Apple has announced a new feature called Visual Intelligence that will join the Apple Intelligence suite of AI features coming to iOS 18 later this year. The feature works largely like similar features offered by other multi-modal AI systems from Google or OpenAI.

With Visual Intelligence, you can “instantly learn everything you see,” Apple’s Craig Federighi said today at the company’s September event. Federighi said the feature is “enabled by Camera Control,” which is the company’s name for a new capacitive camera button that’s now on the side of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro phones. To activate the feature, users click and hold the button, then point the phone’s camera at whatever they want.

iPhones use a “combination of on-device intelligence and Apple services that never save your images” to power Visual Intelligence, letting you take a photo of a restaurant to get information about its hours. Point your camera at a flyer and “data like the title, date and location are automatically captured,” he said. Federighi added that the feature “is also your gateway to third-party models,” suggesting you could use Visual Intelligence to Google a bike you see in the wild or snap a photo of study notes to get help with a concept.

Apple hasn’t announced when the feature would be available, other than to say it’s “coming to Camera Control later this year.”