- According to Mark Gurman, the upcoming iOS 18 will focus on "proactive intelligence" and aim to improve Siri's voice capabilities, giving it a more conversational feel.
- The AI features include the auto-summarization feature for notifications, providing quick synopses of news articles, transcribing voice memos, and improving calendar suggestions.
- Despite some AI enhancements, Apple's proprietary chatbot will still be missing.
Apple is just a few weeks away from revealing its new generative AI features for iPhones at its annual WWDC event on June 10. This time, the Cupertino tech giant is poised to introduce some bold changes. According to the latest newsletter by Mark Gurman, the upcoming iOS 18 will focus on “proactive intelligence” and aim to improve Siri’s voice capabilities, giving it a more conversational feel. Besides, we are likely to see some AI features to help users in their everyday lives.
The proposed iOS 18 features include AI-powered notification summaries, providing quick synopses of news articles, transcribing voice memos, and improving calendar suggestions. In addition, it’s anticipated that the latest iOS 18 update will bring some AI-based editing tools to photos. However, they may not match the advanced AI features that people have already seen in Adobe Inc.’s apps for the last several months.
Gurman also mentioned that while Apple will mostly use on-device LLM for AI features, they also plan to offer AI services through the cloud, using powerful Apple silicon chips in their data centers.
Despite some AI-inspired additions, Apple’s proprietary chatbot will still be missing. It seems that Apple’s generative AI technology is still not advanced enough to compete with ChatGPT or Gemini. Moreover, some of Apple’s top executives don’t want Apple to go in that direction. In the past, chatbot mishaps have created controversies for companies like Google, and such a thing could hurt Apple’s reputation.
To cater to consumers’ demands in the future, Apple is reportedly teaming up with OpenAI to integrate the startup’s technology into iOS 18. Well, this could be good for the short term. If Apple wants to become a major player in the AI space, they have to forget about the partnership approach and build a chatbot of its own. For now, Apple believes its homegrown AI features (both on devices and in the cloud) and the OpenAI partnership could get the job done.
Previously, Apple was also in talks with Google to license Gemini for iOS 18, but there seems to be no deal. To reduce its reliance on Google and handle online searches, Apple is contemplating the development of a search engine on its own, potentially with privacy features that will align it more with DuckDuckGo.
Last week, Google and OpenAI rolled out their latest AI efforts, which has increased pressure on Apple and put it even further behind in the race. While OpenAI’s GPT-4o can hold lifelike conversations, Google is deeply integrating generative AI into its search engine with Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Apple is finally ready to step into the AI league when it reveals the first preview of its next-generation software updates at WWDC 2024, which kicks off June 10.
