Enhancing Siri’s Smarts: How Apple’s AI Boosts App Intelligence

Today at WWDC 2024, Apple announced its long-awaited AI framework, called Apple Intelligence. It will power an upgraded Siri voice assistant and AI features across iPhone, Mac, and iPhone, with some third-party integrations.

Apple Intelligence is the “personal intelligence system” for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that combines large language models (LLM) with personal context data. It’s a collection of technologies and features that will power many AI features across Apple devices, including text writing and summarization, image generation, and natural language processing. Apple claims its AI features are far more secure than competing software, since “many of the models that power it run entirely on device,” with limited data being passed to Apple servers when as task requires more computing power.

Apple

Apple’s apps and devices will have many of the same AI-powered features we’ve seen on other platforms. The new Writing Tools will have options for rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing text in Mail, Notes, Pages, and third-party applications. It will also create summaries of emails in the Mail app, with message suggestions using Smart Reply.

Notifications have been a mess on iPhone and iPad for years, especially in comparison to Android devices, and Apple is hoping AI can help. There’s a new “Priority Notifications” section that appears at the top of your notifications stack, containing alerts detected as important or summaries of long group chats.

Siri has been revamped with a new design and features powered by Apple Intelligence. Activating Siri now shows a glowing edge around the screen, instead of the floating bubble we’ve come to know and love. It can now better understand changes to a request, like saying “start directions to home, I mean, work,” and you can finally type messages to Siri instead of only speaking them.

Apple

Apple Intelligence isn’t a general-purpose large language model, though, so some Siri questions will be handed off to a web search or ChatGPT. The ChatGPT integration will ask you before sending the question to OpenAI servers, and Apple says, “their IP addresses are obscured, and OpenAI won’t store requests.” ChatGPT will also be available in the system-wide Writing Tools, and if you’re a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can use the features from your account across Apple Intelligence.

Finally, Apple Intelligence can create images similar to DALL-E or Microsoft Copilot, through the new “Image Playground” feature. There’s a special mode for creating emoji based on a prompt or mixing emoji characters, called Genmoji, which can even be used in Messages or shared as a sticker.

Apple Intelligence features will be free for all users in U.S. English when iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia rolls out later this year. However, it will require at least an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max, or an iPad or Mac with an M1 chip or later. It’s unclear if certain features will be made available to older hardware through cloud features.

Source: Apple Newsroom

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