Apple looks to catch Google and Microsoft in the AI space at WWDC this year

Microsoft and Google have been beating the artificial intelligence drum for a couple of years now while Apple has been content to reference machine learning as its alternative buzzword, that is, until its upcoming developer conference where the company seems set to have its own explosive AI showcase.

Late last year, Apple referred to its own testing and development of pre-generative and large language model platforms it planned to implement in its own products in the future. However, at the start of 2024, the company seemed to have accelerated its own internal timeline as it announced plans to partner with Google to leverage its burgeoning Gemini AI models as well as flirting with another separate collaboration with the industry leading LLM provider, OpenAI and its ChatGPT models.

With just a couple of weeks left before the company will need to sell its developers on how to add AI-led experiences similar to the competition, Apple reporter Mark Gurman has published a list of areas he believes AI will show up during the conference.

According to Gurman, Apple will seek to add OpenAI’s LLM models to Siri, the Photos app, system wide summarization, messaging, and voice transcriptions.

• Apple Photos: The Apple Photos app will gain further editing capabilities such as those found in the Samsung and Google Photos apps on Android. Presumably leveraging Apple’s already stellar machine learning with trained editing processes in OpenAI’s LLMs, images captured will already see faster and more intuitive processing, as well as offering users more robust post-capture editing tools.
• Summarization: LLMs will be used to help users gather summarizations of missed notifications, web content in Safari, text messages from iMessage, documents such as PDFs and Pages, as well as summation of emails and communications in the Email app.
• Messages: Since Apple will be using the same OpenAI LLMs as Microsoft, and similar ones to Google’s Gemini, the company will also find itself making use of them to do homogenous suggestions when drafting messages, emails, and texts.
• Siri: While Microsoft gave up on Cortana, and Google is being very intentional about keeping Google Assistant and Gemini separate conversations, Apple will use OpenAI to help Siri respond more naturally based on a larger language model preset. There is no word on how the interactions will functionally differ from what the assistant is capable of today.
• Voice transcriptions: Similar to Microsoft’s use of OpenAI models to implement real-time translation throughout Windows, Apple plans to use a similar model to help craft voice memo transcriptions across various supported languages.
• Custom Emojis: Apple continues its love of Emojis by embedding it with AI to allow users to create their own emojis based on the preceding content. This may be one of few areas where Apple can forge its own identity while joining the AI race relatively late.

While AI has yet to bear any concrete transformative results in users’ behaviors, the tech companies are betting big on the technology and Apple seems to be late to the game. However, it is much better position to leverage its user base to help alter AI and LLMs in favor of consumers rather than Microsoft which is aiming its Copilot AI at business and Google is busy figuring out the advertising angel to its Gemini AI.

Perhaps, at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference on June 10, 2024, the company will provide that silver-bullet user case that puts all of these recent AI efforts into focus for average consumers and helps lift the sails of an industry currently struggling with messaging this nascent user-focused push, as it has done time and time again.