They took their time compared to their rivals, but Tim Cook and co have finally unveiled their commitment to AI-powered innovations by adding Apple Intelligence‘s AI to their core.
This intelligent assistant was confirmed at Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino. It’s designed to seamlessly integrate with Apple’s ecosystem, enhancing productivity, creativity, and overall user experience across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
“We’re thrilled to introduce a new chapter in Apple innovation. Apple Intelligence will transform what users can do with our products — and what our products can do for our users. Our unique approach combines generative AI with a user’s personal context to deliver truly helpful intelligence. And it can access that information in a completely private and secure way to help users do the things that matter most to them. This is AI as only Apple can deliver it, and we can’t wait for users to experience what it can do.”
Tim Cook
Here’s a summary of today’s announcements:
- Apple Intelligence: An AI suite for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It combines the power of generative AI models with personal context to deliver helpful and relevant intelligence.
- Rewrite: A new suite wide writing tool. “Rewrite helps deliver the right words to meet the occasion. Proofread checks grammar, word choice, and sentence structure while also suggesting edits — along with explanations of the edits — that users can review or quickly accept. With Summarize, users can select text and have it recapped in the form of a digestible paragraph, bulleted key points, a table, or a list.”
- AI in the Mail app and Notifications: Apple Intelligence adds features like Priority Messages, email summaries, and Smart Reply to help users stay on top of their inbox more efficiently. It will also enhances Notifications with Priority Notifications and summaries, as well as a new “Reduce Interruptions” Focus mode.
- AI integrations in Notes and Phone: These apps will now allow users to record, transcribe, and summarize audio recordings, including during phone calls.
- Image Playground: This feature lets users quickly create fun images in various styles (Animation, Illustration, Sketch) for use in apps like Messages.
- Genmoji: Users can create now create bitmoji like avatars called “Genmojis”. Using generated images, you can even create emjois of friends and family based on their photos, and add them in text and messages.
- Memories: Create personalized video montages that tell the stories they want to see. All it takes is a simple text description – using natural language and image understanding, the assistant will handpick the most relevant photos and videos from your library, craft an engaging narrative with distinct chapters, and stitch them together into a polished video.
- Siri: The personal assistant voice app now has richer language understanding capabilities, allowing it to be more natural, contextually relevant, and personalized in its interactions. Siri can better follow along if users stumble over words and maintain context from one request to the next.
- ChatGPT: Apple also officially announced their partnership with OpenAI, and are building in the company’s LLM, ChatGPT, within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. This allows users to leverage ChatGPT’s expertise and capabilities directly from within Apple’s ecosystem, without needing to switch between separate tools. Siri can now tap into ChatGPT’s knowledge base when appropriate to provide helpful responses to user queries. When a user asks Siri a question that could benefit from ChatGPT’s capabilities, Siri will prompt the user for permission before sending the query to ChatGPT. In addition to text-based questions, users can also share relevant documents or photos with Siri, which will then pass them along to ChatGPT for analysis. Siri will then present the results of ChatGPT’s processing directly to the user.
When Will Apple Intelligence Be Available?
Apple Intelligence will be available free as a beta release of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia this fall, initially launching in U.S. English. Over the course of the next year, additional features, software platforms, and support for more languages will be rolled out.
Apple Intelligence will be accessible on the following devices:
- iPhone 15 Pro
- iPhone 15 Pro Max
- iPad and Mac models with M1 or later processors
To use Apple Intelligence, your device must have its system language set to U.S. English, and Siri must be enabled.
