Apple Just Gave Your iPhone a Surprisingly Useful Camera Trick

When Apple released iOS 18.2 in December, it introduced the first Visual Intelligence features to the iPhone 16 line. Essentially, using its camera and leveraging Apple Intelligence, your iPhone 16 could analyze and identify what you were looking at … and tell you about it.

But at launch, Visual Intelligence only worked with a few neat but basic things. If you used it at a store or restaurant, it could tell you business hours or pull up a menu. If you pointed it at a sign or message in a different language, it could translate it for you. It could also tell you about buildings or objects.

Now that Apple has rolled out iOS 18.3 — launched this week — it’s enhanced Visual Intelligence so that it can identify more things. And actually, I bet you’ll find it a lot more fun and useful.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

Visual Intelligence, what’s new?

The big news with Visual Intelligence is that thanks to iOS 18.3, you can now use it to identify animals, plants, and insects.

That’s right, you use your iPhone 16’s camera to tell you more about the breed of your dog or cat. If you have a wide variety of plants, you can use it to identify those, too.

In my experience of using Visual Intelligence with the houseplants I have, I’ve found that it does a decent job at identifying the more popular ones, like peace lilies, monstera and aloe versa, but wasn’t as consistent with more diversity … it couldn’t tell me the exact species of philodendron, for example.

It’s worth pointing out that all Apple Intelligence features, including Visual Intelligence, are still technically in “beta” … so results aren’t exactly perfect.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

In non-plant-or-pet news, another new ability of Visual Intelligence is that you can point your iPhone 16 at a flyer or poster with a date on it, and it can create an event in your Calendar app — simply confirm you want it to do so when prompted.

The catch is that it’ll only work with Apple’s default Calendar app and not a third-party one (like Google Calendar or Fantastical).

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

How to use Visual Intelligence?

In order to use Visual Intelligence, you need an iPhone 16 and you have to have Apple Intelligence turned on. (Note: the iPhone 15 Pro/Max support most Apple Intelligence features, but not the Visual Intelligence ones. )

Then, to use Visual Intelligence, simply click and hold the Camera Control button on your iPhone 16. The camera app will open and simply point your iPhone 16’s camera at the object, plant or animal that you’re trying to identify.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

After analyzing what you’re looking at, your iPhone 16 will show you a text bubble (below the Dynamic Island notch) of what you’re looking at. If you click on that text bubble, it might even give you some alternative suggestions of what else it could be. You can click on any of the options to learn more.

(Note: You cannot activate Visual Intelligence when the camera app is open. It must be activated from the Home Screen, Lock Screen, or another app that doesn’t use the Camera Control button.)

Additionally, there are two buttons — one for ChatGPT (located in the bottom-left) and one for Google Search (located in the bottom-right) — that you can press for secondary source or search options.

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