Apple Fully Embraces Artificial Intelligence

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At its latest WWDC, Apple announced “Apple Intelligence,” the company’s suite of artificial intelligence features for its devices, including iPhone and Mac. Wes Davis reports in The Verge:

Apple announced “Apple Intelligence” at WWDC 2024, its name for a new suite of AI features for the iPhone, Mac, and more.

The company that once refused to use the term “artificial intelligence” when talking about its machine learning features now has AI enhancements across its platforms. The company has been behind companies like Google and Microsoft, which started racing ahead with their own generative AI features as soon as OpenAI broke the dam open in 2022. Now, it’s making its bid to catch up.

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 it 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.

Siri gets AI smarts
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.

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