You’ll never shrink your laundry again with iOS 17  

Apple CEO Tim Cook has committed his company to investing and innovating in AI, “responsibly advancing” Apple products with machine intelligence. In iOS 17, one of the useful outcomes of this work is in laundry.

What is Apple doing to stop me ruining laundry?

Apple is getting really, really good at machine vision intelligence.

From recognizing plants and dog breeds to automatic translation of signs written in languages foreign to the user to figuring out the focus of images in your Photos library, its Visual Lookup feature is a highly useful tool.

All these small benefits are built on complex AI tools and mean your Apple devices are becoming increasingly aware of the environment around you and how they can help you get through those environments.

But not every AI deployment has to be rocket science, and one of the newest ones in iOS 17 is just about something most of us do regularly. It’s all about laundry.

Coming soon with iOS 17

You see, starting with the new iOS, the camera on your iPhone will be able to understand and explain the laundry labels you find on clothes. Many of us have difficulty understanding these, but this won’t be a problem for iPhone users any longer. That’s because Apple has added the capacity to understand and translate laundry symbols using the Visual Lookup capability it has built into its smartphones.

How to use Visual Lookup to read laundry labels

The tool is so easy to use. Just grab the garment you need to launder, find the laundry advice tag and put it into a position so you can see it clearly with your iPhone’s camera. Then, grab your iPhone and follow these steps:

1. Open Photos and point your iPhone at the laundry label.
2. Take a picture of the label (don’t forget to zoom in for a better image).
3. Open the image you just took in full screen.
4. Tap the Visual Lookup icon that should now appear underneath the image. It looks like a small letter i, surrounded by a circle with a star at the top left.
5. Then tap the icon that appears on the photo or at the top of the information results to find out more about the label.

The information you’ll see will vary depending on what’s on the label, but might include letting you know if you can iron or tumble dry a garment, whether it can be dry cleaned, and what maximum temperature to wash your clothes.

Apple is getting information for laundry instructions from the Online Browsing Platform that is run by the International Organization for Standardization.

Visual Lookup also recognizes car symbols on vehicle dashboards, pets, food, signs, symbols, flowers, trees and more. And now it will help make sure you don’t shrink your cashmere. More tips here.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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