Writing Tools feature to summarize your transcription. My 38-minute recording was summarized into four paragraphs by the Writing Tools, which generally captured the gist of what was said and included most of the important points.

At this point, Apple’s smart transcription tools are still a work in progress, but there’s definitely potential as long as Apple can improve the rough edges.

What’s missing?

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That’s more or less all the Apple smart features available in macOS Sequoia right now. But there are a lot of other features that haven’t been released yet, with estimated release dates ranging from shortly after the macOS Sequoia release date to after 2025.

Image creation tools like Genmoji (custom emoji you can generate yourself), the Image Playground picture maker, and Image Wand (which turns rough sketches into polished drawings) are gone. So are Apple’s ChatGPT integration and the Priority Notifications feature that lets only the most important alerts reach you immediately, blocking out most other distractions.

I’ve already mentioned that many Siri features aren’t ready yet, from on-screen awareness to controlling other apps. Apple’s Mail app is also getting a redesign, with new sections that will automatically categorize emails so they’re easier to manage, and smart, AI-assisted replies coming to Mail, Messages, and more. Right now, they’re all nowhere to be found.

Finally, AI features in the Photos app, like using natural language to search for images and retouching to remove background elements from photos, may exist, but I wasn’t able to test them. Every time I tried to open the Photos app, it simply crashed.

In a way, that in itself pretty well sums up the Apple intelligence in the latest beta of macOS Sequoia. Right now, there are a lot of things to try out — and a lot of them are very good so far — but a lot of features are in a rough state or simply don’t exist. There are a lot of things I’d love to test, but for now, we’ll just have to be patient with the slow drip of Apple intelligence over the next few months.