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Have to say, I was thoroughly impressed by what Apple showed today with all this Personal AI stuff. And it proves that the real power of consumer AI will be in

Have to say, I was thoroughly impressed by what Apple showed today with all this Personal AI stuff. And it proves that the real power of consumer AI will be in the hands of the platform owners where you have most of your digital life in already (Apple or Google for messaging, mail, photos, apps; Microsoft for work and/or life). The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations or asking about someone’s flight is so useful (can’t tell you how many times my brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup!). I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem. Nevermind all the thought put into private cloud, integration with ChatGPT, the image generation playground, and Genmoji. I can genuinely see all this being useful for “the rest of us,” to quote Craig. As someone who’s taken a pessimistic view of Apple software innovation the last several years, I’m amazed. One caveat: the image generation of real people was super uncanny and made me uncomfortable. I would not be happy to receive one of those cold and impersonal, low-effort images as a birthday wish.

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
>The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails I did not see the announcement. Can Siri also send emails? If so then won't this (like Gemini) be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks? Edit: Supposedly Gemini does not actually send the emails; maybe Apple is doing the same thing?
- dudus 2y ago
  It doesn't look like it does. It seems to only write the email for you but not send. At least yet.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  It just writes the content, it doesn't actually send anything. We'll find out later if there's an API to do something like that at all or are external communications always behind some hard limit that requires explicit user interaction.
b33j0r 2y ago
I will believe it when siri isn’t the stupidest decade old idea ever. I’m sorry if I sound anything but snarky, but they have had Star Trek abilities this whole time, nerfed for “safety” and platform product integrity —from my iPhone
tonyabracadabra 2y ago
The image generation is dalle 2.5 level and feels really greasy to me, beyond that I think the overall launch is pretty good! I also congratulate rabbit r1 for their timely release months before WWDC https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb
- wwalexander 2y ago
  Yeah, the image generation felt really…cheap?…tasteless? but everything else was really impressive.
  - tonyabracadabra 2y ago
    I think that basically stretched the limit of what local model can achieve today, which also makes their image API almost useless for any serious generative art developers.
    - foolofat00k 2y ago
      Fwiw I don't think "serious generative art developers" are the target audience at this point, that's probably on the order of .01% of their users
  - mholm 2y ago
    Personalization really feels like the missing link here. The images it creates are highly contextual, which increases their value dramatically. Nobody on Reddit wants to see the AI generated T. rex with a tutu on a surfboard, but in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer. The image AI can even use photos to learn who a person is. That opens up a ton of cool ways to communicate with friends
    - chockablock 2y ago
      > in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer. Maybe, but this class of jokes/riffs is going to get old, fast.
paganel 2y ago
> but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. No-one is hitting anything out of the park, this is just Apple the company realising that they're falling behind and trying to desperately attach themselves to the AI train. Doesn't matter if in so doing they're validating a company run by basically a swindler (I'm talking about the current OpenAI and Sam Altman), the Apple shareholders must be kept happy.
- kcplate 2y ago
  > No-one is hitting anything out of the park I kind of feel like their walled garden and ecosystem might just have created the perfect environment for an AI integrated directly to the platform to be really useful. I’m encouraged, but I am already a fan of the ecosystem…
Jayakumark 2y ago
Google is doing this as well but they are doing it on single app like gmail assuming all info is there and also across websites with agents but not cross apps like apple is doing across mails, messages, maps etc.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  100%. Based on what I've seen so far, unified context is king. Which at the backend means unifying necessary data from different product silos, into organized and usable sources.
