Monday marked the kickoff of WWDC 2024, the annual event where Apple unveils some of the major features coming to its devices, apps, and software. And this year's WWDC was awesome: Thanks to Apple's big new investment in generative AI tech, the company had a ton to show off in the AI space, from an upgraded Siri to AI-generated emojis.
Apple announced a deal with OpenAI to bring the company's AI-powered chatbot experience ChatGPT to a range of its devices, introduced new photo editing tools to remove objects and people from photos, and also introduced AI capabilities to proofread, rewrite and summarize text across content, including email notes.
Here's a roundup of some of the notable Apple AI announcements from WWDC 2024.
New Siri
Siri has undergone a major transformation thanks to a comprehensive generative AI that Apple has been pushing this year called Apple Intelligence.
Thanks to Apple Intelligence, Siri has a fresh look with new icons and indicator lights on the edge of your device's screen, and now handles speech stumbling, understands context better, and lets you type to Siri to help answer questions about how to use your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Image credit: Apple
Soon, Siri will become even smarter, with screen recognition and the ability to perform actions within and across apps. For example, you can ask Siri to “highlight this photo,” then ask it to “add this photo” to another app. During Monday's WWDC keynote, Apple gave an example of Siri finding a photo of your driver's license, extracting the ID number, and entering it into a web form.
To take advantage of the new Siri, you'll need an Apple device that supports Apple Intelligence, specifically an iPhone 15 Pro and a device with an M1 or later chip.
ChatGPT Integration
Apple will bring ChatGPT to Siri and other first-party apps, as well as features across the operating system.
According to Apple, Siri users will soon be able to forward questions to ChatGPT for potentially helpful “expertise.” When asking ChatGPT questions via Siri, you can include photos and ask questions related to documents or PDFs.
Image credit: Apple
Apple has also integrated ChatGPT into tools across the OS, such as Writing Tools (powered by Apple Intelligence), which allows you to use ChatGPT to create content (including images) or ask for your initial ideas and send them to ChatGPT to receive revisions and variations.
According to Apple, ChatGPT integration will be coming to iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia later this year and will be available for free without the need to create a ChatGPT or OpenAI account. Initially, it will feature GPT-4o, OpenAI's recently announced flagship generative AI model.
Genmoji and Image Playground
Coming soon to iOS 18 on devices that support Apple Intelligence, Genmoji lets you create an AI-emoji-like image of someone in your photo library, or a custom emoji. According to Apple, Genmoji can be used as a sticker to react to messages with Tapback, or inline in messages.
Another new image generation feature lets iPhone users create AI images of people they're messaging with. Apple says that Apple Intelligence knows who you're chatting with, so if you want to personalize your chats with custom AI images, you can do so on the fly.
Image credit: Apple
There's also Image Playground, a new image generation feature that works in apps like Notes, Freeform, Keynote, and Pages.
Available as a standalone app and an API for developers, Image Playground allows users to create images using concepts like theme, outfit, accessories, location, etc. After selecting the theme you want to include, Image Playground will create a preview of your image within minutes.
AI Photo Editing
Apple's new Clean Up tool built into the upgraded Photos app removes unwanted people and objects from photos.
Clean Up works on any photo in the Photos app. Just circle or highlight the object or person you want to remove. Clean Up will then use AI to remove the selected element and replace it with context-aware pixels to make it look like the object or person was never there in the first place.
Image credit: Apple
When it comes to photos, AI just got better at organizing them. In iOS 18, the Photos app will show you collections of your photos that are automatically organized by topics, like time, people, favorite memories, and travel. You can also search for photos using more specific terms.
Transcripted Calls
On iPhone 15 Pro and newer models, iOS will give you the option to record and transcribe phone calls.
The feature, which has to be enabled manually, notifies the other party that the call is being recorded to avoid violating privacy laws, transcribes what was said during the call, and displays a summary of the key points discussed in the iOS Notes app.
During its keynote address on Monday, Apple said (no pun intended) that you can also record and transcribe audio from within the Notes app.