Reminders in iOS 27 turns a typed sentence into a dated reminder, on Apple Intelligence iPhonesReminders in iOS 27 turns a typed sentence into a dated reminder, on Apple Intelligence iPhones

Apple's Reminders app in iOS 27 can create a reminder from a sentence typed in plain language, filling in the date, time and place itself.

Apple's iPhone User Guide for iOS 27 gives the example of typing that the cat needs feeding every evening at 5pm, and says Reminders fills in the details and timing from what was typed. It is an Apple Intelligence feature, and Apple's note under it says Apple Intelligence on iOS 27 needs an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or an iPhone 16 or later, is not available in every language or region, and that usage limits may apply. 9to5Mac, testing the release, reports that the same describe-it approach now works on the reminder detail screen as well as when creating one. MacRumors' guide to the release adds examples with people and times, and says date, time and location are all picked up.

What else changed in Reminders?

Three further changes, from Apple's documentation and the two outlets:

• The toolbar above the keyboard has gone. In iOS 26 it held Date, Location, Tag, Flag and Camera. 9to5Mac says iOS 27 moves those options into a box around the reminder being edited, and MacRumors says less common details now sit behind a Details view.
• Grocery lists sort more accurately and in more languages. Apple's guide says that on supported devices Apple Intelligence sorts items even when one list mixes languages.
• Suggested reminders from other apps carry over from earlier releases: share a recipe in Safari or an email in Mail to Reminders and Apple Intelligence proposes items to add.

MacRumors also lists an extra-large Reminders widget and new Reminders actions in Shortcuts, including creating and deleting lists, groups and sections. Those actions are part of the wider set of new Shortcuts actions in iOS 27 we covered on 29 September.

Which languages does grocery sorting support?

This is where Apple's own pages disagree with each other. The iOS feature availability page lists the Apple Intelligence grocery list feature in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, several varieties of English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese, with simplified Chinese excluded in mainland China. Apple's separate support article on adding grocery languages, last dated December 2025, still refers to iOS 18 and says that, to start, only seven extra languages are offered. Both are live on Apple's site today. The feature availability page is the newer of the two and is the one we would trust.

Our take

Natural language entry is not new to Reminders, and it is not new to to-do apps: Fantastical and Todoist have parsed dates out of sentences for years without a large language model. What changes in iOS 27 is that the parsing is done by Apple Intelligence, which is why it is limited to iPhone 15 Pro and later. An iPhone 15 or iPhone 14 owner on iOS 27 gets none of the describing, so two people on the same iOS version will find the app behaving differently and may not know why.

The removal of the toolbar is the change most people will notice first, and it is a trade. Typing a sentence is faster than tapping a date picker when it works. When it misreads a time, the controls that used to be one tap away are now inside a box or behind Details. We would like to know how often the parsing gets dates wrong, and nobody, Apple included, has published anything on that.

APPDOOK's view is that the grocery language mismatch is small but telling. Apple's support library is large, and pages written for one release are not always revisited when the next one ships. Anyone checking whether their language works should read the feature availability page, not the support article. The other open question is the usage limit Apple attaches to every Apple Intelligence note. Reminders parsing is presumably on-device and unlikely to hit one, but Apple's wording does not say, and Apple has published almost none of its Apple Intelligence limits.