“Siri, what will AI in our smartphones do for us?”

Since GenAI burst out of the lab and into the general consciousness, it seems that everyone has been speculating about when Apple might join the party – me included.

My own AI experience with an iPhone to date has been a little clumsy. Like many other people, I still find Siri weak when it comes to voice commands, which might admittedly be something to do with my unusual blend of second-language English, French and German, as well as my native Dutch. All I know is that when I’m sitting in the car and want to call my brother, Gijs (good luck with that one if you are not from the Netherlands), or anyone else whose name is difficult to pronounce in English, it struggles. I know, first-world, northern European problems.

I have also been exploring AI in a few other ways. One of the main tools I’ve been using is GoatChat , a chatbot platform that allows you to interact with various AI models. Despite the funny name, it’s actually pretty powerful. Essentially, I would characterize it as an intelligent search engine. Instead of getting responses from more than 40 websites when I want to know what the snow levels are in Switzerland (something I search for more often than I should probably admit), it makes a serious attempt to filter these, and seems to understand my sometimes weird Anglo-Dutch questions – so extra points there.

I also use PhotoPrism , which helps you tag and find pictures automatically – taking out any duplicates (I can’t be the only one with thousands of these). Finally, I use DeepL , which I think is a brilliant translator service. Very useful generally, and especially when my wife reverts to her own Swedish language.

While all these features are great, the thing that is lacking is a way of bringing lots of AI capabilities together in one place, so we don’t all end up with a thousand AI apps on our phones. Let’s face it: as tech gets cleverer, it also has a tendency to become more complicated, something I wrote about in a previous post .

This is what makes the launch of Apple Intelligence interesting, in my view. Rather than trying to build a massive proprietary AI infrastructure, or replace the huge large language models already out there, it has been designed to start by doing tasks for you. Siri’s capabilities are set to expand, ranging across apps like your photos, calendar, music and so on to find information that is uniquely useful to you, wherever it is enabled.

Apple Intelligence will also tell you how to make the most out of your phone’s latest features, which I think is something many manufacturers have fallen down on in the past. Finally, it will include free access to ChatGPT and might use other LLMs in future, although my guess would be that Apple is really placing its bets on people getting most of what they need from its own system, on their own devices, using their own information.

Of course, the big question for many people when it comes to AI systems is how to maintain privacy. This is something Apple has traditionally been very good at, and it promises that users’ information will mostly be kept within its own domains and data centers. Those using the ChatGPT functionality will also have to consent to each query, a potentially tiresome feature that The Economist referred to as ChatGDPR ??.

As well as becoming a much more intelligent search tool, I think a big opportunity for Siri will be sifting through photos and video files efficiently, the way PhotoPrism does. We all know that awkward moment when you try to show a picture of your dog to a friend, and then spend the next five minutes in silence as you frantically scroll through your library trying to find a funny one.

As for the challenges, one is definitely improving voice recognition beyond “standard” English, to my earlier point. Another will be developing the ability to sift material that is not inside Apple’s “walled garden” – like my 9966 unread emails sitting across five mailboxes…

Finally, I’m really interested in whether an AI calendar could help me organize my schedule better, a perennial headache. Should I ask Siri about it, or am I better off waiting for the next upgrade?

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Photo credit: Prykhodov, iStock