Apple made several major artificial intelligence (AI) announcements during the keynote session of its annual developer-focused event, the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, on Monday. The event was kick-started by CEO Tim Cook, who highlighted that “intelligence” updates would be announced towards the end of the event. The AI segment began with Cook name-dropping Apple Intelligence, which appears to be the Cupertino-based tech giant’s version of integrating generative AI into its devices.
Highlighting the five pillars of Apple Intelligence — powerful, integrated, intuitive, personal, and private — the company unveiled new generative AI-powered Writing Tools that can summarise content and rewrite text across apps devices. The company is also adding image-generating capabilities to its devices which will be triggered in apps such as Messages, Keynote, Freeform, and Pages. Users will not be able to create realistic images but they can generate artistic images in different styles. These images will be generated on the basis of the photos in the user’s gallery.
Explaining the privacy focus of Apple Intelligence, the company promises “on-device intelligence”, which is just on-device processing using the device’s chipset. Claiming large AI models will require more computing power, the company also unveiled Private Cloud Compute, Apple’s encrypted cloud solution to balance privacy while offering powerful AI features.
Siri, as previously reported, is getting a major AI overhaul. The core of the upgrade is contextual understanding. The virtual assistant can now understand natural language and vaguely spoken sentences to find the underlying meaning behind them. Additionally, the AI-powered Siri will also be integrated with various native Apple apps. Through this integration, Siri will be able to take action within the apps via verbal prompts. For example, Siri can open a photo in edit mode and can add brightness and contrast when prompted to “make the image glow”.
Siri gets new Apple Intelligence capabilities
Photo Credit: Apple
Apple says Siri will be able to understand things and get things done which it never did before. In a demo, Siri takes the prompt “When will my mom’s plane land” and cross-checks the flight information from an email to provide the answer. Siri’s new design and capabilities will be available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices.
The Memories feature in the Photos app is now enhanced by Apple Intelligence. The AI capability will automatically pick out the best photos and videos based on the description and craft a storyline. A new Clean Up tool has also been added to Photos app that can remove unwanted objects in the background of the photo without altering the subject. This is similar to the Magic Eraser in Google Pixel devices and Object Eraser in Galaxy AI.
New Writing Tools for Mail app
Photo Credit: Apple
Another app to be getting Apple Intelligence capabilities is the Mail app. It will feature several Writing Tools including Rewrite which is allow users to rephrase their messages in different tonalities such as friendly, professionals, and concise. Users can also rewrite it into different styles by using manual prompts as well. Another Writing Tool, Proofread will check for grammar, word choice, and sentence structure in drafted emails. Summarise is another tool that brings out the key points from long emails. Smart Replies has also been introduced.
The Messages app is also getting new Apple Intelligence features. Users will be able to create custom emojis, dubbed Genmojis, by typing a text prompt in the Messages app. The AI will generate various iterations of the described emoji and users can pick one from them.
Expanding its AI ecosystem to third-party tools, Apple announced integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Free users will be able to use ChatGPT without requiring them to log in or without the information leaving the device. Paid users will be able to connect their accounts to the platform. It will also be usable across Apple devices.
ChatGPT integration with Apple devices
Photo Credit: Apple
ChatGPT will be integrated within Siri and the systemwide Writing Tools across Apple’s platforms. It will also power the image and document processing capabilities of app-integrated tools. In essence, the GPT AI models will be providing their multimodal LLM capabilities for most of the AI features announced under Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence will run on Apple silicon and its Neural Engine. These AI features will be available in beta on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and MAc with M1 and later. In beta, Siri’s capabilities will be available when device language is set to US English, as part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year.
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