Apple Intelligence coming to India in April, Tim Cook confirms: Here’s what it means for iPhone users

Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that the Cupertino-based tech giant will be rolling out Apple Intelligence in a localised English version to users in India and several other countries. While Apple Intelligence is already available to iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro users in India, they had to go into Settings and change their default language to English (US). Following a new iOS 18 update in April, eligible iPhone users will likely be able to access Apple's AI features in iOS 18 without having to change their default language setting.

Speaking during an earnings call on Thursday, Cook said, “In April, we’re bringing Apple Intelligence to more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and simplified Chinese, as well as localised English to Singapore and India.”

"Markets where we had rolled out Apple Intelligence during the [quarter] performed better on a year-over-year basis than markets where we had not…It’s a positive indicator that we were pleased with." Cook told analysts during the same earnings call

What is Apple Intelligence?

Apple Intelligence is the tech giant's first set of AI features, which were first unveiled at last year's WWDC 2024 conference, but did not make it into the final iOS 18 build released with iPhone 16. Since then, Cupertino has rolled out several updates to bring many of the promised features to eligible iPhone users.

Apple Intelligence brings with it a host of new features including Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, ChatGPT integration, a revamped Siri, writing tools and more. While many of these features have been well received by users, some of the features have put the tech giant in a bit of a spot.

The AI-powered notification summaries feature, for example, has come under scrutiny after the BBC, among others, heavily criticised the inaccurate results it produced. In one case, the AI-generated summary of a news story said that Luigi Mangione (the person arrested for the murder of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson) had shot himself, a statement that was false and was later pointed out to Apple.

The tech giant later apologised for the error and removed AI summaries for News and Entertainment apps from the iOS 18.3 update, while adding a caveat that the summaries are currently in beta and may be prone to errors.