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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.
Apple Intelligence
Highlighting the five pillars of Apple Intelligence — powerful, integrated, intuitive, personal, and private — the company unveiled new generative AI-powered writing tools that can generate content and rewrite text across 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.
Apple Intelligence will also leverage personal context, which is also understood as contextual understanding in large language model (LLM) parlance. The company is adding new contextual prompts for commands across core apps.
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”.
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.
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.
Apple Intelligence will be free to use across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. It will available this fall on the M1 chipset or later and A17 Pro chipset or later starting with the US.