Your iPhone's camera is about to get smarter. During its WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple announced Siri's Visual Intelligence feature will be directly integrated into the Camera app on your iPhone in iOS 27. This will allow you to point your camera at real-world objects and get more information on them, similar to what Google Lens already does. To use it, you'll need a phone that supports Apple Intelligence—which means an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, including all devices in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 17 families.
The company also announced that Visual Intelligence is coming to Mac for the first time with macOS 27. It will let you draw a highlight around details in an image, so you can, say, identify a landmark and get more information about it, or figure out where to buy a piece of clothing. Again, you'll need a Mac that supports Apple Intelligence, which means an M-series laptop or iMac.
Visual Intelligence is getting a bunch of upgrades on iPhone and iPad
With iOS 27, Visual Intelligence will also be getting a few useful updates as a part of the Siri overhaul coming later this year. Apple is integrating Siri directly into the Camera app on your iPhone, so you'll be able to point your camera at an object and ask Siri to help you look up useful information about it. This feature will be available as a new "Siri mode" in the Camera app, currently nestled between the Photo and Portrait modes. You'll also be able to ask follow-up questions and view previously asked questions in the new Siri app that's shipping with iOS 27, so that these lookups are not lost after you've closed the Camera app, the company said.
Siri mode will also suggest relevant actions based on what you're pointing the camera at. Apple's demos showed Siri identifying a restaurant bill and making it easy to split the cost between a group of friends. On the iPad, Visual Intelligence is integrated into the screenshot experience, so you'll be able to use the feature to analyze what's onscreen every time you capture a screenshot.
It's also worth noting (for a little while, anyway) that Visual Intelligence is coming to visionOS, which is the operating system for the Apple Vision headset.
What do you think so far?
How Visual Intelligence works in macOS 27 Golden Gate
In explaining how Visual Intelligence will work on Mac in macOS 27 (dubbed "Golden Gate"), Apple said you'll be able to select any part of your screen to use Visual Intelligence. This looks like a great implementation in theory, because that's how I tend to clip and save things I'm interested in already—I use a keyboard shortcut to crop a part of the screen and drop it into reverse image search; Apple is integrating a similar workflow into macOS 27.
Once you use the keyboard shortcut to bring up Visual Intelligence, you'll see a few options next to the image. You can either ask Siri to tell you more about it, click a button to perform a reverse image search, or use the option that gives you more contextual information about the thing you're looking at. As an example, if you select an image of a pizza, macOS 27 will show you an option to look up the nutritional values of that specific type of pizza.
Visual Intelligence on the Mac should also be able to identify a music festival poster and add multiple events to your calendar in one go. As of this writing, this feature will only be available on Macs with their device language set to English.
