It is the latest chapter in how technology is integrated into the rhythms of living Amid a digital landscape in which iPhone sales are stagnant, and in which AI systems such as ChatGPT are rocketing to national buzz, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) was no ordinary event. Apple sees in the way that AI represents a feature of its ecosystem rather than just an off-the-shelf product.
As WWDC loomed with murmurs of generative AI and how it might transform the tech industry, Apple’s own term for it was ‘Apple Intelligence’, underscoring how the company is taking a truly visionary view of what the future of AI looks like as it entwines itself across the gamut of the company’s products and software to enhance and transform user experience, often in very subtle ways.
There are a lot of efforts now to corral the vastness of generative AI into usable products. It’s not always a great experience. Apple takes the opposite approach. The company has embedded generative AI into the existing ecosystem. It’s trying to keep everything in harmony, preserving the controls available to users to balance the functions that need the new technologies to make them shine.
While Writing Tools, another Apple innovation, guarantees text rewriting and summarisation at the touch of a button, which then becomes effortlessly seamlessly integrated into the user’s creative process via native Apple hardware, or indeed, in-house software. Also, Image Playground, an equally revolutionary tool that takes text and sketch inputs in order to turn them into practically gorgeous illustrations.
Then Apple announced Genmoji, taking advantage of generative AI to create emoji from textual cues – another step toward the expressive possibilities of digital communication.
Siri is set to get a major upgrade, thanks to the introduction of generative AI. Speech recognition should improve, context awareness should increase, and engagement with on-device data should grow, creating a more intuitive assistant at our beck and call.
Apple is heavily committed to privacy and most of its AI runs locally on the device instead of in the cloud. This not only protects the privacy of users, but also makes interactions more personalised and efficient. Apple also leverages new technologies such as Private Cloud Compute to balance the need for powerful AI with the need for user privacy.
Certainly, the announcements out of WWDC have helped buoy investor sentiment, but as I noted before, it’s going to take time to judge whether they’ll lead to user satisfaction. If the experience is good, we’ll know it when technology rolls out, which is not likely to happen until later this year, at least for the most part on newer iPhone models and computers that carry the new M series chips.
In defining AI not as a product in itself, but as a feature of existing products, Apple is ushering in a new era in technology design, where the point of AI is utility, and the user experience is as important as the technology. Equally, in the hype surrounding the AI industry giants of Google and Microsoft, there is a common instinct to recognise the value of AI not as a technical advance in itself, but as a set of technologies that make sense within the digital context of everyday digital life.
Indeed, the company has always been at the forefront of innovation in technology, starting with the personal computer revolution, to today, with the iPhone and the new way of thinking about modern technology. Today, Apple has built that way of thinking into its core by building AI into the core of future devices that they release. By doing so, Apple has once again redefined the future of the way we use technology, but it has also inspired other companies to think in innovative ways to offer AI as a core product, defining the future of several industries. The future of Apple and the way technology interacts with humans is filled with possibilities. By fusing AI and advancing the possibilities of human interaction, Apple has fostered a new way of thinking about technology and its place in our lives. By creating AI for its human users, Apple has shown that technology and humans interact, live, and move as one. Apple has glimpsed into the future, on a quest to help us get there.
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