Every year, Apple and Google announce innovations that bring new features to our phones: aesthetic changes to the home screen; enhanced privacy protections; messaging tools. This time, the changes will be more radical, because it’s about reinventing the smartphone through artificial intelligence.
At its annual conference on Monday, Apple unveiled a series of improvements coming this fall to iOS 18, the iPhone’s operating system. There will be a revamped version of its voice assistant, Siri, that’s easier to use, and an AI system that can generate images, summarize online articles and respond to texts and emails.
Apple’s announcement follows Google’s in May, which will put an AI system in Android that summarizes audio transcripts, sniffs out whether a phone call seems like a scam and helps students with homework.
AI technology is just arriving, we don’t know if it will appeal to the general public. The change that will have the most immediate effect is green bubble texting (sent to Android phones). The new iOS software will adopt a messaging standard that allows for higher-quality exchanges between the two rival platforms, solving a problem that is at least 10 years old.
Free iOS and Android updates are planned this fall. Here’s a preview.
Apple says it has completely overhauled Siri, its 13-year-old virtual assistant.
The assistant will soon be powered by Apple Intelligence, the Apple firm’s “big language model”, which combines probabilities and complex algorithms to guess the order of words, a bit like autocomplete on your phone. It’s a technology comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Apple says its system is more private than others because users’ data will remain on their iPhone.
The new Siri will be able to understand the context of a conversation and will allow users to speak to it more naturally. So we can say, “What’s the weather like in Santa Cruz? Oh wait, I meant San Francisco,” followed by “Schedule a coffee meeting tomorrow at 9.”
It will also be able to handle more complex tasks, such as searching for your driving license in your photo album and extracting the number to paste it into a form, Apple promises.
There will also be AI in the Mail and Notes writing apps. You can highlight a text to revise it or rewrite it in a different style. In the Safari web browser, you can also highlight articles to generate short summaries.
Apple partnered with OpenAI so Siri can use ChatGPT for tasks like creating a list of recipe ideas.
AI features will only be available on the latest and fastest iPhones, including the iPhone 15 Pro.
Only Google Pixel phones provide access to Google’s latest AI features; other Android devices are expected to be included later this year.
For a year, Google has allowed users to test Gemini, its new AI assistant, which requires downloading an application. (By default, Android phones still have Google Assistant, the virtual assistant similar to Amazon’s Alexa and the older version of Siri). Like ChatGPT, Gemini generates answers to questions.
A new version of Gemini, called Nano, handles AI tasks directly on Pixel phones without going through Google’s servers, for privacy reasons.
The “Circle to Search” feature allows you to circle an image to request information from Google. It has been expanded to allow students to circle a math or physics problem for help. Google’s AI generates steps to resolve the problem.
Gemini Nano can also generate a transcription of an audio recording and summarize it in writing, which could be useful at the end of meetings. Another tool, “Magic Compose,” in the Messages app can quickly rewrite a text message in a different style.
The old problem of green and blue bubbles will soon be a thing of the past. Text between two iPhones appears in blue and allows you to add emojis and animations. But between an iPhone and an Android, the bubble is green, many features are disabled and the quality of photos and videos deteriorates.
In iOS 18, the messaging application will run on the Rich Communication Services standard, already integrated by Google and others for several years. Text messages sent between iPhone and Android will remain green, but images and videos will be of higher quality.
This will make a difference. Many iPhone and Android users were reluctant to send messages to each other because the image quality was poor. The US Justice Department, which recently accused Apple of imposing restrictions on its phones to maintain a monopoly, considered the messaging incompatibility a tactic to encourage iPhone purchases.
