Apple introduces AI to its products at WWDC

Apple’s nearly two-hour-long Worldwide Developer Conference kick-off event was chock full of announcements.

By far the biggest news was Apple’s introduction of its own artificial intelligence model, Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence will be able to draw from users’ personal information on their devices to answer their questions, all in a privacy-conscious way.

Here are some of the highlights from today’s event, which also included operating system upgrades for the company’s various products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs and more.

Following the keynote, Tim Cook and other Apple executives participated in a Q&A to discuss privacy and security and why it decided to partner with OpenAI.

Cook once again emphasized that Apple is taking privacy and security very seriously with the rollout of the new technology.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, said the company chose to align with OpenAI to support the new tools because they’re best equipped to meet the needs of Apple’s customers at the moment.

As Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to its devices, the artificial intelligence company also introduced two new hires.

Sarah Friar, formerly the CEO of Nextdoor, is joining as chief financial officer. Kevin Weil is joining as chief product officer. Weil was most recently president, of product and business at Planet Labs, an earth imaging company.

The announcement comes after upheaval within its staff, such as the high-profile exit of an OpenAI executive focused on safety, Jan Leike, in May. OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever also said that he would leave the company.

A large screen shows Apple CEO Tim Cook during an announcement of new products on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif., today.

Apple shares (AAPL) ended the day down 1.9% on Monday, despite the highly anticipated artificial intelligence updates the company announced during WWDC.

The disappointing stock performance is a reminder of how Apple’s share price growth has lagged behind AI competitors over the past year, as rivals have moved more quickly to articulate an AI strategy.

Apple’s share price has grown just 5% compared to a year ago. By comparison, Microsoft shares are up nearly 29% compared to this time last year, Google shares have risen 42% and Nvidia shares have soared 208% year-over-year.

For the note-takers among us, Apple’s new AI features include the ability to record and transcribe audio. Those capabilities will be in Apple’s phone and notes apps, and when an Apple user starts to record a phone call, all the call participants will be notified automatically, Apple said. (The notifications are important because it can be illegal in some states to record calls without the consent of other participants.)

These features are similar to something that Google has supported for years in Google Voice, where voicemail and calls can be recorded and transcribed.

Monday’s keynote saw two big AI reveals from Apple: The unveiling of Apple Intelligence — the name for Apple’s proprietary suite of AI capabilities — as well as a partnership with OpenAI that will integrate ChatGPT into many Apple devices. Where does one end, and the other begin?

The key distinction appears to fall in the line between what Apple described as “world knowledge” and “personal context.” Where Apple Intelligence will excel is combining information about you and your relationships and using those insights to streamline your everyday workflows — calling up old photos from an event or helping you create stylized AI-generated images of your contacts. Much of the processing of this data will happen within the Apple ecosystem, either on your Apple device or in special cloud-based Apple servers.

By comparison, Apple’s integration with OpenAI will let you send specific queries about the wider world to ChatGPT. Apple said that while Apple Intelligence will understand a great deal about your personal life, other AI models — such as ChatGPT — may be better suited for responding to prompts related to more general information.

Any prompts to ChatGPT will be sent to the platform on an opt-in basis — users will have to make a conscious decision to do so. You’ll also be able to use ChatGPT to create documents from within some Apple apps.

From the sound of it, the partnership will simply create an easier way for Apple users to access ChatGPT rather than providing unique or distinct AI features to Apple devices. Notably, you’ll be able to use ChatGPT through Apple without creating a ChatGPT account, and any prompts sent to ChatGPT won’t be logged and your data won’t be stored, Apple said. The company added that it’s working on integrating other AI startups’ models, too.

So the two announcements could be seen as rather complementary.

The new “Apple Intelligence” addition to Apple products promises to clean up users’ writing. From class notes to blog posts to emails and cover letters — everything will be “perfectly crafted.”

The tool “Rewrite” produces different versions of what users have written so they can choose the one they like best. It also helps out with the tone of the writing to make it sound “more friendly, professional or concise.”

“Proofread” will focus on grammar, word choice and sentence structure.

The tools are present across apps.

By adding artificial intelligence features to Siri, Apple’s smart assistant will be able to do more, Apple said.

Those changes start with Siri’s language recognition capabilities, which can detect when users correct themselves mid-sentence. Users will also be able to write instructions to Siri by tapping twice at the bottom of their lock screen, allowing them to interact with Siri without actually using their physical voice to speak to the assistant out loud, such as by texting it to set an alarm.

Other examples of actions users will be able to do with Siri include asking it to add a certain photo to a draft email; directing Siri to send photos from a recent event to a specific contact; or to share a summary of meeting notes in an email to a colleague.

All of that is possible, Apple said, because Apple Intelligence grabs information about you from your photos, calendar events, files and messages — including PDFs of concert tickets and links shared by contacts.

It will also be able to search through your photos for information that you’re trying to put into an online form and add it for you, like taking the data from a photo of your driver’s license and automatically inserting it into a form.

Apple says most of the data processing for its new “Apple Intelligence” AI capabilities will be done directly on a user’s device, to protect that user’s data. The capability will mean Apple’s AI technology is “aware of your personal data without collecting your personal information,” according to the company.

In situations where more computing power is needed to address a user’s query, Apple has developed what it calls “private cloud computing,” where a user’s information may be sent to a secure server to be processed but it won’t be stored.

