According to Apple, Apple Intelligence is there to make your life easier.
Apple describes Apple Intelligence as “a personal intelligence system for iPhone, iPad and Mac that combines the power of generative modeling with personal context to deliver incredibly useful and relevant intelligence.” It will be part of the iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia updates. Apple CEO Tim Cook described the team’s approach in designing Apple Intelligence: “Combining generative AI with a user’s personal context to deliver intelligence that’s truly helpful,” making processing and computing “personal” rather than “artificial.”
Understanding the language
This new system places great emphasis on the importance of relevance in how it processes information – a better word than “intuitive” to describe what users need.
New writing tools help users communicate more effectively with any kind of text in native and third-party apps. Apple Intelligence can prepare written text for more effective communication, such as reformatting emails to make them more formal, consolidating notes into bullet points and proofreading general grammar.
Mail now prioritizes events, tickets, and meetings in your inbox and previews now show a summary of the email instead of the first few lines. Notifications now prioritizes and summarizes messages and notifications. Focus now has a new “Reduce Interruptions” option that determines what needs your immediate attention, again focusing on what you need in that moment.
Apple Intelligence also works with spoken word: the Notes and Phone apps can record, transcribe and summarize audio, automatically notifying both callers when you record, and taking into account whether it’s legal to record someone else’s audio without their permission.
Creating visuals
In a further effort to make self-expression more inclusive, Image Playground is a generative system that lives within Messages and its own app. Users can use it to create animations, illustrations, and sketches. It takes different photos, suggestions, themes, moods, and prompts to generate fun images to send to friends. Though perhaps not recommended for work emails.
You can also experience this fun with Apple Pencil, including the Image Wand feature that allows for generative filling, and the ability to take a sketch and turn it into something more detailed with additional suggestions. As part of the new update, the Tapback feature now also allows for emoji reactions beyond the standard five reactions. Genmoji is a new feature that lets you customize emojis and use them in Tapbacks.
Other features that benefit from Apple Intelligence include the ability to search for photos using natural, descriptive language and making it easier to combine multiple photos to create videos in Memories.
Siri
Siri has long been iPhone users’ faithful, yet sometimes frustratingly basic, digital assistant, but Apple Intelligence now gives Siri more advanced language understanding. Users can actually speak to Siri more naturally, with Siri understanding the nuances and humanity of language, the broader context of a conversation, line or question, and even the distinction between voice and text responses. Enhanced “screen awareness” also allows Siri to recognize anything that’s on your screen. Apple Intelligence also allows Siri to better interact with third-party apps, like accessing your Spotify playlists or opening links in Chrome.
privacy
Many of these features, powered by Apple Intelligence, are processed on-device, so your data and personal context stays in one place. And when more power is needed to process a request, Private Cloud Compute ensures that the data it needs to process resides on massive servers powered by Apple silicon chips, your data is never stored, and the software is kept in public logs.
ChatGPT for everything else
It may seem redundant to integrate ChatGPT at this point, but this AI tool is primarily used for non-personal contextual information you need at hand. It also integrates with the Writing Tools mentioned above and helps generate images. Privacy is also taken into consideration, no requests or IP addresses are stored.
This year’s WWDC is focused on intuitive, useful tools that help you sift through the noise, so Apple users will definitely have something to look forward to.
