iOS 18.1 beta adds photo 'Clean Up' AI tool and notification summaries - how they work

If you have access to Apple's IOS 18.1 developer beta, you can now try out Clean Up, a new feature that removes unwanted people, places, and other objects from your photos. 

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Available in the third beta rolled out on Wednesday, the new photo clean-up tool takes a page from Google's Magic Eraser by letting you eliminate an unwanted element from a photo just by wiping it away. The editing feature is part of Apple Intelligence, the company's on-device artificial intelligence (AI) technology that the company is gradually adding to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. 

Clean Up uses AI to analyze an object and its surrounding area. The challenge is to remove the unwanted item and fill that empty area with the adjacent pixels.

Though it sounds great, this type of trickery can be hit or miss. The success depends on the edges around the object. If the outline is distinct and easy to separate, then the odds are good that the results will look seamless. If not, you could end up with remnants of the erased object, such as a floating head without a body.

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In a post on X, Bloomberg writer and Apple expert Mark Gurman said he was unimpressed with the clean-up tool, noting that so far it feels a bit "raw and underwhelming" and "not very good". However, some X users who responded to Gurman's post were pleased with the results, especially for a tool still in early beta mode.

Beyond the clean-up option, the latest iOS 18.1 beta taps into AI to provide summaries of your notifications. Initially available only for the Mail and Messages app, this feature can now summarize notifications from all your apps, according to MacRumors. A new Apple Intelligence setup that takes you through some of the new features helps you with the settings for the notification summaries.

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You can choose to get the summaries for all apps or just certain ones. Your device then displays the key details of your summaries so that you don't have to read them all. As the Settings app explains: "Summarize content in direct messages and groups of notifications, making them more succinct and easier to read. Summary accuracy may vary based on content."

At this point, developers with access to iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS Sequoia 15.1 can opt into the new Apple Intelligence features or remain on the standard developer beta track. However, you'll need the right type of device to access the developer beta. For iOS, that means an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max. For iPadOS or macOS, that means a device with an M-series chip.

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Apple's next iPhone event is slated for September 9, which means iOS 18 and other OS updates will likely launch by the end of the following week. However, with so much riding on the new AI capabilities, the company has also been testing iOS 18.1 with built-in Apple Intelligence. 

Reports say that version 18.1 should roll out sometime in October. But even then, Apple will continue to add new features to its AI technology into 2025.