Apple has finally unveiled “Apple Intelligence” at WWDC 2024, which is its own suite of AI features. While a little late to the game, the Cupertino firm is finally rolling out AI across its ecosystem, with a little help from OpenAI.
Odd naming choice aside, the tech giant’s AI implementation seems to be quite comprehensive in that it is integrated into many of the OS’ core features instead of just being an app update. To start with, Apple Intelligence will be able to improve your writing; the Writing Tools feature can proofread and rewrite text with a chosen tone and it can even use AI to generate a summary, key points, a table, or a list based on what’s written.
Apple Intelligence can help keep your device more organised with priority notifications that intelligently put high-priority items on top and it will even summarise notifications for you. In the Mail app, time-sensitive messages such as invitations or a check-in reminder will appear at the top of your inbox.
For those of you who are note takers, the Notes and Phone apps will be able to capture audio recording and automatically generate a transcript and a summary of the recording. Of course, with the smart notification management of Apple Intelligence, there will also be a new Focus mode called Reduce Interruptions, which will understand the content of notifications and only show you ones that might need your immediate attention.
An AI integration wouldn’t be complete without an image editor, so obviously, there will be a new tool in the Photos app called Clean Up, which lets you remove objects in photos through generative AI. The search function in Photos will also be improved, letting you search through pictures and videos by describing what you’re looking for.
Doodlers can have some fun with a feature called Image Wand, which can turn a rough sketch into a related image. If you’ve ever felt like there aren’t enough emojis to express how you feel, Apple will soon let you make custom Genmojis by only describing what you want to express in the keyboard such as “squirrel DJ”.
Excitingly, Siri is getting a complete revamp with better language understanding and, most importantly, the ability to understand conversational context. From the demo shown, Siri will be able to understand what you mean even if you stutter and it can retain the context of previous prompts to apply to the next one. You will even be able to interact with Siri through text instead of voice and switch between the two mediums.
The company is touting Apple Intelligence as a privacy-focused AI integration, with most of the features done on-device. For features that require a connection to the cloud, it promises that your data won’t be stored. And for requests that it can’t handle, Siri will actually be able to use ChatGPT 4o for composing texts through Writing Tools and generate original content, but it will ask for your permission first. While it’s starting with OpenAI’s chatbot, Apple says it will support other AI models later on.
Apple Intelligence won’t be available to a lot of older devices. It will only be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro series as well as Apple Silicon-based iPads and Macs. The beta will be rolled out this fall, which implies that the stable release will take a while longer.
(Source: Apple)
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