Apple might be late to jump to the roaring Generative AI bandwagon, but it has quickly made significant strides by announcing Apple Intelligence! At its WWDC 2024, Apple announced its entry in Generative AI and a collaboration with OpenAI.
Apple now integrates advanced Generative AI capabilities into its ecosystem to enhance user experiences across its devices and services. However, unlike the ubiquitously available Generative AI tools, Apple Intelligence comes deeply rooted in its iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, thus making it an on-device feature available systemwide.
However, on-device machine learning systems aren’t new to Apple. They have been here for a while now. Take for instance Siri, the search feature in photos, and more. On-device feature benefits the end user regarding data security and privacy.
Neural Engine, launched with the iPhone’s A11 Bionic processor was made to boost machine learning processes in iPhones.
Coming back to Apple Intelligence, with its help, users can rewrite, proofread, and summarize text nearly everywhere they write, including third-party apps on Apple devices.
With the Rewrite feature, Apple Intelligence allows users to choose from different versions of what they have written, something many existing AI tools let you do, but having an on-device feature makes a difference.
However, foundationally, many Generative AI features remain the same, proofreading, word choice, sentence structuring, summarization, and so on.
Apple Intelligence: Privacy-Centric
What makes Apple’s offering unique is its privacy feature. As always, Apple is keeping privacy as its top priority, ensuring that its consumers’ data remains protected and secure.
Apple explains while major processing happens on-device, the complex requests that require more processing power need to go through the cloud to unlock even more intelligence. Here, Private Cloud Compute comes into play and extends the privacy and security of Apple devices into the cloud as well, making sure data remains protected even if it goes through the cloud.
Apple Intelligence can draw on larger server-based models, running on Apple silicon, to handle more complex requests for you while protecting your privacy.
How Developers can Integrate Experiences Powered by Apple Intelligence into Their Apps
Developers will be able to take advantage of the newly launched Apple Intelligence as well.
Apple has updated its SDKs with new APIs and frameworks. For example, developers can add the Image Playground experience, a GenAI image-creating feature to their app with just a few lines of code.
Apps like Craft could use Apple Intelligence to make users’ documents more visual by allowing them to add AI images. Furthermore, apps that use the standard editable text view will also be getting AI-powered writing tools automatically. For instance, an app like Bear Notes would automatically be able to allow users to rewrite, proofread, and summarize their notes.
Additionally, Apple is building more ways for developers to utilize its Apple Intelligence with Siri. Developers who already have adopted SiriKit, they’ll see immediate enhancements from many of Siri’s new capabilities without additional work. This includes areas like Notes, Media, Messaging, Payments, Lists, Restaurant Reservations, VoIP calling, and Workouts.
Apple is also investing deeply in the App Intent Framework to connect the vast world of apps with Apple Intelligence.
The Cupertino-based giant is defining new intents across its operating systems and making them available to developers starting with categories including Books, Browsers, Cameras, Document Readers, File Management Mail, Photos, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Whiteboards, and Word Processors.
These intents (prompts) are pre-defined, trained, and tested, so they’re easy for developers to adopt. Apps like Darkroom will be able to use the Apply Filter intent to give users the ability to say “Apply a cinematic preset to the photo I took of Ian yesterday.”
Not only that, Apple brings generative intelligence to Xcode for developing apps using Swift and SwiftUI with features like on-device completion and smart assistance for Swift coding questions.
Learn to Bring Machine Learning and AI Directly into Your Apps
Apple might be a bit late to join Generative AI, a class of AI to create new content by learning patterns from existing data. However, it has already been doing much more in the field of ML. The company may not have name-dropped “Artificial Intelligence” or AI meaningfully, but it hasn’t avoided it either.
But, speaking of Generative AI, Apple is now fully convinced of its transformative potential and hence has geared up for all the possible inventions.
Apple brings enhancements to its machine learning frameworks to let you build, train, and run your machine learning & AI models on Apple devices.
You can also learn to build ML apps and more with the help of our comprehensive Machine Learning course. The program is strategically co-created by FAANG+ instructors who are also active hiring managers at their respective companies. The course dives into Supervised and Unsupervised learnings to help you design video recommendation systems.
Also, if you are a tech professional who want to learn Generative AI then you must seek out our Applied GenAI course, a Generative AI course for everyone.
You can also take a dive deeper to pursue Advanced Generative AI to understand LLMs, diffusion models and more.
FAQs: Apple Intelligence Generative AI
Q1. What does Apple Intelligence do?
Apple Intelligence is Apple’s initiative in the Generative AI space. Apple Intelligence is a personal intelligence system for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that with the power of generative models can generate text and images. It integrates advanced AI features deeply into Apple’s ecosystem and harnesses the power of Apple silicon, all by emphasizing privacy.
Apple Intelligence performs most AI processes on-device to minimize the need for external server computations. However, during complex requests, when server power is required, it uses a secure “private cloud compute” method to protect user data.
Q2. What are the Key Features of Apple Intelligence?
Apple Intelligence can create language and images, take action across apps, and do text rewriting. What’s more interesting is, that it utilizes personal data from apps like Maps, Mail, and Messages to assist with scheduling, planning, and other tasks, providing a more tailored experience.
Siri is now also powered by Apple Intelligence. Developers can take advantage of pre-defined and pre-trained App Intents across a range of domains to give Siri the ability to take actions in your app.
Q3. Is Apple Intelligence just ChatGPT?
While Apple Intelligence does incorporate ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI, its functionality extends beyond just this generative AI tool. It has been built to offer a more comprehensive AI experience across Apple devices, compared to ChatGPT tool.
In its partnership with OpenAI, Apple clearly mentions that privacy protections are built in when accessing ChatGPT within Siri and writing tools. Requests are not stored by OpenAI and users’ IP addresses are obscured.
Q4. When can I use Apple Intelligence on my devices?
Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system from Apple is available only on a few select iPhone models, including iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
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