Apple announced plans to integrate AI into Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant that comes with its iPhones. The new system, launching in September, is called Apple Intelligence, and will use generative models to aid users with everyday tasks. While many tech companies have promised life-changing AI tools, the reality leaves a lot to be desired. Will Apple’s update be truly helpful, or is this a ploy to sell more products?
“You can see how they're positioning this — that the Apple AI features are supposed to be useful and narrowly tailored to things that you already do, but make them easier,” says Shira Ovide, writer of The Tech Friend newsletter at The Washington Post.
Those tasks include generating original emojis, automatically providing directions, plus proofreading and summarizing text found in Mail, Notes, and other third-party apps. To do so, Ovide says it appears Apple has rebuilt Siri from scratch.
Ovide says the new tech falls in line with Apple’s long-time goal of making Siri a personal, digital assistant. “The promise of those digital assistants has never been fulfilled. … It is very difficult for all kinds of technical and business reasons for AI to be able to do multiple steps that involve multiple kinds of apps.”
She adds, “It's not quite there yet in the way that Apple and other companies describe. And the companies have really been over-promising the capabilities of their AI for the past 18 months.”
Where does Apple Intelligence stand in the greater tech field? Ovide says the company is hedging its bets, in comparison to Meta, Google, and Microsoft: “Apple is really limiting its AI to only knowledge and information about what's happening on your phone, or on your Mac, and in your Apple services. It's much more narrowly tailored than the all-knowing, in theory, chatbots from Meta or Microsoft or Google.”