During its annual developers’ conference, Apple answered a burning question that had previously received a vague response: “What is an AI smartphone?” We don’t know the industry’s definition of that term, but as of Monday, things seem a little clearer regarding what Apple meant by incorporating GenAI into the iPhone, the world’s most popular smartphone. While in most ways the move was predictable, Apple has today made non-AI smartphones obsolete, whether you admit it or not.
Cupertino isn’t the first phone company to market an AI-powered smartphone. Samsung and Google have already introduced GenAI in their flagship phones.
However, Apple is bringing AI through iOS 18, a new version of the mobile operating system that powers the iPhone, previewed at WWDC. When the update rolls out to compatible models, it will reach millions of users at once. This means Apple will be able to supercharge iPhones with the power of AI at scale and reach a wide user base before the end of the year. The move hints at Apple’s plans for the expanded use of AI in their product line moving forward, despite a perception that the tech giant is late to the AI frenzy, while its rivals Google and Microsoft have the first-mover advantage in AI.
Some of these AI features will be powered by ChatGPT. (Image Source: Apple/YouTube)
The impact of AI technology on the iPhone, in particular, and the smartphone market at large, is going to be huge. The original iPhone brought the touchscreen and the App Store to the forefront, and the combination of the two laid the foundation for the modern smartphone. While smartphones existed before, the experience was not intuitive. The iPhone changed that with its touchscreen interface and how users discovered applications. Years later, Apple is in a similar situation, poised to change smartphones again, and what we saw at WWDC might just be just the beginning of that transformation.
The thing is, AI tech inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in smartphones—including the iPhone—for years and have enabled features such as background blur effects and photo editing. But GenAI isn’t about heavy lifting behind the scenes; rather, it is bringing a foundational shift to mobile devices.
At WWDC 2024, Apple gave a first glimpse into GenAI and what the technology can do for your iPhone. “Apple Intelligence,” as Apple likes to call it (the company didn’t use the term “artificial intelligence” during the two-hour keynote presentation), is a suite of GenAI-powered features designed to simplify users’ daily lives.
“Apple Intelligence combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that is incredibly useful and relevant for users. It does this while setting a new standard for privacy in AI,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said following the keynote in a panel discussion providing more insight into Apple’s AI strategy.
For Apple, “Apple Intelligence” isn’t just a marketing name; instead, these capabilities combine information about you and your relationships, using those insights to optimise features that can assist you in various ways. For example, AI can read your calendar, check traffic routes between meetings, or draft a message to your contacts to reschedule for another time. Much of the data processing will happen on-device or in special cloud-based Apple servers. While Apple Intelligence understands a lot about you as a “person,” other AI models—such as ChatGPT—are better designed for responding to prompts that retrieve general information on the go. This is perhaps why Apple didn’t add a ChatGPT-like AI chatbot to the iPhone despite a deal with OpenAI, and the company justified why it chose not to do so.
“If you went to a traditional chatbot, first of all, you’d have to leave wherever you were and what you were doing, go to another app, and type all that in. More importantly, the chatbot would have no idea how to answer that question. It wouldn’t know where you are,” Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple.
Apple may be right about AI chatbots. They aren’t good at things like booking an Uber or getting real-time traffic updates, for example. However, the truth is Apple doesn’t need a fully functional chatbot like ChatGPT to make a case for AI on the iPhone. The ChatGPT app on the iPhone already does what the AI chatbot can possibly do. But Apple cleverly integrated ChatGPT into a new version of its voice assistant Siri. That translated into a meaningful upgrade – what Siri was before the integration and after. iPhone users will be able to have more natural conversations with Siri; they can also search user image libraries for specific photos users ask for, schedule text messages, and edit photos. ChatGPt will be accessible straight from Siri and the new compose feature, with the promise that your activities won’t be logged.
iOS 18 will also have new AI-powered features. (Image Source: Apple/YouTube)
Whether accessing ChatGPT on the iPhone or using Apple Intelligence to rewrite or proofread text while maintaining privacy, Cupertino is making sure users get a taste of AI features on their devices in a unique way. Even if Apple’s new “personal intelligence” tools aren’t groundbreaking, Apple promises it is making a first step in making the iPhone more “personal” and “intelligent.”
Apple Intelligence was a headline feature at Apple’s developer conference, giving a peek into where the iPhone is headed. For several years, the story of the iPhone has been about the device peaking, with relatively flat sales year-over-year. Apple’s brand pull is still powerful, and loyal customers are in the millions, but there is a limit to how much you can improve a smartphone. While Apple’s long-term AI strategy is unclear, in the short term, Cupertino may look to AI to bolster the iPhone’s sales, which it will already do. With the new Apple Intelligence features only available on the iPhone 15 Pro (review) models, this move could spur device upgrades. But to sweeten the deal, Apple is throwing in AI features for free. Apple, in a way, rejects the idea, unlike others in the industry, that users need to pay extra to use AI-led features despite announcing an integration with OpenAI which brings the latest version of ChatGPT at no cost to iPhone users. This establishes one thing: Apple doesn’t see AI as a separate service but rather as a way to make its core products more intuitive.
“The device you’re carrying around in your pocket knows all of that. So the ability to bring all of that together, to take all of that knowledge and then combine it with the power of these powerful generative models, is personal intelligence. Today was really about taking the first step in applying this technology in an Apple way to real people’s experiences,” said Federighi.
(The writer is attending WWDC 2024 in Cupertino, California at the invitation of Apple)
