iOS 18 update to bring Generative AI features to iPhones

Google began using AI a long time ago to improve your smartphone experience. With AI services like GPT and Google’s Gemini finally reaching enough maturity levels for public use, many smartphone manufacturers began implementing AI for their software in 2023. This trend will continue in 2024. Apple is far behind on this, but the iOS 18 update will finally bring Generative AI features to iOS.

Tim Cook confirms this in an official Apple Financial Results Conference Call statement. We can take Tim Cook’s words as an official confirmation that iOS 18 will use Generative AI algorithms to bring new features and make iOS smarter. Siri is currently among the worst in terms of intelligence when it comes to Virtual Assistants.

Google’s Assistant is more intelligent and uses AI features to its full potential. From Tim Cook’s statement, we can assume that Apple will announce new features at WWDC 2024 in June. That’s a few months away, and many leaks suggest that iOS 18 will be the biggest update to iOS ever. It might even get a complete design language revamp. Some menus in iOS 17 look nothing like the traditional 2D-flat iOS design language.

While the WWDC announcements will reveal the new features, we must wait until September for the iPhone 16 lineup to ship with iOS 18 out of the box. We can expect other iPhones to get AI features with the update, though Apple might restrict some of them to the newer models with more powerful chips. How many features are on-device and offline, and how many are cloud-based is unclear.

Code from iOS 17.4 finds major improvements to Siri. Apple could use AI (Siri) to deliver something similar to the Summarize feature currently on Galaxy AI. Additionally, we might get intelligent reply suggestions for iMessage. Instant replies are part of it, and AI will probably autocomplete your sentences or help you frame your message. Samsung already does this, and Grammarly has been able to do this for years. This is an expected feature since one of iOS 17’s new features was better autocorrect, autocomplete, and sentence/ phrasal prediction.

Apple didn’t disclose which AI model they’ll use for this. There’s a chance that they have unannounced proprietary technology or AI models that we do not know of. Apple can use this and integrate AI within first-party apps like Apple Pages and Keynote. Many don’t use Apple Music because of the relatively worse recommendation algorithms. AI could change this.

Apple doesn’t exactly use the term “AI” in its marketing. They don’t advertise the Vision Pro as a “Virtual Reality” headset; they call it “Spatial Computing.” It’ll be interesting to see which term Apple will use for AI & ML.

This is the official statement from Tim Cook:

“In terms of generative AI, which, I’d guess, is your focus, we have a lot of work going on internally, as I’ve alluded to before. Our MO, if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves. And so, we’re going to hold that to this as well. But we’ve got some things that we are incredibly excited about that we’ll be talking about later this year.”