Apple is working to introduce an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered notification summary feature when it unveils iOS 18 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, according to a report. The Cupertino-based tech giant is likely to unveil several “hands-on” AI features when it hosts its annual developer-focused event on June 10. Another planned feature will reportedly make Siri more conversational, as the artificial intelligence could add natural and emotional speech to the virtual assistant. Apart from these, AI functionality could also come to Apple’s Safari, Photos and Notes apps.
Apple will upgrade Siri with AI features
AppleInsider reports that the tech giant plans to significantly upgrade Siri by incorporating AI capabilities into it. Citing people familiar with the matter, the publication said that Apple has internally named its project AI initiative Greymatter and is working on introducing a feature called “Greymatter Catch Up”. It’s essentially a notification collapse feature, but the publication claims it will work through Siri.
Siri could also be better at handling complex commands, the report claims. It is said to get a new smart response framework and a large on-device language model (LLM) that will understand the context of requests and adapt its responses. The report also expects the language to be more conversational with the inclusion of LLMs.
Another area of focus for Apple is integrating AI features into its existing apps to make the user experience smoother. For example, a previous report claimed that the Safari browser might get a web page compression feature.
This could be similar to features offered by Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. Additionally, a Web Eraser feature could also be introduced that can delete any element from a website including banner ads, images and text.
The Photos app could also get an AI tool called ‘Clean Up’ which is said to offer users ‘Photoshop-level’ editing capabilities. The feature is said to be able to remove all unwanted background objects from the image.
A real-time AI-based audio transcription feature could also be added to the Notes app. A report detailing the feature claimed that users would later be able to read, edit, copy and share these transcripts. To easily capture long transcriptions or notes, a text compression feature is also added to the Notes app.
These internal AI features are reportedly powered by Apple’s Ajax LLM, which the company is keeping under wraps for now.
