Google and Microsoft have made their developer conferences a showcase of their generative ai skills, and now all eyes are on next week's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is expected to mark the debut of Apple Intelligence.
The Cupertino-based company is facing a lot of pressure. Apple has fallen behind its peers in the ai race and probably feels like it needs to do everything it can to impress fans and shareholders. But that shouldn't mean overpromising in terms of features.
Reliability first
Apple makes some of the most popular devices on the planet, and its artificial intelligence features should serve to make them more useful. Many ai-powered functions rely on going back to the cloud for answers or input. However, if Apple manages to run some useful functions locally on the device, users could abandon cloud-based tools in favor of always-on ai. Offline transcriptions in the Voice Memo and Notes apps may qualify.
Apple is likely to reveal notification and web page summaries, basic text generation, and photo editing. However, many browsers, note-taking apps, and photo editing apps already have them. Apple needs to make its implementation as smooth and seamless as possible to make it stand out.
Privacy first
Apple is likely to reinforce its privacy-first approach, so it might not give Siri or ai-powered features free rein to take control of all apps. According ai-ipados-18-macos-15-siri-updates-more?sref=gni836kR&leadSource=uverify%20wall&embedded-checkout=true” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>a Bloomberg report, only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPads or Macs with M1 chips or later will get ai features and be enabled. If this is true, despite being behind on the ai feature adoption curve, Apple remains cautious and does not want to get caught up in user backlash.
The company recently came under fire for its iPad “Crush” ad, which showed creative instruments destroyed under a hydraulic press. This was seen as Apple undervaluing creators, their tools, and the effort it takes to make art by packaging it in a thin capitalist package. Since ai already has a bad reputation among creators, Apple may not want to bother them again. Therefore, a non-controversial approach is likely to be adopted.
Improving Siri
The biggest expected change is that Apple revamp Siri to better understand user queries and deliver results more accurate results. Currently, Siri cannot multitask. If you ask the wizard to set a timer for 10 minutes and a timer for 5 minutes, it will set a timer for 15 minutes instead. These things may not need the help of generative ai to solve, but the Siri revamp should at least have them.
If Siri doesn't get deeper access to apps as expected, Apple can make users' lives easier by introducing an ai assistant to help them create complex Siri shortcuts to perform multi-step tasks.
Rumor on the street is that Apple will announce an agreement with OpenAI to power ai features in their operating systems. It remains to be seen how much of Apple's intelligence will be based on that agreement. Given ai's hallucination issues, Apple may not want to get directly involved in content-related ai features just yet.
Many companies make big promises about ai-powered features, only to disappoint with inaccurate or biased results. Companies like Google and OpenAI have had to backtrack on ai features due to bugs or copyright issues. As such, the company may not want to rely on LLMs (large language models) for content generation.
