Apple Intelligence has been off to a rocky start, especially when it comes to Siri. The assistant still has a lot to be desired, and that should definitely be at the forefront of Apple’s priorities.
Regardless, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple plans on expanding current Apple Intelligence capabilities to additional apps in iOS 19, and I figured I’d throw out some ideas I’d like to see.
Summaries in more places
I think providing summaries is probably one of the better use cases of on-device large language models. Apple introduced notification summaries in iOS 18, and while there were some major inaccuracies early on, things seem to be mostly fine. Apple recently enabled Apple Intelligence on compatible devices by default, rather than making it an opt-in feature.
For one, I think it’d be neat if there were an API for developers to use summarization models in their apps. I’m sure Apple would put strict guardrails on it, but allowing third-parties to utilize Apple’s summarization models would be a big win. It’d empower indie developers to create AI features without having to worry about an OpenAI bill.
On top of that, I’d really like to see some summarization improvements in the Messages app, particularly in group chats. If you missed out on a 100-message conversation, Apple should provide a more detailed summary than what can fit within two lines.
Or, say you’re a student – imagine being able to summarize the notes you took in a class after the fact. You’d still need to read the notes to get a thorough understanding, but a note summary could serve as a great way to jog your memory if you’re quickly trying to recall something.
Genmoji for everyone
Genmoji is probably one of the most popular Apple Intelligence features unveiled at WWDC24. Unfortunately though, it’s only available on some of the most recent iPhone models: iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max, iPhone 16e, iPhone 16/16 Plus, and iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max.
If you have anything older, including the one-year-old iPhone 15, you can’t use Genmoji.
I don’t expect Apple to make its models run locally on less capable hardware, as nice as that would be. However, they did announce Private Cloud Compute – a private server for handling Apple Intelligence requests in the cloud.
Those servers were likely low capacity when they just begun rolling them out, but it’ll have been over a year since the rollout begun by the time iOS 19 releases to the public.
While I don’t expect Apple to give out Private Cloud Compute usage for free, I think it’d be pretty neat if they bundled Genmoji in iCloud+ subscriptions for users with older devices – giving people a taste of what Apple Intelligence offers.
More customizable focus modes
One of my favorite features in iOS 18 has been the new Reduce Interruptions focus mode. In short, it analyzes every notification that comes through, and only presents what it thinks is important. The rest just stay in notification center.
Top comment by Blurft
Summaries in more situations sounds useful, but only insofar as it's an accurate summary of what occurred. Apple has already shown that their models struggle to parse and summarize information accurately.
The problem with rolling out these LLMs as early as companies did is that the vast majority of consumers will remember their first impressions - ChatGPT not knowing how many times the letter "r" appears in "strawberry," Google telling users to put glue on pizza or eat pebbles, and Apple rewriting a headline to say that Luigi Mangione shot himself. I have personally seen Apple summaries misrepresent the contents of chat groups that I'm a part of, and I'm not sure that giving it more than two lines to provide a summary is actually going to make it more accurate.
We need significant improvements in simulated critical thinking before anyone should trust these "summaries."
I'm not opposed to useful, reliable applications of these technologies, but we need to stop pretending that the current crop are more capable than they really are. I understand that it's exciting to believe that we're in the era of "artificial intelligence," but we're not. Step back and realize that this is just another hype cycle.
I’d really like to see Apple offer additional granularity here. For example, you could configure a focus mode that only triggers on key words that you set up. I could also see the inverse being useful, where you’d normally allow an app to notify you, but you’d like notifications with matching key words to be muted.
That’s just scratching the surface, but I really think there could be a lot of opportunity for AI to enable more granular notification management. The new “Reduce Interruptions” focus is just the start.
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