How Monterey is looking up

It’s magic to select a photo of a dog and be told that it’s a Havanese, or pick a painting and learn that it was created by Camille Pissarro. These are examples of Monterey’s Visual Look Up in action, and a reflection of Apple’s growing use of machine learning. Notable landmarks, flowers and plants, dog and cat breeds, and paintings can be identified almost immediately on recent Macs and Apple devices.

There are small catches. This is currently only available for certain combinations of language and country; what we can do in macOS 12.3 in the UK doesn’t work yet if you’re using English in France or Italy, where you’ll need to switch to the local language. Visual Look Up also relies on Siri Suggestions being enabled in Spotlight Search Results, a little quirk that has caught many users out already.