Apple to unveil iOS 15 with facetime features

Apple shared the first details about iOS 15, the next major version of iOS, during the virtual keynote of WWDC. iOS 15 is going to be released later this year. the world.

Apple is adding spatial audio to FaceTime. Now the voices are spread out depending on the position of your friends on the screen. For instance, if someone appears on the left, it’ll sound like they’re on the left in your ears. In other FaceTime news, iOS now detects background noise and tries to suppress it so that you can hear your friends and family members more easily. That’s an optional feature, which means that you can disable it in case you’re showing a concert during a FaceTime call for instance.

Another FaceTime feature is “Portrait mode”. Behind this term, Apple means that it can automatically blur the background, like in “Portrait mode” photos. In case you want to use FaceTime for work conferences, you can now generate a FaceTime link and add it to a calendar invite. FaceTime will also work in a web browser, which means that people without an Apple device can join a FaceTime call. All of these features make FaceTime more competitive with other video call services, such as Zoom and Google Meet.

A new notification summary

Apple is going to use on-device intelligence to create summaries of your notifications. Instead of being sorted by apps and by date, it is sorted by priority. For instance, notifications from friends will be closer to the top. When users silence notifications, iMessage contacts will see that they have activated “Do not disturb”. It works a bit like “Do not disturb” in Slack. But there are new settings. Apple calls this Focus mode.

New smart features

Apple is going to scan users’ photos for text. Called Live Text, this feature lets users highlight, copy and paste text in photos. It could be a nice accessibility feature as well. And, iOS is going to leverage that info for Spotlight. You can search from text in your photos directly in Spotlight. These features are handled on-device directly.

Wallet, Weather and Maps

After a recap of all the features of Apple Wallet, the company announced that users will be able to scan their ID and store it in Wallet. It’ll be available in participating states so it’s going to be a slow rollout. When a government service wants some info from your ID, you can choose to share some data with this service directly on the iPhone.

WWDC 2021 - weather app

As for Apple Maps, the new mapping data has been rolled out in several countries and Apple is still rolling it out in Europe. Apple has added a ton of new details to some areas, such as San Francisco. You can see bus and taxi lanes, crosswalks, bike lanes, etc. On highways, you see complex interchanges in 3D. All of this is also coming to Car Play later this year.