Apple’s WWDC 2024 event took place earlier today in California, with announcements across all product lines, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro, AirPods, and more. The big announcement everyone was waiting for and expecting is the introduction of AI technology to Apple devices, including what Apple calls Apple intelligence as well as ChatGPT integration. Here are highlights from the events with regards to AI.
Apple Intelligence
Available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Apple Intelligence is the brand’s own version of AI technology, akin to Copilot in Windows laptops or Google’s Gemini in Android. Like the others it understands personal context to deliver helpful, relevant, and personalized information and responses to queries and questions. Deeply integrated into iOS 18, iPadOS 10, and macOS Sequoia, it can be used to take actions across various apps, create images, provide help with composing an e-mail, proofreading content, summarizing a webpage, finding related information, and more. Apple’s Private Cloud Compute is designed to offer enhanced privacy of your personal information, combining on-device processing with server-based models running on dedicated Apple silicon servers that only kick in when needed.
Intelligence works across different apps in various ways. In Mail, for example, it can show priority messages with urgent missives, like ones that include details of dinner that evening or a flight boarding pass. Previews of messages, meanwhile, will include summaries of a message instead of the first few lines. Smart Reply provides suggestions for quick responses while priority notifications show at the top of a stack. In the Notes and Phone apps, meanwhile, you can also record, transcribe, and summarize audio.
Image Playground lets you create fun images quickly and easily using Animation, Illustration, or Sketch styles, both right in the Messages app and a dedicated app.
Taking it to another level are Genmoji, which you can create based on images of contacts, adding them as stickers, reactions via Tapback, or in-line messages
AI also works in the photo app, making it easier to search for items using natural language. You could search for a specific photo of your child holding an ice cream cone in a red shirt, for example, or with a superhero costume. With videos, you can even drill down to a specific moment in a clip.
Taking a tip from Google and its photo editing features like Magic Eraser, there’s now a feature called Clean Up that allows you to identify and remove distracting objects from the background of a photo.
Create Memories from a specific description of images: Apple Intelligence will use your command and choose the best photos and videos based on the description, craft a storyline with chapters based on themes, and arrange them in a movie with a narrative arc (think vacation or fishing photos, for example). You will even get song suggestions to match the newly created movie, all from Apple Music, of course.
Apple Intelligence With Siri
The introduction of Apple Intelligence also means there’s new enhancements for Siri. Now powered by Apple Intelligence, Siri has richer language understanding capabilities. It’s more natural, contextually relevant, and more personal. It can follow your command, even if you stumble words, and maintain context from one request to the next. Siri now also works with typed commands as well as spoken ones. It also has a new design with a glowing light that wraps around the edge of the screen.
Siri knows more about how devices work, and it can provide information about how to do something with your iPhone, for example, including some of the latest features like switching to Dark Mode or scheduling an e-mail. With onscreen awareness, Siri can understand and take action with your content in more apps over time. If a friend texts their new address in Messages, for example, you can tell Siri to add the address to that person’s contact card and it will understand what you’re asking and do it.
With Apple Intelligence, Siri will also be able to take hundreds of new actions in and across Apple and third-party apps. For example, say, “Bring up that article about cicadas from my Reading List,” or “Send the photos from the barbecue on Saturday to Malia,” and Siri will take care of it.
Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to you and your on-device information. For example, say, “Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,” and Siri will locate and play the episode, without you having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an e-mail. Or ask, “When is Mom’s flight landing?” and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.
ChatGPT Integration
For those tasks that Apple Intelligence can’t perform, you can now rely more easily on ChatGPT. Apple is integrating ChatGPT access into experiences within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. You can access its expertise as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities without needing to jump between tools.
Siri can tap into ChatGPT’s expertise when helpful, and you are always asked if you would like to send your information, whether it’s a query, document, or photo, to ChatGPT before it happens.
Additionally, ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools, which help you generate content. With Compose, you can also access ChatGPT image tools to generate images in a wide variety of styles to complement what you are writing.
When accessing ChatGPT, you IP address is obscured, and OpenAI won’t store requests. ChatGPT’s data-use policies apply for users who choose to connect their account.
ChatGPT will come to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, powered by GPT-4o. You can access it for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT subscribers can connect their accounts and access paid features right from these experiences.
Apple Intelligence is free for users, and will be available in beta as part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia this fall in U.S. English. Some features, software platforms, and additional languages will come over the course of the next year. Apple Intelligence will be available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later, with Siri and device language set to U.S. English.