iOS 26 and Apple Intelligence

As Finalist plunges into the murky waters of iOS 26 beta, I figured it would be helpful to developers and users alike to share some of the journey. I don’t have a lot of time to write (and I’m a terrible writer who refuses AI’s help), so I’ll keep these brief.

I just finished implementing the first of Foundation Models in iOS 26 beta and was really impressed. I’ve been pining for what seems like years for Apple to open up some of these to third-party apps and they’re just as good as I thought they’d be.

Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time was to allow users to speak a bunch of stuff they need to do and have the app pull it apart into discrete tasks and create Reminders for correct dates and times. Well, with some effort this is now possible with iOS 26 Beta 1 (yes, the very first beta!):

The feature as currently implemented has a confirmation screen and doesn’t yet attempt to schedule times but will create reminders for the day you’re looking at. It also sometimes gets confused but considering that this is the first iOS 26 beta, implemented for the beta of Finalist, I’m pretty impressed. In its final state I can see it do away with the confirmation screen and also pay attention to times and dates you speak so that the Reminders could get their alarms as well.

The LLM could be quicker (I’d take twice as fast please), but keep in mind this is a screen recording of iPhone 15 Pro Max, which will be two generations behind by the time September rolls around.

If you want to try this out today, you need to have both iOS 26 developer beta and Finalist 3 beta (available in Discord) but it will be available to everyone in September, as long as your iPhone and iPad support Apple Intelligence.