Apple Intelligence is here to make your life easier, so Apple says.
Apple describes Apple Intelligence is “the personal intelligence system for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that’s incredibly useful and relevant.” This will be part of the iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia updates. Apple CEO Tim Cook explains the team’s approach in designing Apple Intelligence, which was to “combine generative AI with a user’s personal context to deliver truly helpful intelligence,” making the processing and computing more “personal” instead of “artificial.”
Understanding Language
This new system heavily emphasizes the importance of relevance in how it processes information. It’s almost a better word than “intuitive” for what it needs to do for users.
New Writing Tools assist users with any types of texts to communicate more effectively on native and third-party apps. Apple Intelligence tidies up written text for more effective communication, like rewriting an email sound more or less formal, summarizing notes into bullet points, or proofreading general grammar.
In Mail, there will be prioritization of events, tickets, meetings in the inbox, and now, previews will display a summary of the email instead of the first few lines. With Notifications, messages and notifications will be prioritized and summarized. Focus gets a new “Reduce Interruptions” option that will determines which might need immediate attention. It’s again, focusing on what users might need at that moment.
Apple Intelligence works also with spoken language. The Notes and Phone apps can record, transcribe, and summarize audio. If you record, there is an automatic notification to both callers, accounting for the legality of recording someone’s audio without permission.
Creating Visuals
In more efforts to make expressing ones self more comprehensive, Image Playground is generative system that lives in Messages and in a dedicated app. Users can go in and can Animated, Illustrate, or Sketch. It takes on different photos, suggestions, themes, moods, and prompts to generate fun images to send to friends. Probably not recommended for work emails.
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Even the Apple Pencil gets in on the fun, with an Image Wand feature that can generative fill and can take sketches and turn them into something more detailed with additional suggestions. As part of the new update, the tapback feature will now allow any emoji reactions beyond the standard five reacts. Genmoji is a new feature where you can customize emojis and then use them in tapback!
Among other features that benefit from Apple Intelligence, it’s easier to use natural, descriptive language to find a photo, or groups of them to make a video in Memories even.
Siri
Siri has been a faithful, though sometimes frustratingly basic digital assistant for iPhone users for years, but now Apple Intelligence injects Siri some deeper language-understanding capabilities. Users can actually speak more naturally with Siri and it will understand the nuances and human qualities of speech, as well as the larger context of conversation or line or inquiry, even following between spoken and texted responses. With more “onscreen awareness” Siri can also understand registering whatever is on the screen. Apple Intelligence also makes it possible for Siri to better interact with third-party apps, like accessing a playlist on Spotify, or opening a link of Chrome.
Privacy
Many of these features mentioned that use Apple Intelligence are processed on-device, so your data and personal context stay in one place. When there a request needs more power to process, Private Cloud Compute is an assurance that data that any needs to be processed are on larger servers that have Apple silicon chips, data is never stored, and its software has been publicly logged.
ChatGPT for Everything Else
At this point it may seem redundant to integrate ChatGPT, but that AI tool will mainly be used for the non-personal context information you might need on hand. It’ll also be integrated with the Writing Tools mentioned above and can help generate images as well. Privacy is also a factor here and no requests or IP addresses will be stored.
This year’s WWDC sure gave Apple users something exciting to look forward to, really focusing on intuitive and helpful tools that help sift through the noise.
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