Apple is putting AI in your pocket
The “A” in AI stands for Apple, the techies attending Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were told yesterday. CEO Tim Cook and Co. unveiled Apple Intelligence, a host of AI-powered features that will debut on iPhones, iPads, and Macs this fall.
The all-out AI push comes after the company initially appeared uninterested in jumping on the AI hype train, and even refused to mention “artificial intelligence” at last year’s WWDC.
Here’s what Apple is Cooking up:
- It’s bringing ChatGPT to Siri and other Apple apps through a partnership with OpenAI. A more personal Siri will be able to act as an iPhone user guide, pull info from ChatGPT, and perform tasks across apps like texting photos from a specific event to a contact or playing a podcast that a friend recommended over text.
- Writing Tools can rewrite texts, emails, or notes to adjust for tone.
- Mail app’s new feature will summarize emails and rank them by importance.
- The calculator app is finally coming to the iPad, and users will be able to write out math problems using an Apple Pencil that’ll be solved automatically.
For those concerned about privacy, Apple assures that the AI will be run either locally on the device (without the need for internet) or on the company’s own servers through the cloud.
Is Apple behind?
As it deals with sluggish iPhone sales, Apple has been far slower to adopt AI than rivals Google and Microsoft, which have launched their own AI features and integrated them into their devices and offerings. Apple is known for being fashionably late to embrace new tech but still outdoing the competition when it gets there, as it did with the iPod, which was far from the world’s first MP3 player.
Some commentators believe that Apple’s devices are uniquely positioned to become the physical shells that AI bots need to become a daily part of your life.
Apple Intelligence won’t appear on your device…unless you have an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or an iPad or Mac with the newest M1 chips.—SK