This article covers a developing story. Continue to check back with us as we will be adding more information as it becomes available.
Key Takeaways
- Siri improvements likely at the WWDC
- Better predictive text in Messages from AI
- AI-enhanced photo editing & app development in the works
It’s not often that Apple finds itself in the position of playing catch-up. However, when it comes to generative AI, the company is severely lagging behind many of its competitors. It’s somewhat understandable; no one really knew that AI capabilities would explode the way that they have in recent years, but while other companies have quickly jumped on the bandwagon to great success, Apple has dragged its heels.
But things are beginning to happen. Apple has been investing in AI and hiring dozens of people to work on generative AI at the company. It seems highly likely that we will get some significant announcements relating to AI and Apple products at Apple’s WWDC event that’s slated for June this year.
How will Apple integrate the power of AI into its products? To know for certain, we’ll have to wait until this summer, but there have been some rumors that give a clue as to what we can expect. Here are some of the things that Apple might be planning to do with generative AI.
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1 Make Siri actually useful
She could get significantly smarter
When Siri first arrived on the iPhone 4S, all the way back in 2011, it promised a new dawn of voice assistants that would change the way we interact with our phones forever. Sadly, Siri didn’t quite live up to those expectations. The voice assistant has stagnated, in part due to the database design that makes adding new content a time-consuming process.
However, Siri may finally see her first significant bump in performance since she first appeared. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Siri is being revamped to implement the AI system that Apple is currently developing. This should improve Siri’s ability to respond to questions or commands.
It may also mean that Siri will be able to perform multi-step tasks. This would save users from having to create their own multi-step tasks in the Shortcuts app. Amazon has announced a similar upcoming feature for Alexa that will allow you to create multi-step routines with your voice, so voice assistants may soon be a lot more useful.
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2 Improve autocomplete in Messages
Sentence prediction should be much better
One place where machine learning is already in use on your iPhone and other Apple devices is when it comes to autocorrect. Your phone can correct typos and suggest the next word that it thinks you’re going to type.
Other AI models such as ChatGPT have shown that generative AI is very good indeed at predicting what will come next in a line of text. Indeed, this is the basis of how text-based generative AI works; at its heart, it’s simply predicting the most likely response to any given prompt. Using generative AI in apps such as Messages should mean that your predictive text gets a whole lot ducking better.
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3 Create Apple Music playlists
Use prompts to create playlists in seconds
Spotify has already beaten Apple to the punch here, with an AI DJ already available on the app. AI-generated playlists have also been tested in the wild by some Spotify users. It’s highly likely that Apple will follow suit and use the power of generative AI to create playlists.
You can already get playlists based on your listening preferences in the Apple Music app, such as the New Music Mix and Discovery Station. However, generative AI may give you the ability to create your own playlists with prompts such as ‘slow tempo indie from the 90s with a female singer’ and have a playlist magically created by the power of AI.
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4 Make your photos better
AI editing to transform your pics
When the Google Pixel 8 Pro was launched, Google went all in on promoting the AI capabilities of the smartphone, particularly when it comes to the camera. The Magic Editor allows you to remove objects, reposition the subject of your photo, and change the lighting by harnessing the power of AI. It also has a Best Take feature that can combine several similar photos to ensure that everyone is looking their best, and you don’t have an otherwise perfect photo ruined by the one person who has their eyes shut.
It’s highly likely that Apple will introduce similar AI features into the Photos app that will allow you to quickly and easily edit your photos or automatically improve them. For example, the Photos app already includes the ability to remove red eye from photos taken with the flash. This is likely something that could be detected and automatically fixed using AI.
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5 Help developers code more quickly
Autocomplete in Xcode
Apple’s generative AI won’t just benefit Apple end users. It may also be able to help developers create their apps more easily. That’s because according to Mark Gurman, Apple is looking into adding generative AI into app development tools such as Xcode. This would allow the AI to predict what a line of code is going to say, speeding up the process of coding apps for Apple products.
The autocomplete suggestions would be similar to how apps can make suggestions to autocomplete entire lines of text. By using the powerful predictive skills of AI, the feature would offer the most likely ending to a line of code, allowing the coder to press a key and have the line of code autocompleted for them. Just as with text, that can offer significant time savings and would allow developers to get their apps to market even faster.
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6 Make you more productive
AI coming to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote?
Microsoft
Microsoft has a huge lead over Apple when it comes to AI. The company has poured billions of investment into OpenAI and is reaping the benefits. In fact, Microsoft’s forward-thinking approach to AI saw the company overtake Apple as the world’s most valuable company at the start of 2024, and this is in large part due to its investment in AI.
Microsoft has integrated its Copilot AI into many of its products, including the Microsoft 365 apps. For example, in Word you can use Copilot to generate a first draft of a document which you can then edit to meet your needs. In Excel, Copilot can help you to create data visualizations or analyze patterns in your data.
Apple has its own suite of productivity apps such as Pages and Keynote. It’s almost certainly the case that generative AI will be used to improve these apps in a similar way to what Microsoft has done, making it quicker and easier to accomplish your tasks when using these apps.
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7 Improve customer service
Quicker solutions to complex problems
Apple
When things go wrong, you can contact Apple customer service for help. However, it’s unreasonable to expect call center operatives to have detailed knowledge of every possible solution to every possible problem with every possible Apple product.
However, Apple has been testing a tool called Ask that uses generative AI to create responses for customer service operatives based on Apple’s own knowledge database. The tool is intended to help solve complex problems more quickly. It means that the next time you call the Apple helpline, you may get a solution to your problem much more quickly.
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