Apple Intelligence is here: a rundown of major announcements at WWDC 2024

Welcome back, AI explorers.

Apple made some groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) announcements during the keynote session of the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024.

Let’s explore it together.

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‘Apple Intelligence’ is here: a rundown of major announcements at WWDC 2024

Apple Intelligence: Five Pillars of Innovation

Apple Intelligence is built on five pillars: powerful, integrated, intuitive, personal, and private. The company unveiled new generative AI-powered Writing Tools capable of summarizing content and rewriting text across apps and devices. Additionally, Apple is adding image-generating capabilities to apps like Messages, Keynote, Freeform, and Pages, allowing users to create artistic images based on photos in their gallery.

Apple emphasized its commitment to privacy with "on-device intelligence," ensuring all processing is done using the device’s chipset. For AI features requiring more computing power, Apple introduced Private Cloud Compute, an encrypted cloud solution balancing privacy and performance.

AI-Powered Siri: Enhanced Capabilities

Siri received a significant AI overhaul, focusing on contextual understanding. The virtual assistant can now interpret natural language and vaguely spoken sentences to find the underlying meaning. Integrated with native Apple apps, Siri can take action via verbal prompts, such as opening a photo in edit mode and adjusting brightness and contrast when asked to “make the image glow.”

In a demo, Siri accurately answered “When will my mom’s plane land” by cross-checking flight information from an email. These new capabilities will be available across iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices later this year.

Apple Intelligence Features Across Apps

Photos App: The Memories feature now uses AI to automatically pick the best photos and videos to create storylines. A new Clean Up tool removes unwanted objects from the background, similar to Google Pixel’s Magic Eraser and Samsung’s Object Eraser.

Mail App: New Writing Tools include Rewrite, allowing users to rephrase messages in different tones such as friendly, professional, and concise. Proofread checks grammar, word choice, and sentence structure, while Summarize extracts key points from long emails. Smart Replies offer quick, relevant responses.

Messages App: Users can create custom emojis, called Genmojis, by typing a text prompt. The AI generates various iterations, allowing users to choose their favorite.

ChatGPT Integration: Expanding AI Ecosystem

Apple announced integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, enabling free users to access ChatGPT without logging in, and paid users to connect their accounts. ChatGPT will be integrated within Siri and systemwide Writing Tools, powering image and document processing capabilities. These features will run on Apple silicon and the Neural Engine.

Availability

Apple Intelligence features will be available in beta on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later. Siri’s new capabilities will be part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, initially available when the device language is set to US English.