On the early morning of June 11th Beijing time, the annual Apple World Developers Conference (WWDC 24) officially began. Unlike the autumn launch event that focuses on hardware products, each year's WWDC focuses more on the software aspect, and artificial intelligence is the most concerning topic for the outside world, so Apple naturally lives up to expectations.
In the words of Apple CEO Cook, "this is the unique AI developed by Apple," which is different from the commonly referred to Artificial Intelligence in artificial intelligence. Apple's annotation of AI is "Apple Intelligence," which means "Apple Intelligence.".
In the demonstration, Apple will combine generative AI with personal usage scenarios to achieve intelligent functionality, which means embedding AI into various tools. For example, writing tools such as iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia come with a new tool called Writing Tools that can be called across the entire system, allowing users to rewrite, proofread, and edit text in almost any scenario, including emails, memos, Pages, and various third-party apps.
Image Playground allows users to create interesting images in seconds, with three styles to choose from: animation, illustration, and hand drawn. This feature is directly built into multiple apps such as messaging, and can also be installed and used as a separate app. All images are created and generated on the device side. Emoji has evolved into Genmoji, where users only need to input descriptive text to generate corresponding Genmoji, along with several additional options. They can also directly generate Genmoji from photos of family and friends.
Siri, long complained about by users, has also become "smarter". With Apple Intelligence, Siri can accurately understand users' demands, simplify and speed up daily task processes, provide device support for users, and answer thousands of questions about how to use iPhone, iPad and Mac. Including completing hundreds of new operations in various Apple and third-party apps, such as executing "retrieve the article about XX from my reading list" or "send the barbecue photos on Saturday and that day to XXX"; And achieve intelligence based entirely on user personal and device information. For example, when a user asks, "What time does my mother's plane land?" Siri will check the flight details on its own, and then cross compare it with the real-time flight trajectory to provide the arrival time.
OpenAI's ChatGPT will also be integrated into the Apple full platform operating experience of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, allowing users to directly use ChatGPT's special features, including its ability to understand images and documents, saving them the hassle of switching back and forth between different tools. Siri can directly call the special functions of ChatGPT as needed. It will first obtain the user's consent before sending their questions to ChatGPT, along with any documents or photos, and finally respond directly to the user.
The collaboration with OpenAI did not come as much surprise to the outside world. Prior to the official opening of the Global Developers Conference, news of the upcoming collaboration between the two companies had already spread widely, and Apple had clearly stated that ChatGPT would not be the only partner for the collaboration.
Apple Intelligence is available for free to users, but it will take several months before users can truly use it. According to Apple's official schedule, the beta version will be launched this autumn as a built-in feature for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, only supporting English (in the United States). Some features, software platforms, and other language support will be gradually released next year.
Most Apple loyal users may also find it difficult to use "Apple Intelligence", as Apple Intelligence will only support iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac devices equipped with M1 or later chips, requiring Siri and device language to be set to English (US).
From the perspective of stock price performance, this mediocre press conference did not bring much surprise. On June 11th, Apple fell more than 2% during trading and closed down 1.91%.