Apple’s annual developer-focused event, the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), is happening soon and a new report has highlighted the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy that could be revealed during the event. The Cupertino-based tech giant is reportedly working to make its native virtual assistant Siri smarter by integrating AI and adding what it calls “proactive intelligence”. Apart from that, it is said that the iPhone maker has partnered with OpenAI and is planning to make a major AI announcement at WWDC 2024.
According to a report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter, Apple executives are not very confident with the pace at which Apple is working on AI. The feeling, internally, is said to be that the gap between the company and its rivals is not likely to close anytime soon. Concerns have likely increased further after OpenAI and Google unveiled further advancements to their AI models at respective events last week.
However, Apple is also reported to bring some big guns when it hosts WWDC 2024 on June 10. One of the focus areas, as mentioned earlier, is Siri. The virtual assistant is capable of performing some basic tasks but gets deeply overshadowed in both speech and functionality when it comes to modern AI chatbots. The iPhone maker aims to bring it up to speed by integrating AI. Gurman claims Siri will get AI-powered “proactive intelligence” features that include auto-summarising notifications from iPhone, providing a quick synopsis of news articles, transcribing voice memos, and more. Existing features could also get an upgrade.
Apart from Siri, Apple could also introduce AI-powered editing tools with iOS 18. While details about these features are not known, it is believed they could be similar to what Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S series smartphones have. “None of those features will impress people who have used AI in Adobe Inc.’s apps for the last several months,” Gurman adds.
Finally, WWDC 2024 might also witness the formal announcement of the partnership between Apple and OpenAI. The report claims that the two companies are already aligned to bring the latter’s AI technology to the former. While it is not certain what these features might be, some rumours have claimed that the AI firm might integrate ChatGPT with the iPhone and allow native access to its AI assistant.
