Apple’s most important new product of the year (sorry, it’s not a $3,500 headset) will arrive this month. Apple Intelligence, a suite of software tools bringing what Apple describes as artificial intelligence to its devices, will be released through free software updates for owners of some iPhones, Macs and iPads.

The initial version of Apple Intelligence, which Apple is publishing as an unfinished “beta,” will include a slightly improved version of Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, and tools that automatically summarize text, transcribe audio recordings and remove distractions like photo bombers from pictures.

For Apple, this debut is the beginning of a new era. Apple Intelligence is the result of a major restructuring of the Cupertino, Calif., giant nearly two years after the tech industry was upended by the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI.

Apple executives had been concerned that, without similar A.I. technology, the iPhone would eventually look antiquated, so Apple killed its self-driving car project, which had been more than a decade in the making, and reassigned its engineers to work on Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence is arriving without many of the most hyped features that Apple announced in June. Although the company struck a deal with OpenAI to include ChatGPT in its software, the chatbot will not be part of this initial release. Siri also isn’t smart enough (yet) to do things like stitch together data from multiple apps to tell you whether a last-minute meeting will make you late for your child’s play. Apple said those features and others would be gradually rolled out through next year.

To get a sneak preview, I tested an early version of Apple Intelligence over the last week. The new features were a little tricky to find — they have been integrated into different parts of Apple’s software system, including into its buttons for editing text and photos.

I found a few features, including tools for proofreading text and transcribing audio, to be very handy. Others, like a tool for generating summaries of web articles and a button for removing unwanted distractions from photos, were so hit or miss that they should be ignored.

This is all to say that Apple Intelligence is worth watching over the next few years to see whether it evolves into a must-have product, but that it’s not a compelling reason to splurge on new hardware.

Apple Intelligence will work on the latest iPhone 16s and last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, as well as on some iPads and Macs released in the last four years. Here are the tools that will be most useful and the ones you can skip when the software lands on devices this month.

Apple Intelligence Tools That Are Useful

Transcribe Audio Recordings

Apple Intelligence delivers a feature that feels long overdue: When you use the voice memos app to record audio, the app will now automatically produce a transcript alongside the file.

As a journalist who regularly records interviews, I was gung-ho about trying this tool and pleased that it worked well. When I met with a tech company last week, I pressed the record button in the app, and after I hit stop, the transcript was ready for me. Apple Intelligence detected whenever a different person was speaking and created a new paragraph accordingly in the transcript. It transcribed some words incorrectly whenever a person mumbled. But over all, the transcript made it easy for me to look up a keyword to pull a portion of the conversation.

Ask Siri for Help With an Apple Product

While it may be easy to use any smartphone or tablet, Apple’s software has grown increasingly complex over the years, so it can be difficult to know how to take advantage of features that are hard to find. Apple Intelligence has imbued Siri with the ability to offer help with navigating Apple products.

I can never remember, for the life of me, how to run two apps side by side on the iPad, for instance. So I asked Siri, “How do I use split screen on the iPad?” Siri quickly showed me a list of instructions, which involved tapping a button on the top of an app.