Apples heavily marketed Visual Intelligence is just a fancy Google image search [Video]

Of the many still unavailable Apple Intelligence features that have been marketed by the company, one in particular seemed quite promising: Visual Intelligence. The idea was that you could point your brand new iPhone 16 at anything you see and it would tell you all about it. Turns out, this Visual Intelligence is just an API call to Google or ChatGPT. In short, it does nothing new.

Bloomberg’s Apple insider Mark Gurman says that this feature probably took Apple around a week to implement at most. Though I’m willing to bet it was probably longer than that — software development often runs into unforeseen complications — it likely wasn’t that difficult.

While Apple has marketed Visual Intelligence as this amazing next step in the usefulness and practicality of an iPhone, it’s just a front for services you already had access to. Apple Intelligence does no heavy lifting here, at least for now. That may …