It's going to be another big year for generative AI – and one of the biggest stories could be Apple's AI upgrades for iOS 18 and the iPhone, which are reportedly still on track for an announcement at WWDC 2024 in June.
We previously heard that Apple plans to unveil AI boosts for Siri, Messages, Apple Music, Pages and more at this year's developer conference, and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has confirmed that these announcements are still on track for a big reveal at WWDC 2024.
The basis for these upgrades 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 broadly Apple apparently plans to apply its capabilities across hardware and software. and not just on the iPhone.
We've already heard that Apple plans to give Siri a major brain transplant to make it more chatty, like ChatGPT – and that's something it will undoubtedly need to do if it is to keep pace with AI rivals in 2024. But Gurman also claims that Apple plans to add features like “autosummarize and autocomplete” to core apps like Pages and Keynote.
The biggest problem, 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 use AI to both write code and create new AI features, that could dramatically improve the quality of third-party apps on your iPhone. This follows 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 totality of Apple's generative AI vision” won't happen until 2025. Considering how far Apple is seemingly behind the technology, that certainly seems likely, but we should at least get a first look at the next generation of AI upgrades in June at WWDC 2024.
What AI features can we see on iPhones?
Apple is reportedly spending more than $1 billion a year on its major AI project – and while that's not much compared to the $100 billion it apparently spent developing the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset that is about to be launched, it is. a significant amount for software. So what treats could it bring to our iPhones?
The biggest is probably the next-generation Siri assistant, which has long been rumored. If you try to use ChatGPT's free voice feature on your iPhone, you'll know that it's a much talkative voice assistant than Siri – even if it's a voice assistant that's still prone to hallucinations.
Plug in these kinds of skills to iOS 18 and we should get much improved voice control of our iPhones, which should work especially well if you have AirPods. In other words, not just staccato two-sentence commands like cooking timers, but a truly smart assistant that can handle multiple requests at once, like smart home commands, calendar views and more.
Elsewhere, we can expect AI to appear in Messages to help answer questions and autocomplete our sentences. Apple has been using machine learning to improve the accuracy of the iOS keyboard for a few years, so this would be a natural progression of that work.
According to Gurman, Apple also plans to give Apple Music a big boost with AI features, such as using it to “better automate playlist creation.” This would see Apple Music start to overtake Spotify, which has already introduced similar features such as the AI DJ.
A few big questions remain about Apple's AI announcements for WWDC 2024. First, will Apple even call the new iOS 18 features “AI-powered”? Previously, the term was avoided in favor of the less used (but often more accurate) 'machine learning'.
Will the AI features also only work on-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 limit it to local processing. If so, will the new AI features be limited to newer iPhones? And which models?
We should find out the answers to all these questions and more in about five months at WWDC 2024.