It’s shaping up to be another big year for generative AI, and one of the biggest stories could be Apple’s AI updates for iOS 18 and the iPhone, which are reportedly still on track to be announced at WWDC 2024 in June.
We previously heard that Apple plans to reveal AI improvements for Siri, Messages, Apple Music, Pages and more during its developer conference this year, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has confirmed that these announcements are still on track for a big reveal at the WWDC. 2024.
The basis for these updates is apparently a large language model (LLM) called Ajax, which Apple has apparently been testing since early 2023. But what’s interesting about these latest rumors is how widely Apple apparently plans to apply its capabilities in hardware and software. and not only on the iPhone.
We’ve already heard that Apple plans to give Siri a major brain transplant to make it more conversational, like ChatGPT, and that’s something it certainly has to do to keep pace with its AI rivals in 2024. But Gurman also claims that Apple plans to add features like “autosummary and autocomplete” to core apps like Pages and Keynote.
Arguably the biggest deal, however, is that Apple is apparently “working on a new version of Xcode and other development tools that incorporate AI for code completion.” If developers can leverage AI to write code and create new AI features, that could dramatically improve the quality of third-party apps on your iPhone. This follows the news in December that Apple had quietly released a new machine learning framework called MLX for Apple Silicon.
The bad news? Gurman suggests that “the entirety of Apple’s generative AI vision” won’t happen until at least 2025. Given how far Apple apparently is with the technology, that certainly seems likely, but we should at least get a first look at its next generation. . AI updates in June at WWDC 2024.
What AI features could we see in iPhones?
Apple is reportedly spending more than $1 billion a year on its big AI project, and while that’s not much compared to the $100 billion it apparently spent developing the Apple Vision Pro, its reality device mixed that is now very close to its launch, yes it is. a significant amount for the software. So, what advantages could it bring to our iPhones?
The biggest one is likely to be the long-rumored next-generation Siri assistant. If you try to use ChatGPT’s free voice feature on your iPhone, you’ll know that it’s a much more conversational voice assistant than Siri, although it’s still prone to hallucinations.
Plug those kinds of abilities into iOS 18 and we should get much better voice control from our iPhones, which should work particularly well if you have AirPods. In other words, not just staccato, two-sentence commands like kitchen timers, but a genuinely smart assistant that can handle multiple requests simultaneously, like smart home commands, calendar overviews, and more.
Elsewhere, we can expect to see AI appear in Messages to help answer questions and automatically complete our sentences. Apple has been using machine learning to improve the accuracy of the iOS keyboard for a few years now, so this would be a natural development of that work.
According to Gurman, Apple also plans to give Apple Music a big boost with AI features, for example using it to “better automate playlist creation.” This would see Apple Music start to catch up with Spotify, which has already been rolling out similar features, like its AI DJ.
Some big questions remain about Apple’s AI announcements for WWDC 2024. First, will Apple even refer to the new features in iOS 18 as “powered by AI”? Previously, the term was avoided in favor of the less used (but often more accurate) “machine learning.”
Also, will your AI features only work on the device or will some be enhanced by cloud processing? The Google Pixel 8’s new Video Boost with Night Sight feature relies on the added power of the cloud, but Apple’s focus on privacy may cause it to stick to local processing. If so, will the new AI features be restricted to newer iPhones? And what models?
We should find the answers to all these questions and more in about five months at WWDC 2024.
