Reminders takes advantage of Apple Intelligence to examine information in your reminders and make them, or their organizational structure, more useful to you.
Get suggested reminders
While working in other apps, you can prompt Apple Intelligence to extract items from Reminders. While looking at a recipe, for instance:
- Tap or click the Share button, and the Suggestions section should appear in a moment with all the ingredients to add to a shopping list or all the steps in a recipe.
- Tap or click the plus button to add items, or tap or click Include All.
- Tap the blue checkmark button or click Add to finish.
You can refine this by making a selection before tapping or clicking the Share button. In our testing, Suggestions first showed the steps. Selecting the ingredients section first produced the comprehensive shopping list.
Categorize your reminders
If you would prefer your device to divide up your reminders within a list by category, you can use Auto-Categorize. Select a list, then tap the More button and choose Auto-Categorize, or right-click/Control-click the list and choose Auto-Categorize. The results may vary. When we tested it, we had a hard time figuring out what it did.
To turn Auto-Categorize off on an iPhone or iPad, tap the Siri button, then choose Turn Off from the Auto-Categorize section; on a Mac, right-click or Control-click the list, choose Auto-Categorize to turn it off. Then click or tap either Keep or Remove to determine what happens to your existing sections.
Write naturally
As with Calendar, on devices with Apple Intelligence, you can type loosely—if not using completely natural language—and Reminders suggests or fills in task-related elements.
What Notes adds
Notes makes limited use of Apple Intelligence, offering it in two places in the app.
Summarize a transcript
You can record a call from FaceTime or Phone—starting in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 26, and Tahoe—which is automatically transcribed as text in an entry in Notes and saved in that entry as an audio file. The transcription doesn’t require Apple Intelligence, but a summary created after the recording ends does.
Record a call in either app after a call starts by tapping or clicking the More button, then choose Call Recording. In iOS 18.1, tap the Record button.
Add Siri AI answers
You can tell Siri to insert its answers to your questions into a note by the note’s name. You can also ask Siri to format the answer in a particular way so that when it’s inserted, it looks the way you want. For example, you can take a long response from Siri and ask it to format it as a bulleted list.
Make or improve images with Magic Wand
The Magic Wand tool in Notes lets you create images directly in a note, even from the text of the note. To try it, tap the drawing button to reveal drawing tools and then select the Magic Wand. Then simply draw a circle to trigger it.
Magic Wand automatically incorporates any text in the note in the image generation prompt. However, with Apple Intelligence, you can add additional elements by typing a description in the Describe an Image field and tapping the send button. Tap the minus button next to an element to remove it from the image.
Starting in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, you can also start by using the drawing tools to create a sketch, then switch to the Magic Wand, circle your drawing, and it incorporates that along with text in the note.
Tap Done to insert the image in your note. You may have to swipe down on the canvas to reveal the Done button.
