Apple kicked off WWDC 2025 yesterday and made several new announcements regarding its software ecosystem. One of the biggest announcements the Cupertino tech giant made at the conference is iOS 26. It brings a new Liquid Glass design, updates to Safari, FaceTime, the Phone app, improved spam call detection, new backgrounds for Messages, Live Translation, and a new games app. Furthermore, the company has also upgraded the Visual Intelligence feature, which allows you to search for whatever is on your iPhone’s screen.
Apple adds a Circle to Search-like feature to Visual Intelligence
Apple has provided much-needed improvements to the Visual Intelligence functionality in iOS 26. Visual Intelligence now allows users to search and take action on anything on the screen of their iPhones across applications. Users can search for anything on their iPhone’s screen using Visual Intelligence, and it kind of works like Google’s Circle to Search for Android devices.
However, Visual Intelligence’s new functionality takes a few more steps in searching for on-screen content. For example, if you take a screenshot on your iPhone, you’ll then find the new Ask tool and Image search button on the screen. From there, you can highlight anything on the screen you want to search and it’ll show up on Google or other apps you use to search and shop.
Apple’s new Visual Intelligence’s on-screen search feature now acts more like a universal search and action tool across the entire iOS ecosystem. The functionality, which previously worked only with the camera, now analyzes the whole on-screen content. Users can ask ChatGPT questions about what they’re viewing or search Etsy and other supported third-party apps for similar items or objects.
Furthermore, Visual Intelligence’s on-screen search feature can also extract dates, times, and locations from event invitations and suggest adding them to Calendar. Accessing the new feature is straightforward, and you can trigger it by pressing the same buttons you use to capture a screenshot.
It’s worth mentioning that Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 15 Pro and later models. So, Visual Intelligence’s new functionality is coming to all iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max later this year in English.
