During the iPhone 16 keynote, Apple unveiled the language roadmap for its in-house AI called Apple Intelligence. While French support is planned, you’ll have to be patient: the Cupertino firm announced availability in 2025, without giving further details.
French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese will wait until 2025
Launching in October with iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, Apple Intelligence will only be available in US English. In December, additional local English languages (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom) will be added.
But to see new languages like French, Spanish, Chinese or Japanese arrive, we will have to wait until 2025. An encouraging announcement but one that clearly lacks precision: is it the beginning or the end of the year? Mystery.
As a reminder, Apple Intelligence introduces several features based on artificial intelligence on iPhone, iPad and Mac devices. For example, Genmoji allows you to create personalized emojis from descriptions or photos. The Visual feature Intelligence provides real-time contextual information: pointing the camera at a restaurant can get reviews or make a table reservation. Plus, the Clean Up tool in Photos automatically removes unwanted elements from an image, and Siri, with more contextual understanding, can handle complex tasks across apps, like finding emails or scheduling messages?
What about availability in France and the EU?
While support for French is good news for French-speaking users around the world (Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, etc.), this does not in any way predict the availability of Apple Intelligence in France or among our European neighbors.
Apple Intelligence will be available on iPhone 15 Pro/Max and all iPhone 16 models, as well as Macs and iPads with the M chip.
As a reminder, Apple’s AI will not be offered in European Union countries at launch, officially because of “regulatory uncertainties” related to the Digital Markets Act. The issue will therefore have to be resolved by 2025 in order to hope to benefit from Apple Intelligence in French on the Old Continent. Apple also said after the conference that it was not committing to a date for the EU; it is still discussing the terms with the Commission.
While we wait for details on the exact schedule, some non-English speaking users might be tempted to wait until the iPhone 17 to benefit from Apple Intelligence in their language. Unless they opt for the workaround: switching their iPhone to American English. Not ideal, but it’s still something!
Updated 09/18:
Apple confirms that it will roll out initial support for languages other than English for Apple Intelligence. The languages currently announced for 2025 are:
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- Chinese
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- French
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- Japanese
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- spanish
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- German
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- Italian
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- Korean
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- Portuguese
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- Vietnamese
