Apple Intelligence: 3 tips if you have already installed iOS 26.1

If you have installed iOS 26.1, you can now use Apple Intelligence – we give you 3 useful tips to get started.

3 useful tips for Apple Intelligence

Thanks to Apple Intelligence, your iPhone has received many new functions. Maybe you’ve already tried some of them. In any case, we will give you some useful tips to get started!

1. Launch Visual Intelligence without a camera controller

With the new Visual Intelligence, you point your iPhone’s camera at a plant, for example, and you will then see what type of plant it is. You use the function by briefly pressing the camera controller. But what do you do if you don’t have a camera controller? This is, for example, the case with an iPhone 15 Pro (Max) and an iPhone 16e.

You then have three options: you can use the Action button assign to use Visual Intelligence. You do this via ‘Settings > Action button’. Then choose Visual Intelligence.

You can also add Visual Intelligence to the Lock Screen. To do this, long press the Lock screen and tap ‘Customise’. Then tap one of the two controls at the bottom left or bottom right. Then choose ‘Visual Intelligence’.

The last option is to start Visual Intelligence via the Control Panel:

In the image above you see the Visual Intelligence icon at the bottom right.

2. Summarize notifications

This is a very useful new feature of Apple Intelligence. Especially when you have friends or acquaintances who always send a lot of messages one after the other. Thanks to this feature, you don’t necessarily have to read through all those messages, because you just see a summary of them. That is of course much clearer. The feature is disabled by default, so you have to activate it manually once. This is how you do it:

• Open the Settings app;
• Scroll down a bit;
• Tap ‘Notifications’;
• Tap the heading ‘Summary notifications’;
• Turn on the switch behind ‘Summary notifications’.

3. Enable ChatGPT

Since iOS 26.1, you can enable a ChatGPT extension. They can help you, among other things, with writing text, creating images and answering questions. To enable it, proceed as follows:

• Open the Settings app;
• Scroll down a little;
• Tap ‘Apple Intelligence & Siri’;
• Here you tap on ‘ChatGPT’;
• Behind ‘Use ChatGPT’, tap ‘Configure’;
• Now tap ‘Next’ and then ‘Activate ChatGPT’;

If you have an account for ChatGPT, tap ‘Use ChatGPT with an account’ in the last step.

More iPhone tips?

Did you like these iPhone tips and want more? On iPhoned you can read useful tips and tricks for your iPhone every week. Check out the most recent tips below!

• Apple Intelligence: 3 tips if you have already installed iOS 26.1

• How to turn off Apple Intelligence on your iPhone (and why you want to)

• This is Visual Intelligence on your iPhone (and here’s how it works)

• This is how you use the official WhatsApp app on your Apple Watch

• Removing people from your photos: this is how you do it on your iPhone