The security feature is important given Apple’s reputation for prioritizing privacy and because other companies’ AI tools have raised concerns about how user data might be used. Rivals, including OpenAI, have faced criticism for collecting the inputs to their tools in order to train their AI models.

The iPhone's new AI tools will let you create personalized, non-photorealistic AI-generated pictures of people.

Apple outlined a few ways AI will add more personalization to the iPhone experience.

For example, users will be able to create personalized photos, such as taking a picture of your mom and making it into a stylized, cartoon-y version, adding a superhero cape. It can take action across apps, including asking the software to pull up all photos of a family member, and retrieve and analyze data from across your apps, such as factoring in what’s on your screen like email or a calendar. 

If a meeting is being rescheduled, Apple Intelligence can process relevant personal data and see the email your kid sent days before about a recital, alerting users if there may be a conflict.

Apple said it is pushing its products into a new era with the introduction of what it’s calling “Apple Intelligence.”

The company said it’s been impressed with the generative AI tools already on the market, but wants to take this a step further by making it personalized for Apple users, with privacy in mind.

He added: “Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications, and more. And, of course, it has to be built with privacy, from the ground up.”

Apple announced a new iPad feature called “Smart Script” that will improve the appearance of your handwriting in notes in real-time. It can recreate your handwriting from your notes, so if you’re scribbling notes quickly, the software can clean them up in a way that still looks true to your style.

“It’s still your own writing, but it looks smoother, straighter and more legible,” an Apple executive said.

Users can also copy and paste text into a note, and it will appear in their handwriting. If you need to erase a few words, you can simply scribble through them with the Apple Pencil and they’ll disappear.

Apple showed off its latest MacOS software called Sequoia, with a handful of new games, productivity features and more. Here’s a snapshot of a few notable tools:

iPhone mirroring will bring iPhone alerts directly to the laptop that show up directly next to Mac notifications. 

MacOS will also support the ability to arrange windows open on screen in certain areas, such as side by side – a concept popularized by Microsoft Windows.

Video conferencing is getting a presenter preview, so users can see what they’re going to share before they share it. Apple is also introducing background replacements on calls, so users can hide the laundry behind them.

Apple announced its calculator app is coming to the iPad, creating the biggest audience reaction yet. (Yes, the iPad never had the Calculator app until now, in the month of June in the year 2024).

In addition to doing basic math through the app, users with an Apple Pencil can now take “math notes” to enable more complex math such as physics problems. For example, if you you write down a math problem with Apple Pencil, it will solve it for you.

Apple announced the release of iPad OS 18, which also includes the latest iOS features announced today, like new ways to personalize the home screen, customize control center and an updated Photos app.

IpadOS 18 also redesigned the Apple pencil and updated apps to work with the distinct capabilities of iPad. Users can expect to see a new floating tab bar for easier navigation and a different way of browsing through documents in apps like Pages and Keynote.

Apple’s WatchOS 11 will monitor your vitals even more closely, combining health aspects like heart rate, body temperature, and sleep to helpfully guess whether or not you’ve been doing things like drinking alcohol before going to bed.

Apple is also adding a training mode to track how intensity impacts workouts over time. The new tools blend weight and age to come up with an “effort rating” on the summary page, ranging from 1 (easy) to 10 (difficult). It also blends other metrics, such as workout duration, to let you know it’s opinion on if you’re training too hard or need to step it up a notch.

Users can also check in on your “vital” metrics, which provides more details on your overall health and notifying you when you may be getting sick. At the same time, the Health app’s ability to flag when heart rate is up will be more more supportive for people like pregnant users.

Apple’s share price (AAPL) has ticked downward as the WWDC progresses. Just over half an hour into the event, shares were down more than 1.5% from Monday’s opening price.

Shareholders may be disappointed by the lack of artificial intelligence-related announcements so far, given the anticipation about the technology ahead of the event. They may also be cluing in to some of the more tepid new features – color customization, for instance – that Apple has hyped in between more exciting announcements, such as the “Insight” feature for Apple TV+ that’s notably similar to an existing feature on Amazon Prime Video.

Apple is introducing a new feature to its TV app, adding “Insight,” which allows users to look up information about actors on screen with a swipe down on the remote. It will also display the song playing in the screen, and allow you the functionality of adding it to Apple Music.

AppleTV will also add vocal clarity through the feature of “enhanced dialogues,” which ensures that an actor’s dialogue will always cut through the noise and be audible.

Users can also get a theater-like experience with 21:9 format for projectors.

Screensavers will also allows users to choose what they want to view.

Apple is adding gesture support and “voice isolation” to its popular AirPods line.

The company said it will soon integrate more with Siri when wearing AirPods. For example, users can shake their head “yes” or “no” when a phone call comes through, if they don’t feel like talking out loud in a crowded elevator or a bus to a voice from an automated assistant that only you can hear.

Meanwhile, voice isolation will allow users on the other end of a call to hear better when someone is using AirPods in a noisy setting.

Apple users will be able to send and receive messages via satellite when they don’t have WiFi or cell connection.

It uses the same technology that powers emergency SOS via satellite.

The capability is available on iPhone 14 and newer models since, and powers all messages, emojis and tab backs.

iMessages sent over satellite are end-to-end encrypted, and also covers texts to non-Apple users.