At WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled a revolutionary AI system designed to empower you and elevate your iPhone, iPad, and Mac experience. This intelligent system is poised to understand your personal context, delivering relevant and invaluable insights, thereby enabling you to take full control and make the most of your Apple devices.
Apple Intelligence will be integrated into the latest operating systems: iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Providing advanced AI capabilities aims to improve the apps you use for work, communication, and creative expression.
Apple Intelligence capabilities
Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, presented Apple Intelligence at the keynote. The AI system can understand and create language and images, act across apps, and draw from personal context to streamline everyday tasks. It also offers advanced features like text rewriting, image creation, and natural language search, all designed to enhance your Apple device experience.
For instance, you can use it to rewrite text if you are not satisfied with the tone or language. Apple Intelligence can rewrite, proofread, and summarise text for reviews, school notes, or work reports. It will work seamlessly across Mail, Notes, Pages, Keynote, and third-party apps.
Apple Intelligence allows you to express yourself creatively with photos, emojis, and gifs. With the Image Playground feature, you can create images in seconds, choosing from animation, illustration, or sketch styles. For example, you can make an animated image of someone with a cake for a birthday greeting or generate a genmoji from a description or photo of a friend.
You can also use natural language to search for photos by describing them, such as “Maya skateboarding in a tie-dye shirt.” The new Clean Up tool can also remove distracting objects from photos without altering the subject.
Apple Intelligence can perform tasks across your apps. For example, you can ask it to “show me all the photos of Mom, Olivia, and me,” and it will do so. It can also retrieve and analyse data from your apps and reference the content on your screen, like emails or calendar events, to provide relevant information.
Privacy and security
Privacy and security are not just features, but the very core of Apple Intelligence. Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, underscored this during the keynote. With on-device processing, the AI system comprehends your personal data without collecting it, ensuring your privacy is safeguarded. In instances where your device requires additional computational power for complex tasks, Apple’s Private Cloud Compute steps in, further enhancing your data security and instilling a sense of trust in the system.
Private Cloud Compute allows Apple Intelligence to scale its capacity and use server-based models for complex requests while protecting your privacy. Your requests will be processed on Apple silicon-powered servers, ensuring your data is never retained or exposed.
Additionally, independent experts can inspect the code running on Apple silicon servers to verify privacy. Private Cloud Compute ensures that devices only communicate with servers that have publicly logged software, providing what Federighi called “intelligence you can trust.”
Enhancing Siri
Apple Intelligence will make Siri more natural, contextually relevant, and personal. Siri can follow along, even if you stumble over words, and maintain context from one request to the next. You can also type to Siri and switch between text and voice.
Siri can now give detailed answers thanks to its extensive product knowledge of Apple devices. With onscreen awareness, Siri can understand and act on the content across your apps. For instance, if a friend texts you their new address, you can tell Siri to “Add this address to his contact card.”
Apple Intelligence will enable Siri to perform hundreds of new actions across Apple and third-party apps, leveraging Apple’s latest writing and image generation capabilities.
Apple is taking a step further by integrating ChatGPT into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. This integration allows you to access its expertise and document-understanding capabilities seamlessly without switching between apps. Siri can tap into ChatGPT’s vast knowledge when needed. You will be asked before any questions are sent to ChatGPT, and Siri will present the answer after confirming it is okay to share your data.
Federighi also mentioned plans to support other AI models in the future.
Apple Intelligence will be available on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPads, and Macs with the M1 processor or later. It is free for users and will be available in beta later this year in the U.S. English as part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia.
