Today’s Mark Gurman report for Bloomberg reveals some details on the AI-powered iOS 18 features we are going to see during the WWDC keynote on Monday. The tech giant is bringing all the features under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella, which is a clever use of the AI acronym.
Apple’s main focus with those will be productivity and helping with everyday tasks so AI will be baked into many of Apple’s system apps. For instance, the AI can generate summaries of web pages in Safari or offer rich replies in Messages and Mail. The latter will also use an AI-powered algorithm to sort emails and make your inbox much tidier. And Messages will offer summaries for notifications.
The Photo app will have some advanced editing tools, including Apple’s version of the Smart Eraser tool in Google’s Photos app.
Huge improvements to Siri and Xcode for code compilation are also in the cards, but these features will probably launch publicly next year.
Apple won’t be all serious and no fun, though. Generative AI will generate emojis on the fly, depending on what you are writing. Users will then be able to use emojis that are beyond the Unicode consortium’s emoji list.
Apple will reportedly rely on on-device and cloud computing for some of its AI features. Gurman also confirms OpenAI’s involvement in some of iOS 18’s AI tools.
Cloud computing, however, can mean a breach of privacy. That’s why Apple is addressing the issue in multiple ways. It will use confidential computing design for data processing, it won’t build user profiles based on customer data, and it will inform the user of how the data will be used.