Apple to debut 'Apple Intelligence' at WWDC and here are the features it powers

Although Apple joined the AI race late, it has been working on a bevy of AI features for its products. At WWDC, it’s expected we’ll finally see the fruits of the company’s labor. A new report says about half of next week’s presentation will focus on AI and it will center around the tech giant’s new AI system.

Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has laid out everything Apple plans to announce during its WWDC event on June 10. At the event, the Cupertino-based firm will reportedly unveil its new AI system, which it has dubbed “Apple Intelligence.” It will be available for the iPhone 15 Pro and for the iPhones coming out this year, as well as for iPads and Macs with at least an M1 chip. The AI will arrive in the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Apple Intelligence will power a variety of AI features that users will have to opt-in for. These features will be positioned as beta versions and will focus more on productive functions instead of things like image or video generation. Apple has also partnered with OpenAI to create a ChatGPT-like chatbot. Additionally, these AI features will rely on either on-device processing or cloud-based processing, which the new operating systems will use an algorithm to determine the best approach for each task.

What features will be announced?

As for the features to be announced, there will be an AI summarization function for overviews of articles and web pages in Safari. AI summarization will also come to text messages and emails. And there will reportedly be a catch-up feature for missed notifications. The AI can also provide fully fleshed-out responses to emails and text messages.

Another announcement will focus on Apple’s virtual assistant. Siri is expected to get an AI revamp to its voice-control service. This will allow Siri to have control over features and actions within apps. So users will be able to ask Siri to perform actions like deleting an email, editing a photo, or summarizing a news article. The outlet says that Apple wants to expand this functionality to third-party apps so users can give multiple commands as a single request, but this ability likely won’t be available until next year.

Speaking of email, the Mail app will gain the ability to automatically categorize incoming mail. Voice Memos are also being updated to allow automatic transcription of audio recordings.

The final AI announcements involve AI-generated emojis and new photo editing capabilities. This AI can create custom emojis to represent words or phrases you type. Meanwhile, the Photos app will use the technology to make it easier to do things like remove an object from a photo or enhance an image.

Other announcements

While it’s not an AI feature, Apple is expected to announce something about precautions it is taking to protect security and privacy. The company has previously discouraged the use of cloud servers, but will be using such technology with its AI. As such, it will talk about security features on the chips that it’s using in its data centers. It’s also expected that the company will mention that it won’t build user profiles based on customer data, as well as show reports that they aren’t reading or selling your data.

The company will also have non-AI-related announcements like a new password management app and app updates. Since this is a mostly software-focused event, there likely won’t be any hardware reveals.

WWDC is scheduled to begin on June 10 and continue on until June 14. The keynote will start at 1PM ET and will be live-streamed on YouTube.