Apple is three weeks out from its annual developer conference, and Bloomberg is already filling in the picture. A new report from the outlet details three features coming to iOS 27: a smarter grammar checker baked into Writing Tools, a natural-language interface for building Shortcuts automations, and an AI-powered custom wallpaper generator tied to the existing Image Playground app.
The grammar checker is probably the most immediately practical of the three. According to Bloomberg, it works similarly to Grammarly, the popular third-party writing assistant, except it lives natively in the operating system. The feature surfaces in a translucent menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen, showing original text next to suggested revisions. Users can accept individual suggestions one at a time, approve everything in bulk, or dismiss the whole thing if autocorrect has already burned them one too many times. There are also controls to pause grammar checking mid-document and jump between flagged sections. For anyone who has fumbled through an important email on their phone, this is the kind of thing that quietly improves daily life without requiring much adjustment.
Alongside the grammar checker, Apple is reportedly rethinking how Writing Tools surface to users in the first place. The company has been testing a "Write With Siri" toggle that appears directly at the top of the keyboard, and a "Help Me Write" button that shows up when a user activates Siri while working inside a text field. The underlying capability is not new, but it has been tucked away enough that plenty of people have never found it. Making it a persistent, visible option at the keyboard level is a reasonable fix to an adoption problem Apple has had with its AI writing features since their introduction.
The Shortcuts update is where things get genuinely interesting for power users and casual users alike. Right now, building a useful Shortcut requires at least some tolerance for the app's logic-flow interface, which can feel like assembling furniture without the right instructions. iOS 27 apparently changes that by letting people describe what they want a shortcut to do in plain language. The app presents a prompt asking "What do you want your shortcut to do?" and a text field to type the answer. From there, the system builds and installs the shortcut automatically.
That is a meaningful shift. Shortcuts has always been one of those features iPhone users appreciate in theory but rarely dig into in practice. Reducing the barrier to entry from "learn the interface" to "describe what you want" could push the app into genuinely mainstream use, rather than remaining the territory of automation enthusiasts who post their setups on Reddit.
The wallpaper feature rounds out the trio. Bloomberg reports that iOS 27 will include an option in the standard wallpaper picker to generate custom lock screen and home screen backgrounds using AI, built on top of the Image Playground app Apple introduced with iOS 18. The framing here is straightforward: rather than browsing static options or pulling from your photo library, you could describe or prompt an image and have it generated on the spot.
Apple has been careful about how it positions image generation, keeping it largely contained to Image Playground and specific creative contexts rather than scattering it across the operating system. Folding it into the wallpaper picker is a logical expansion that keeps the feature anchored in a place where people already expect to be creative, and where the stakes of a weird or off-putting result are low. You can always just pick a different wallpaper.
Taken together, these three features point toward a consistent theme in how Apple is building out its AI layer: less about dramatic new capabilities and more about making existing things easier to find, easier to use, and more useful in the moments where people actually need them. Grammar help when you are typing, Shortcuts you can build without a manual, wallpapers you can generate without leaving the settings screen. None of it is science fiction, but that is somewhat the point.
Apple will formally unveil iOS 27 at its Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins in roughly three weeks. The full scope of what the company has planned will become clearer then, but Bloomberg's reporting suggests the software update leans heavily into making Apple Intelligence feel less like a feature to seek out and more like infrastructure that is simply there when you reach for it.