Apple unveiled its bold plan to weave artificial intelligence into its devices Monday, focusing on how the company plans to make AI personal. The new AI-powered features, which will launch in beta later this year under the umbrella term of “Apple Intelligence,” will follow Apple’s unique approach to computing.
“At Apple, it’s always been our goal to design powerful personal products that enrich people’s lives by enabling them to do the things that matter most as simply and easily as possible,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook as he took the wraps off Apple Intelligence during the WWDC24 keynote. “We’ve been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for years to help us further that goal. Recent developments in generative intelligence and large language models offer powerful capabilities that provide the opportunity to take the experience of using Apple products to new heights.”
Apple Intelligence: AI, done Apple’s way
After the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, AI became the hottest buzzword in tech. Rivals like Microsoft and Google embraced AI, and their stock prices benefited, while Apple was perceived as slow to jump into the game. (Stop me if you’ve heard that story before.)
With Apple Intelligence, the company plans to do what it always does: Make technology easy to understand and accessible to the masses, while maintaining the privacy that Cupertino holds so dear.
“As we look to build in these incredible new capabilities, we want to ensure that the outcome reflects the principles at the core of our products,” Cook said. “It has to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most to you. It has to be intuitive and easy to use. It has to be deeply integrated into your product experiences. Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded in your personal context.”
Apple’s core apps get an AI infusion
During the WWDC24 keynote, Apple demonstrated how Apple Intelligence — which Apple called a “personal intelligence system” — will enhance the company’s core apps like Notes, Messages and Photos.
Apple software chief Craig Federighi acknowledged that competitors’ chatbots perform well by tapping into universal knowledge. But he positioned Apple Intelligence as AI uniquely suited to help you accomplish personal tasks.
“We’re tremendously excited about the power of generative models … but these tools know very little about you or your needs,” Federighi said. “With iOS18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, we are embarking on a new journey to bring you intelligence that understands you. Apple intelligence is the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models right at the core of your iPhone, iPad and Mac. It draws on your personal context to give you intelligence that’s most helpful and relevant for you. It protects your privacy at every step. And it is deeply integrated into our platforms and throughout the apps you rely on to communicate, work and express yourself.”
Writing Tools
System-wide Writing Tools will put the ability to tweak, proofread and summarize your documents and emails at your fingertips in Apple’s Mail, Pages and Notes as well as third-party apps. With Rewrite, inline suggestions will help you achieve an appropriate tone — friendly, professional, etc. — and give you options for pumping up your copy. The Proofread feature will help you fix up grammar and spelling errors, and surface options for better word choice and syntax. The Summarize tool will recap selected text into paragraphs, bulleted key points, tables or lists.
The Mail app also will receive new Apple Intelligence-powered features for managing the daily nightmare of your inbox. A new Priority Messages section will showcase “the most urgent emails, like a same-day dinner invitation or boarding pass,” the company said in a press release. New AI-generated summaries will make it easier to perform triage on your inbox, and a Smart Reply feature will make it easier to take action.
Similar AI-powered sorting features will come to Notifications. Priority Notifications will “appear at the top of the stack to surface what’s most important, and summaries help users scan long or stacked notifications to show key details right on the Lock Screen, such as when a group chat is particularly active,” Apple said. And a new Focus called “Reduce Interruptions” is designed to show only urgent notifications while shielding you from ones that can wait till later.
Apple’s Notes app will “record and transcribe audio to capture detailed notes while staying present in the moment,” the company said.
Image Playground: Image-creation tool for Genmoji and more
Image: Apple
Image-generation capabilities powered by Apple Intelligence will give users of the Messages app colorful new ways to send a message. A new feature called Genmoji, enabled by Apple’s new Image Playground, will generate custom emoji based on simple prompts.
The Photos app will let users create custom slideshows and quickly remove unwanted elements from a picture using a feature called Clean Up.
Read more about Apple Intelligence’s image-creation capabilities in our post: Image Playground and Genmoji bring AI images to iMessage and more.
AI Smarts for Siri
And Siri, Apple’s widely derided AI assistant, will gain powerful new features, Apple said, that will make it relevant after years in the wilderness. Apple Intelligence promises to infuse Siri with the smarts needed to handle complex requests that draw on private data like flight times and personal photos.
Read more about Apple Intelligence and Siri in our post: AI-powered Siri is the new face of Apple Intelligence.
ChatGPT will be baked into iOS 18, iPadOS and macOS Sequoia
Apple Intelligence will largely default to on-device processing. This means that only the latest Apple hardware — the iPhone 15 Pro models and Macs and iPads with Apple’s M-series chips — can take advantage of the new AI features.
But what about competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other high-profile AI products? As previously rumored, a deal with ChatGPT will bring the groundbreaking chatbot’s capabilities into Apple’s platforms for free.
However, ChatGPT will work in a distinctly Apple way on the company’s devices. If Siri detects that a request could be more effectively handled by ChatGPT, the AI assistant will ask if you want to use OpenAI’s tool. If you permit it, Siri will send the request to the cloud to perform the task. And that request will go through a privacy-focused feature called Private Cloud Compute.
“With Private Cloud Compute, Apple sets a new standard for privacy in AI, with the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon servers,” the company said.
The ChatGPT-powered Compose feature, which works with text and images, will come “later this year,” according to Apple. The company said it would add other AI models in the future.
This is a breaking news story. Refresh the page for updates.
