The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Meet Apple Intelligence, the new AI coming to iphone, ipad and Mac
APPLE INTELLIGENCE, the company’s longawaited deeper push into AI technology, was unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in
Cupertino, California, on
Monday. It is powered by generative AI — a type of AI that can generate new content like text and images often in response to prompts — and will be integrated into iphone, ipad, and Macbook.
What is Apple Intelligence?
According to the company, Apple Intelligence is a system that combines the capabilities of generative AI models with personal context to deliver personalised intelligence — which means that it understands user behaviour and generates appropriate responses. It is like Openai’s CHATGPT but with more contextual awareness. Apple Intelligence can know the user’s likes and dislikes, online preferences, can keep a tab on their calendar, etc.
The new AI tool will run on Apple Silicon (a processor designed by Apple) and will be able to comprehend and create language and images, work across applications, and simplify and enhance everyday tasks.
What can Apple Intelligence do?
Apple Intelligence will let users improve their writing and communicate with more ease. Apple is bringing systemwide writing tools that are built into IOS 18, ipados 18, and MACOS Sequoia. These tools will allow users to write, rewrite, proofread, and summarise text almost anywhere they write, including on third-party apps.
Apple Intelligence will help users feel more confident in their writing, according to the company. For example, the rewrite feature will show users different versions of what they wrote. These versions will adjust the tone to suit their audience and the task at hand.
The new AI tool will make it easier to manage emails by showing a new section at the top of the inbox with the most urgent emails and summarising emails without the need to open them.
Apple Intelligence will also enable users with creative ways of expression. It will introduce a feature called Image Playground that will allow users to create images in seconds. They can pick from three styles: animation, illustration, or sketch. There will be an image generator as well, which will create emojis through the user’s prompts.
The new AI tool will make searching for pictures on iphones more convenient. Apple has claimed that users can use “natural language” for searching specific photos. For example, one can search images using simple prompts like “Katie with stickers on her face”. This will also be applicable to videos, as users will be able to find specific moments in clips.
How will it improve Siri?
With Apple Intelligence, Siri — Apple’s virtual assistant — will now be more contextually aware and come with richer language-understanding capabilities. It will be more natural, contextually relevant, and more personal. Apple claims that Siri will follow along if a user stumbles over their words and it will maintain context from one request to the next.
Apple Intelligence also brings something known as “onscreen awareness” to Siri. It will enable Siri to take action with all that is visible on the screen. For instance, if a friend texts the user her new address in Messages, the user can respond by saying, “Add this address to her (the friend’s) contact card.”
What about security?
Contextualawarenessmeansthatsiriwill be aware of all the user’s activities, which raisesquestionsofprivacyandsecurity.apple has said that Apple Intelligence is backed by Private Cloud Compute (PCC), which is specially designed to address security and privacy challenges. Moreover, the new system is aware of a user’s personal information without collecting it, according to Apple.