Apple’s AI capabilities are about the bigger picture

This year, we’ve seen two approaches to AI in mobile technology: “AI isn’t your phone” and “AI that does random things on your phone.”

The “Not Your Phone” group includes devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin, two petite gadgets that aimed to make artificial intelligence more useful by building it into a smaller, simpler gadget. It didn’t go very well. Both devices had massive promises of helping us get things done without looking at our phone screens. None delivered.

It’s time for Apple, like Google and Microsoft before it, to announce a whole host of AI features at its annual developer conference today. But the current state of artificial intelligence in our phones is not impressive. “AI does random things on your phone” includes Google’s AI-generating tools like Magic Editor, Samsung Galaxy AI, and the like. At this point, it’s a collection of party tricks of varying quality, from “kinda helpful” to “doesn’t actually work” to “oh my God, no.” This is definitely not the bold modern future of mobile computing that we were promised.

The company that has come closest to showing us an AI feature that can actually save us some time is Microsoft. Last month at its developer conference, the company announced the discontinuation of its modern Copilot Plus computers, a feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your computer every few seconds so you can later search for them using artificial intelligence. I could employ it yesterday. But maybe it’s a good thing that Recall isn’t widely available yet; it appears there are earnest security concerns.

During today’s keynote, it will be Apple’s turn to make the case for artificial intelligence as our everyday assistant – and the signs so far are encouraging. Some of the rumors sound like things we’ve heard before, such as AI voice note transcripts and summaries, but recent reports point to features that have “broad appeal.” Siri would be a reasonable home for such things, and all signs point to a major update to the iOS virtual assistant. What’s most compelling is that Siri can do this do things on your phone for you. You know, the things virtual assistants have been promising to do for the last decade.

However, Apple must strike a balance to make this a reality. According to reports, the company does not yet have its own blockbuster LLM project ready to announce, so it will probably call a specialist: OpenAI. However, public trust in the company is not at an all-time high and Apple will have to reconcile its emphasis on privacy with the need to transfer data to the cloud. It may have some clever privacy solutions on hand, but it seems likely that the age of artificial intelligence may force Apple to rely more on third parties than it has preferred in the past.

As always, Apple has a massive advantage: control over both software and hardware. Theoretically, this is something Google has in its Pixel phones, but there’s only so much it can do with Android because it has to work for all the other members of the ecosystem as well. Google’s recent reorganization suggests it sees an advantage in having its hardware and software teams work more closely together, but for better or worse Apple has a massive advantage here. Even though the modern and improved Siri will initially only have access to Apple apps, there are still plenty of apps that many people employ every day.

One thing is clear: Apple, a company that was “late” to artificial intelligence, faces a gap in the market wide enough for a truck to drive through.