Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Apple finally entered the AI race at last year’s Worldwide Developer Conference when it revealed Apple Intelligence. However, some of the biggest updates announced at WWDC 2024 — such as a new and improved Siri and an AI that’s aware of your personal context from your daily phone use — have yet to deploy, leaving users frustrated. Still, I think there is hope.
Apple has done a lot well with the limited features it has shipped — and offered a promising glimpse of what’s to come. For example, many of the new features — including Genmoji, voice memo transcriptions, and photo clean-up — are useful and easy to access, while also not being forcefully pushed to iOS users.
Also: Forget Siri: Apple Intelligence’s true potential on iPad and Mac lies in third-party apps
Most importantly, Apple’s A18 chip provides the iPhone 16 models with the infrastructure and compute necessary for Apple to support more compute-heavy AI features, while keeping Apple’s promise of on-device processing that can preserve your information’s privacy and security. Although the full Apple Intelligence suite of tools has yet to be revealed, the foundation is there.
Here are three features that would make me a believer in Apple Intelligence.
1. A more Siri-ous voice assistant
While Siri has a new look, with the screen glow showing up every time it’s activated and a new way to interact with the AI via text, it’s still trailing behind most AI voice assistants.
The biggest perk of conversational chat with a voice assistant is having it provide you — almost instantly — with feedback on anything you may be thinking of, from simple tasks such as the weather and notifications to more complex ones such as advice and math problems. Siri doesn’t yet have the knowledge or intelligence to support this breadth of assistance.
The actions it can perform for you are still pretty limited, and the more advanced conversational prompts require a reliance on ChatGPT. Because ChatGPT is a third-party application, there’s a time lag when sending the message to the chatbot and then Siri answering. There’s room for Apple to remove some reliance on ChatGPT and give its own assistant some TLC so that it can do more both in terms of knowledge and actions, which leads me to the next point.
2. Go all in on agentic AI
Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Agentic AI, which takes AI assistance one step further by taking actions on your behalf to carry out a task with minimal intervention, has been the biggest AI trend since last year’s WWDC. Interestingly enough, at WWDC 2024, before AI agents were all the buzz, Apple said that Apple Intelligence would be able to carry out tasks on your behalf, such as “Pull the files that my coworker shared with me last week.”
While last year it was a really cutting-edge feature, to keep up, this year, it is especially necessary to roll these features out as quickly as possible to keep up and provide that extra something users are looking for.
Also: What are AI agents? How to access a team of personalized assistants
Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic all held their annual developer conferences last week, and all of them unveiled agentic AI products. Apple Intelligence was originally poised as a “personal assistant,” and I think adding this agentic functionality can bring it a step closer to that reality.
3. Timing, timing, timing
The concept of Apple Intelligence being grounded in your personal information and context, retrieving data from across your apps, and referencing the content on your screen was a unique and helpful approach to implementing AI into an ecosystem of phones. While it would be amazing if Apple could ship this feature promptly, it is a relatively complex undertaking. I foresee further delays.
In the meantime, Apple could announce another unique feature that is less of an undertaking, such as the rumored revamped Health app that features an AI agent meant to replicate the insights a doctor can give patients based on their biometric data. Key to the success of any new feature Apple announces is that it needs to be ready to ship to restore user confidence lost due to the extended waiting period.
Also: Apple’s AI doctor will be ready to see you next spring
A combination of the features above would also help give users who only purchase a new phone with the A18 chip for Apple Intelligence a return on their investment beyond the phone’s basic functionalities.
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