Apple’s much anticipated new range of generative artificial intelligence tools for the iPhone and other devices have started to roll out to UK users for the first time, with one Apple executive saying it will be more than just “another chatbot”.
Initially rolled out in the US in October, Apple Intelligence is a range of AI-powered tools built directly into the iPhone, iPad and Mac and can help users quickly proofread, edit and rewrite texts and emails, provide summaries of large bodies of text, help organise, prioritise and summarise emails, and enable image editing, image creation and even the ability to generate new, original emoji.
The technology has also been used to carry out a substantial revamp of Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, which is now smarter, more able to understand and remember context to help with tasks across different apps, while Apple has also integrated ChatGPT to help with some requests that are more suited to the OpenAI chatbot.
Apple’s steady rollout of the tools comes after rivals Google and Samsung both launched their own AI features ranges earlier this year, and as generative AI chatbots – including ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot among others – have continued to become more prominent in daily life.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, told the PA news agency that the iPhone maker’s slower, steadier approach had been an intentional step for the tech giant.
“As we approached the feature set, we didn’t feel the world needed another chatbot. Those exist and the people in that field were doing a good job with that,” he said.
“We wanted to approach it in the way Apple should approach it for our users; how do we take this incredible new technology and how do we integrate it into our products and not make it a destination for our users to have to say, now go open the Apple Intelligence app.
“Instead, what we want to do is integrate the experience and meet customers where they were and present itself where it made sense as a feature, and a capability that made your products better without you having to understand this brave new world of generative AI.
“That isn’t something people should have to even think about.”
He pointed to the company’s history of not always being the first to introduce something as a key part of its thinking when it came to generative AI as well, saying the firm wanted to “humanise” the trend of generative AI into simple features users could understand without having to know exactly how the technology worked in order to get the most out of it.
“We don’t want people to have to have learn some new arcane language,” he told PA.
“The idea is that it’s going to help you with the features and the apps you’re using today, and the things you want to do, to do them faster, and this is what Apple does, right?”
“We take complicated, highly technical things and we make them easy to use for people, and powerful and fun to use.
“One reason people love their iPhones is because it’s fun to use. There were smartphones that existed before the iPhone, they just weren’t very good, they weren’t fun to use. They weren’t as powerful and the iPhone changed phones forever and changed people’s lives, because people love using their iPhone and that’s what we look at with anything: this is both an opportunity and a responsibility.
“To do that, to humanise these things, to make them intuitive, to make them powerful in your everyday life – not just for the high-end power users or those sophisticated enough to learn prompt language and can do powerful things, but – you heard us say it at our developers conference in June, this is ‘AI for the rest of us’.
“It’s the ability for all of us to take advantage of this without having to learn some new language.”
However, despite the high-profile rollout, users in the European Union are still not clear on when they could or will receive Apple Intelligence, as Apple is yet to confirm any launch date because of issues in the EU with new competition laws.
Privacy and user safety have also been a key issue as the AI boom has continued, and it is an area in which Apple is also trying to differentiate itself from its rivals.
Apple Intelligence includes a feature called Private Cloud Compute, where, in the instance that a request is too complex to be completed on-device, the necessary data, while still protected, is sent to ringfenced, Apple-powered servers to be completed and sent back to the user’s device without a data trail.
Apple Intelligence users will also be alerted each time Apple refers a prompt to ChatGPT, and users can opt not to complete the request if they so wish.
Mr Joswiak said this approach was not only unique, but necessary as it was a topic users were concerned about.
“I think it’s good for the world, the fact that we have approached it differently,” he said.
“The products that we sell, like iPhones, iPads and Macs, those are the products – that’s what we’re making our money on – but for a lot of companies, you’re the product.
“It’s information and data that they can accumulate about you to target you for advertising or build a profile to sell to a data broker. It’s their business model.
“That’s not us, and so we go way out of our way to build in protections so that what you do on your device is private, just to you.
“(For Apple Intelligence) We do so much on device, the lion’s share, but on occasion, you need to go to a more sophisticated model, and this is where true innovation comes in, because no one has done this in a way that we have, to take those protections on your iPhone and extend them into the cloud. No one has done that.
“I don’t think anybody has the motivation or the innovation in this area to do the things that we’re doing to protect customers’ privacy, and it’s a big deal to customers, people are worried about this stuff, understandably, and we want to protect that.”
