Apple wants you to love Apple Intelligence; what even is it?

After months of speculation, Apple officially introduced its Apple Intelligence platform during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024 in June. With companies like Google and OpenAI leading the charge in generative artificial intelligence (AI), many questioned whether the tech giant had missed an opportunity to innovate. However, Apple responded with its signature approach—integrating AI seamlessly into existing products rather than launching a standalone service.

Apple Intelligence is designed to enhance users' experience by operating behind the scenes within Apple's current apps and services. Unlike its competitors, the platform focuses on improving the functionality of apps like Mail, Messages, and Pages through advanced AI-powered tools, without the user needing to interact with an entirely new system.

A pragmatic take on AI

Rather than being a standalone product, Apple Intelligence works as an integrated platform, incorporating AI into everyday Apple services. This marks a deliberate decision to enhance user experience rather than deliver an entirely new tool. Apple is positioning Apple Intelligence as "AI for the rest of us," allowing users to benefit from AI's capabilities through familiar apps, while its advanced technology, driven by large language models (LLMs), works behind the scenes.

Apple's strategy is pragmatic, leveraging AI technologies like text and image generation to improve productivity and creative tasks. During its iPhone 16 event in September, the company showcased several new AI-powered features, including translation capabilities on the Apple Watch Series 10, improved visual search on iPhones, and enhanced Siri functionality.

New AI-powered features

Apple Intelligence introduces a range of features that streamline productivity across devices. The platform's text generation capabilities, powered by LLM, allow users to access tools like Writing Tools, which help with summarising, proofreading, and drafting text in apps such as Mail, Messages, and Pages. These tools adapt to user preferences, including tone and style, making the experience more personalised.

For image generation, Apple users can now create custom emojis, or "Genmojis," and use the Image Playground app to generate visual content via prompts. These images can be used across Apple's ecosystem, including Messages and Keynote, offering users more creative flexibility.

The platform also addresses long-standing issues with Siri, Apple's virtual assistant. Once a trailblazer, Siri had fallen behind its competitors in recent years. Now, Apple Intelligence enables Siri to work seamlessly across multiple apps, such as photo editing and messaging, improving the assistant's usability through real-time contextual awareness.

Release schedule and hardware compatibility

Apple Intelligence will be available in beta starting in October, with its initial rollout limited to the U.S. in English. Additional English-language support will expand to other regions, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K., by December. By 2025, Apple plans to extend support to other languages, including Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish.

The platform will be available on a range of Apple devices equipped with newer chipsets, including iPhone 15 Pro models and various iPads and Macs powered by M1 and M2 chips. Apple Intelligence's capabilities will be limited on devices with older hardware due to technical limitations, but it is expected that the upcoming iPhone 16 series will fully support the platform.

AI infrastructure and cloud integration

To deliver these advanced features, Apple is taking a bespoke approach to AI model training, creating in-house datasets tailored to specific tasks like email composition. This ensures that many tasks can be performed on-device, reducing the need for external processing. For more complex queries, Apple has introduced Private Cloud Compute, which utilises Apple Silicon-powered servers to maintain user privacy while processing data remotely.

Though Apple Intelligence is deeply integrated into Apple's ecosystem, the company has made provisions for collaboration with third-party AI platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT. This integration provides users with access to alternative tools for more specialised tasks, ensuring that the Apple ecosystem remains flexible and comprehensive.