The wait is finally over. Apple introduced its AI at the Worldwide Developer Conference 2024 (WWDC 24) held on Jun 10^th. AI – Apple Intelligence.

People are applauding the name, but I say, well, that was something easy. I mean the brand starts with A, artificial is A. So, AI was expected. That’s a not a big deal. Ok, so coming late to the AI party, how did they do? Leveraging a powerful generative model into core of Apple products – iPhone, iPad and iMac – they give you a personal intelligence system that you can use across the platforms and apps, and the good part is: privacy is respected. Apple Intelligence, or AI, uses language models that could understand deep natural language and allows you to communicate easily. It can summarize your group messages and show it up on your lock screen, prioritize notifications, proofread or rewrite your writing, summarize, condense ideas and review before you post.

Coming to images, it can style images to sketch, animations and illustrations. It allows you to send customized images like creating a cartoon image of your recipients, adding backgrounds, and emojis. There’s more, you can ask it to search for your photos (remember, Google’s Ask Photos), play the podcast that your girlfriend sent you or take any action that the lazy you would want it to be done with just a voice command. Like Google Gemini it could do cool stuffs like analysing your personal mails, arranging meetings, scheduling and even predicting traffic and routes to get you to your meetings on time.

One thing Apple always emphasises is Privacy, no doubt. AI is on-device and so collects your personal data without actually storing it on cloud to process it. This unique integration of hardware and software requires immense processing power, so you could have them in products that uses advanced Apple silicon, A17 Pro and M-family of chips. Behind the scenes, when you request something, they have something called as semantic index, that picks up the context and sends it to the generative models, to give you a personalized experience. Unlike the traditional servers that stores your data and claiming to not misuse your data – which you could never verify it – these on-device models are amazingly safe. You have control. So, what about those processing that requires more computational abilities than your on-device can handle? Well, Apple has a solution for that too – Private Cloud Computer. These are servers …. wait a second…. isn’t it the traditional way. Hold on! Yeah, it is, but it only sends data that is relevant to the task. Data is never stored or made accessible to Apple.

Ok, so what about Siri? Yup, Apple Intelligence would be integrated to Siri to make it more powerful. It could take in-app actions, understand your interruptions, stutter, find you images, schedule your pickups from a text that you sent your friend, create a contact, pick images from apps, and recollect some recommendations that your friend sent a while back.  

There’s more: You could use Genmoji to generate emojis depending on how you feel by providing the description. Image Playground lets you create images with some predefined concepts, for example, let’s say – you select party, dinner, cats – voila, it creates an image with these prompts. Image Wand to analyze your rough sketch and notes to create the images you wished for.

For developers, they have updated SDKs with new APIs and frameworks. Developers can add playground experience to their app with just few lines of code. Writing tools are also available. For those who are using SiriKit, they will see immediate enhancements. There would be on-device code completion and other features integrated to Xcode.

And as we already knew, Siri would be integrated with ChatGPT experience. When you ask Siri, it would first ‘ask’ if you want to use GPT, and if you agree, you’ll get your answers from GPT-4o.

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 are coming to users in beta as part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia this fall.

Hmm… what do you think? Most of theirs are similar to what Google has to offer. So, it will be interesting to see who makes it available to wider range of users, improves it and who will lead the race in the coming years.