Unlocking the Future: APPLE Intelligence Revolutionizes Personal Tech

Apple recently announced that they’re developing their own personalised artificial intelligence from within their company – a move that will increase the amount of generative AI power and personalisation everywhere users interact in the APPLE ecosystem, starting with iOS, its mobile operating system – forever changing how users communicate on these devices. Aptly named ‘APPLE Intelligence’, this ground-breaking announcement was made at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2024. APPLE-developed AI engines are set to completely reimagine user experiences on APPLE products. As cited in the APPLE press release: ‘Our mission is to create first-party, neural-based AI engines that can anticipate a user’s needs, automate or adapt to users’ behaviour, and bring users closer to the people and things that matter to them.’ This is a game-changing move reinforcing a long-term commitment by APPLE to focus on the development of artificial and personalised intelligence, and to continue creating products that are increasingly personalised, smart, and yes, private.

Personalized Tech at Its Core

Knowing You

This is the root of APPLE Intelligence, Cook reminded us: its ability ‘to absorb your personal context’, ranging ‘from locations to times of day … from whom you’re with … to what you’re doing’. APPLE Intelligence is built to be an intimate extension of you. It aims to be as effortless as possible.

Privacy and Integration

Grounded in the ethic of privacy, APPLE Intelligence would be built directly into iOS, macOS and the new visionOS, making those experiences better while also protecting personal data. The idea would be to offer a dual promise of personalisation and privacy that would ensure that any future ‘intelligence’ in APPLE products or those of other tech companies would be uniquely responsive and uniquely grounded in respect for personal data.

Revolutionizing Siri and Beyond

Superhero Siri

Alongside the launch of APPLE Intelligence is another significant development for Siri, arguably one of the most important updates since the voice assistant’s launch in 2011: gone is the iconicSirimusicnote – replaced by a much deeper glowing blue border around a design that is less an individual AI assistant and more a superhero entry point to generative AI capabilities – now offering the option of typing queries, implicitly recognising the shortcomings of voice-only inputs.

App Intents For More Granular Interaction

APPLE has expanded the scope of Siri’s actions with the concept of App Intents, allowing them to be deeper embedded into first-party, and now third-party, apps to effectively enrich what she can do, which in turn opens up more opportunities for richer cross-app multitasking and compatibility in the everyday things you do, such as scheduling meetings.

Innovative Features and Partnerships

Creativity and Convenience

Genmoji (for emoji made to look like you), Image Playground (for on-device image generation) and Image Wand (for generating images using APPLE Pencil): APPLE Intelligence will continue to inspire users by offering even more creative tools to easily create, design and produce, thus promoting the user’s creativeness and convenience.

Search and Learn with AI

For instance, when searching through photos and video, APPLE Intelligence can better understand language searches, while creating a slideshow is more intuitive using natural language. Generative AI may help make tech easier to use and more enjoyable.

Widening the Reach

Compatibility

APPLE Intelligence will be included with the iOS, iPadOS, macOS and (soon to be released) visionOS updates, all free of charge – but its implementation on iPhone 15 Pro and the M1 Mac and iPad shows a more nuanced rollout, with the standard iPhone 15 missing out because of its chip limitations.

APPLE and OpenAI Partnership

In an announcement, APPLE partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and other products. It offers premium features at no extra cost. It further enriches its expanding ecosystem with the latest AI digital technology.

The Essence of APPLE

Underlying everything, however, has been a commitment to creativity, privacy and industrial design, while keeping the user experience as easy as possible. APPLE Intelligence makes clear that the company remains committed to those goals, taking personal technology to the next level. APPLE Intelligence is more than an AI breakthrough. It’s a statement of vision for the future of the personal computer, where technology adapts to the user so that our digital world can be smarter, more intuitive, and more secure.

Apple has long aspired to develop groundbreaking technology that, generation after generation, feels closer to human than it has ever been. Computer technology and services should behave more like human beings than like machines This philosophy of design remains constant as it is continuously actualised through APPLE products and services. As expressed by one team member during the APPLE intelligence AI and ML briefing, APPLE is committed to building ‘things that we feel like we’re people’. APPLE Intelligence, now refined, codified, and expanded, presents a substantive new development in its long-term effort to develop increasingly close approximations of human consciousness in machines. It is driven by an enduring vision of how technology can be individualised, personalised, privatised, and counter to the ‘cloud model’ of mass surveillance and big data exploitation championed by Google and its partners. Under the APPLE brand, personalisation and privacy will once more guide the future of the internet as it became back in the late 1970s when the first APPLE Macs and the APPLE II personal computer went on the market.