AI comes to Cupertino.
Apple announced “Apple Intelligence” at WWDC 2024, its name for a new suite of AI features for the iPhone, Mac, and more. Starting later this year, Apple is rolling out what it says is a more conversational Siri, custom, AI-generated “Genmoji,” and GPT-4o access that lets Siri turn to OpenAI’s chatbot when it can’t handle what you ask it for.
The company that once refused to use the term “artificial intelligence” when talking about its machine learning features is now, as best as we can tell, catching up with just about all of the table-stakes features that Google, Microsoft, and others have rolled out in the last year. Of course, this being WWDC, none of what Apple announced today is out now, but coming in the fall instead.
Apple Intelligence will take action for you in apps
Apple said its AI features will be able to do things for you in apps. It will be able to manage your notifications, automatically write things for you, or summarize text in mail and other apps. The company also says it can do things like reference one app to carry out an action in another, such as asking it to play a podcast your partner sent you.
Of course, this is Apple, so it has to have a privacy story. The company says its AI features will be processed on-device to keep information private. But you’ll need an A17 Pro or M-series chip to take advantage. Part of the story, too, though, is a “semantic index” that will grab personal details when they’re needed and surface them across apps.
But when AI features need to go to the cloud, Apple says they will go to what it calls “Private Cloud” and that data will never be stored on the servers, and Apple says it will never be able to access it. Independent experts will verify that Apple’s claims are true, it said.
Apple says that users will be able to speak to Siri much more naturally in iOS 18. The company also says that you’ll be able to type to Siri to get things done instead of just talking.
Also, the company says Siri will be able to do things like set up scheduled text messages and understand, from the context of what you’re saying, what apps you’re asking it to use.
Apple said Siri will get a new ability to do things within apps for you — for instance, you can ask Siri to “make a photo pop,” and you’ll be able to ask it to take a photo that you’re looking at and send it to a friend. The company called this “on-screen awareness.” As another example, the company says Siri will be able to do things like search your photos to get your driver’s license, pull out your license number, and stick it into a web form for you — similar to current autofill features, just… much better.
Help me write features come to the Apple ecosystem
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but Apple is rolling out new email-writing suggestions and text summaries. In Mail, while typing out a message, you can have Siri write it for you and ask it to change its tone. The company says that writing features like this are available systemwide, anywhere you can type.
Apple says it’s rolling out “Genmoji,” a new feature that will generate emoji-like reactions on the fly so that when you can’t find the one you want, you can just have it created for you by AI. Similarly, a new image generation feature is coming to iOS 18, called Image Playground. Apple says the feature works in several apps, but it also has its own app by the same name. It will also let developers access an API to include Image Playground on their devices.
Additionally, Apple is bringing AI to the Photos app. You can already search for objects pictured in your library, but Apple says it’s improving how this works in the future, so you can search for things like a person who is doing cartwheels. It also added features similar to Google’s Magic Eraser, like the ability to erase a person from a photo.
ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4o, will come to iOS, macOS, and iPadOS “later this year,” as a chatbot that Siri can turn to when it’s not able to do what you ask. When it does this, Apple says it will ask your permission first. Apple said it was starting with the best chatbot but that it will support other AI models down the road.
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Wes Davis
