Report: Apple to launch iOS 18 AI features marketed as ‘Apple Intelligence’

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman today reports that Apple will launch its upcoming AI initiatives in iOS 18 and other operating systems under the brand name ‘Apple Intelligence’, which is obviously a convenient twist on the ‘AI’ acronym. The company will official announce the new plans at its WWDC keynote on Monday.

Rather than focus on writing poetry or making up images, the Apple Intelligence suite of features will use large language models to offer functionality that helps users throughout their daily life, with abilities like summarization and rich auto-reply suggestions.

You can expect Apple to demo features like AI generated notification summaries, or summaries of web pages in Safari. Apps like Messages and Mail will be able to create rich auto replies to conversations. Mail will also use AI to intelligently categorize incoming mail, to tidy up customers’ unread inboxes.

Generative AI will also power a new ’emoji creator’ feature, that can create new emoji icons that relate to what the user is typing. Bloomberg says the system can update on the fly as the user types out words in a text field. It will allow users to go far beyond the official set of emoji defined by the Unicode consortium.

The Photos app will gain new AI-infused photo editing features, similar to the Smart Eraser found in Google Pixel phones. Recordings made in Voice Memos will also be automatically transcribed.

Significant improvements to Siri and AI-powered code completion in Xcode are also in the works, but they might not be available publicly until next year.

Apple Intelligence will be powered by a combination of on-device and cloud server capabilities, depending on the task at hand. There’s also a partnership with OpenAI, to underpin certain functionality.

Relying on the cloud for AI flies in the face of some of Apple’s previous messaging around user privacy, but Apple has a plan to address these concerns. Firstly, its servers will use confidential computing designs to make the data processing as private as possible.

Bloomberg today says Apple also will not build user profiles based on customer data, and it will make new reports that explain to users how their data is protected. All of the new features are also expected to be opt-in. And on-device techniques will be employed, where possible.