Creating stickers from photos is an easily overlooked iPhone feature tucked into iOS 17. Using Apple's machine learning algorithms that quickly separate a subject from its background, it extracts pictures of you, your friends or pets (or anything else it detects as the picture's subject), transforming them into digital decals. It even makes animated stickers from Live Photos to slap onto iMessage chats or Markup tools. Here's how to create your own. In Apple's ecosystem, stickers are digital versions of their real-world counterparts. They debuted in iOS 10, Apple's 2016 iPhone operating system, allowing users to place cut-outs of fun images onto iMessage bubbles for more personalized reactions.

There are few smartphone annoyances worse than your device not doing what you expect it to. When you tap the shutter button, but the camera fires a split second too late. When you're in the middle of an important meeting, but your phone is blowing up with notifications. In its new Pixel 3 smartphone, which debuted Tuesday, Google has added a number of subtle A.I.-powered features that make the device react not just more speedily but in the way you thought your phone should work all along. The camera is perhaps the most dramatic place you can see Google's A.I. at work.

Yes, Apple saved the most substantive changes for its tablets, so it's tempting to overlook the enhancements on the iPhone side of things. That would be selling the iOS 11 update short. While this initial beta iOS 11 feels more like a continuation of iOS 10 than an entirely new version, it does introduce some noteworthy changes that can expand what our phone can do. Some are available now, such as a customizable Control Center and Siri-powered translation tools, and others are on the horizon, like Apple Pay support for transferring money and augmented-reality-friendly apps. Here's what we like -- and what we don't -- so far.

As always, Apple spent a considerable chunk of WWDC earlier this month hyping up iOS 11 and all of the new features it brings. Now it's your turn to take them for a spin. The first public release of the iOS 11 beta goes live today for people participating in Apple's testing program, and we've been playing with it for a few days to help get a better sense of what it has to offer. Long story short, it's already shaping up to be a very valuable, very comprehensive release. In order to find out for yourself, you'll need the right hardware: an iPhone 5s or newer, an iPad mini 2 or newer, or a sixth-generation iPod touch.

After watching Apple's keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, you'd be forgiven for thinking you've seen some of these features before. Here are some of the features in iOS 10 and Mac that take inspiration from Google -- and others. With Apple's release of iOS 10, the Photos app will use machine learning and facial recognition to automatically group together photos of common faces or subjects without you needing to tag anything. The Memories feature organizes photos into categories like trips, events and can even make videos with music that matches the mood. Yet these were features that have already become commonplace with Google Photos when it launched in 2015.

Despite their popularity, creating GIFS can still be a tricky process. But a new app from Google, called'Motion Stills', will allow you to easily create the moving images in just a few clicks. The app takes Live Photos, several frames automatically captured before and after you hit the camera app's shutter button, and turns them into GIFs or short video clips. 'We use our video stabilization technology to freeze the background into a still photo or create sweeping cinematic pans,' Ken Conley and Matthias Grundmann from the Google Research Machine Perception team said in a blog post. 'The resulting looping GIFs and movies come alive, and can easily be shared via messaging or on social media.'