Apple's AI Evolution: Built-in AI, Supercharged Siri, and Ecosystem Lock-in

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Apple kicked off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) yesterday with three major evolutions in how artificial intelligence will improve its platform:

Built-in AI: Apple will use a privacy-first, on-device approach to AI to inject magical new capabilities into its existing software.
Supercharged Siri: The voice assistant Siri is becoming the meta-layer of software, coordinating workflows and reducing the time you spend in applications.
Ecosystem evolution: Each of Apple’s devices—iPhone, iPad, Mac—works in concert with the other, making the sum greater than the parts.

Each of these elements is exciting on its own and, if the technology continues to deliver, will be a genuine improvement on how we work and live. For centuries, new technology has automated an increasing amount of the physical labor we previously did. It is time for it to do the same for mental labor, too. Soon, you won’t need to navigate to a website or app to experience generative AI—it’ll be built into everything you do on your smartphone and computer.

Mathematical magic (built-in AI)

The most impressive application of the day was the iPad calculator app. The company had previously promised not to make one for the iPad until it could “do something distinctly great.” It was a 14-year wait, but boy, did Apple deliver.

Source: Apple.

The calculator is familiar to the form on your iPhone, sprinkled with touches of AI. You can write out mathematical expressions with the Apple pencil, and as soon as you write an equals sign, the calculator will solve it for you—in your own handwriting. It can create graphs in real time and adjust the output as you update the variables in the equations making the graph. It is beautiful and intuitive, the demon horror spawn of a math teacher’s nightmares—and it is all powered by AI calculated on-device. (It apparently drew the loudest cheers of the day).

Beyond that one app, Apple demonstrated numerous instances of machine-learning capabilities enhancing native existing applications and hardware. Photos can now do semantic search with contacts. So I could type, “Morgan hugging Maple in front of a tree,” and the Photos app will pull up a picture of my wife with my puppy playing in front of an Eastern white pine. iMessage can generate custom emoji using image-generation models. Apple Watch can use machine learning to analyze the effort you put into a workout. The phone app can record and transcribe conversations—a boon for writers everywhere. I can do this all day—and name startups that these features kill.

The main takeaway is that the primary capabilities of generative AI—such as finding data in large data sets, semantic understanding, and image generation—are coming to all of your iPhone apps.

Arnold Schwarzenegger voice I’ll be automated (supercharged Siri)

I’ve been arguing for a while now that the ultimate form of AI in software is as a "meta-layer" that automates your repetitive tasks that span multiple applications. As such, I am grateful to the good folks at Apple for proving me right. Siri is exactly what I said it would be.The AI update to Siri means that you can do all the things you want it to do. One example Apple shared in the presentation was the query, “What time does Mom land?” Siri can search your messages from Mom for when she shared her flight number, look up its progress, and tell you the updated arrival time. Siri can also manage notifications, emails, and messages, summarizing long messages and surfacing the most important information.