Apple made several big announcements about artificial intelligence (AI) on Monday during the keynote session of its annual developer-focused event, Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024. The event was kicked off by CEO Tim Cook, who noted that updates to “intelligence” to be announced near the end of the event. The artificial intelligence segment started with Cook’s famous Apple Intelligence, which appears to be the Cupertino-based tech giant’s version of integrating generative artificial intelligence into its devices.
Apple Intelligence
Highlighting the five pillars of Apple Intelligence — Powerful, Integrated, Intuitive, Personal and Private — the company unveiled new AI-powered generative writing tools that can generate content and transcribe text across devices. The company is also adding capabilities to its devices to generate images that will run in apps like 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 take advantage of personal context, which is also understood as contextual understanding in large language model (LLM) speech. The company is adding new contextual command prompts throughout the core apps.
Explaining Apple Intelligence’s focus on privacy, the company promises “intelligence on the device,” which is just processing on the device using the device’s chipset. Claiming that 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. At the heart of the upgrade is contextual understanding. The virtual assistant can now understand natural language and unclearly spoken sentences to find the underlying meaning behind them. Additionally, AI-powered Siri will also be integrated with various native Apple apps. Through this integration, Siri will be able to take actions within apps through verbal prompts. For example, Siri can open a photo in edit mode and can add brightness and contrast when asked to “make the photo brighter.”
Apple says Siri will be able to understand things and do things it has never been able to do before. In the demo, Siri responds to the query “When will my mom’s plane land” and cross-checks flight information from email to provide an answer. Siri’s new design and capabilities will be available on 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 having to log in or leave their device data. Paying users will be able to link their accounts to the platform. It will also be able to be used on Apple devices.
Apple Intelligence will be free to use on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. It will be available this fall on the M1 chipset or higher and the A17 Pro chipset or higher starting in the US.
