What is Apple Intelligence? Apple is approaching an epochal moment in its long and illustrious history and it won’t be any old take on AI, according to reports.
With this being Apple, you just know it wasn’t going to call its version of the thing the same as everyone else calls their version of the thing. For starters, it’s no surprise Apple would want to ditch the word ‘artificial’.
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So, the artificial intelligence in iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS 18 features will be marketed as Apple Intelligence according to a report from the all-knowing Mark Gurman at Bloomberg.
This appears to be the catch-all term for Apple’s AI efforts which will be revealed to the world – in all likelihood – during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote on Monday.
Gurman says he has the lowdown on some of these features. Here’s what we may be able to glean so far.
Less taking money from creatives’ pockets
Thankfully, Apple won’t be focusing heavily on AI’s knack of generating things that creative people generally generate. So there won’t be a big focus on image and copy generation, according to the report. That might be left to whatever Apple has thrashed out with OpenAI.
Genuinely helpful Gen AI
Instead, Gurman believes Apple Intelligence will be deployed to make life a little simpler for iPhone, iPad and Mac users. So you may receive a nice digest of your notifications, as if you’re a big business exec with a personal assistant.
We’d interpret this as being something like: “Your wife text and asked if you’d pick up a bottle of wine on the way home, Johnson cancelled the 3:30 meeting, Dave wondered if you fancy a pint later, and don’t forget to submit that sales report before the end of the day.”
There could also be rich auto-reply suggestions, summaries of webpages, better Mail characterisation and more, that report says.
Emoji creation
The Apple Intelligence tools will reportedly enable users to create custom emoji based on what they’re typing in a given app. This has been rumoured for a few weeks now and it’ll be interesting to see if and how this plays out at WWDC.
Google’s machine-learning based tools like Magic Eraser give it the edge when it comes to image editing, but apparently Apple will make like the squashed tomato and catch-up when it announces its plans at WWDC.
All is likely to be revealed at WWDC 24, where Apple Intelligence will come to the fore.
Cloud + on-device processing
The reporting also suggests Apple Intelligence will.. erm… intelligently decide whether the request from the user can be handled by the on-devlce processors or sent to more powerful server via the cloud. This may be one of the areas where Apple gets into the weeds about how it plans to protect its repuation for prioritising user privacy in the AI era.
