By: Nick Gambino
This has certainly been the year of AI, for better or worse. In an unsurprising move, Apple has bet on AI in a big way, announcing Apple Intelligence at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024.
What is surprising is the tech giant’s decision to partner with Open AI, creator of ChatGPT. They’ve opted to rely on this third-party company to power some of their AI features, instead of building their own or even acquiring a company that has already built it.
Apple Intelligence is essentially a package of new AI features coming to iOS, iPadOS and MacOS this year. It covers all manner of sins…errr…I mean, functions. It’s being promoted as an AI that works between your apps and normal tasks to provide assistance and enhanced capabilities.
For example, you’ll be able to carry out certain advanced photo editing tasks with a little help from AI. Say you want to remove people from the background of your photo. You simply call up the Clean Up tool, identify what you want to remove and it’ll take care of it.
Another nifty feature announced at WWDC is the Genmoji where AI will create a personalized emoji based on a prompt you type in. It’s like an AI-generated image but in emoji form. You can even create a Genmoji based on a photo from your library.
Then there’s the AI-powered search feature coming to your Photos app. I’m not going to lie, this is one I’m excited about. I’m not one to tag my photos, so searching for an old photo is limited. Now with Apple Intelligence, you can just describe what you’re looking for and it’ll pull it up. Even if it’s from a random moment from a few seconds of a longer video.
As for ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot will work in tandem with Siri to increase the number of tasks your digital assistant can carry out. If Siri can’t do it or doesn’t know it, she will turn to ChatGPT to see if it can pick up the slack and help out. Apple has stated that they intend to integrate other chatbots in the future.
A beta version of Apple Intelligence is coming to iOS, iPadOS and MacOS sometime in fall 2024.