- cchance 2y ago
  Not to mention tied into their underlying SDK API that basically the whole system is based on, and seems they are using those same API's for the internal integrations so they can feel whats missing themselves as well.
richardw 2y ago
I’ve been waiting for Apple to arrive. They bring so much polish and taste. Two features I really want: “Position the cursor at the beginning of the word ‘usability’” “Stop auto suggesting that word. I never use it, ever”
- teh_infallible 2y ago
  Apple auto suggest can be ducking annoying
- RheingoldRiver 2y ago
  legitimately good voice recognition would probably be the "killer feature" to get me to switch from android to iOS after all this time. I'm so frustrated with the current state of voice recognition in android keyboards, but ChatGPT's recent update is amazing at voice recognition. I type primarily by voice transcribing and I would be so happy if I could go from 70% voice 30% I need to type to 95% voice 5% I need to type.
Hippocrates 2y ago
The AI/Cartoony person being sent as a birthday wish was super cringey, like something my boomer father would send me. I'm a fan of genmoji. That looks fun. Less a fan of generated clip art and "images for the sake of having an image here", and way, way less into this "here, I made a cornball image of you from other images of you that I have" feature. It's as lame as Animoji but as creepy as deepfakes.
- wwalexander 2y ago
  Yeah, the genmoji feel like a proper Apple feature, but the full images feel cheap and pointless.
  - cchance 2y ago
    LOL you haven't been in group chats with idiot drunk friends apparently shit like that kills, i had a friend who hates iphones, i sent a dozen bing ai images of him as a cartoon doing... things... to the phone... entire chat was dieing for days.
- jnaina 2y ago
  Aimed at a different demographics. Peepaw and Meemaw are absolutely going to love it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
discordance 2y ago
In the context of off-device processing, it's worth keeping in mind that US surveillance laws have recently expanded in their scope and reach: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-government-surveillance-senate https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...
- ENGNR 2y ago
  For this reason, I really hope we can self-host our "private cloud" for use with apple devices. That would truly, properly allow end to end privacy. I don't trust Apple given the legislation you've just linked to, both claims obviously can't be correct.
  - doug_durham 2y ago
    Only a diminishingly small percentage of users have the ability to do this properly. I have 40 years of development experience and I don't trust my self to set up and properly run these types of servers.
    - ENGNR 2y ago
      Fair, but we could conceivably have an ecosystem of providers, like ProtonMail or whoever the user feels comfortable with. If it's just Apple we're headed for honeypot
brundolf 2y ago
An interesting consequence: I started to think about how I'll be incentivized to take more pictures of useful information, and might even try setting up a Proton Mail proxy so I can use the iOS Email app and give Siri more context
- krrrh 2y ago
  I’m curious if simply running the proton mail bridge on a Mac at home would allow the native mail app feed “semantic” context across devices to iOS.
  - brundolf 2y ago
    The native mail app would have my full inbox, so it could (presumably) do whatever local analysis it would do with a normal email account
tomcam 2y ago
I’ll be thoroughly impressed when Siri learns my wife’s name for good. Yes, I trained it, but somehow the lesson was forgotten.
- eppsilon 2y ago
  You can set a relationship type in her contact card. I think Siri uses that data.
- BoringTimesGang 2y ago
  Ah, you mean my good friend 'heart emoji wife heart emoji'
nox101 2y ago
I have no confidence this will work as intended. The last MacOS upgrade had the horrible UX of guessing which emoji you want and being wrong 95% of the time. I don't expect this to be any better. Demos are scripted. I also expect it to fail miserably on names (places, restaurants, train stations, people), people that are bilingual, non-English, people with strong accents from English not being their first language, etc.
everdrive 2y ago
Do you think Apple could develop an AI so powerful that it would allow me to uninstall Siri from my iPhone?
- citizen_friend 2y ago
  You can turn it off in settings
uhtred 2y ago
The willingness you seem to have to sacrifice all your privacy for a few gimmicks is astounding
deepGem 2y ago
One really powerful use case they demoed was that of meeting conflicts. "Can you meet tonight at 7?" Me "oh yes" Siri "No you can't, your daughter's recital is at 7" It's these integrations which will make life easier for those who deal with multiple personas all through their day. But why partner with an outside company ? Even though it's optional on the device etc, people are miffed about the partnership than being excited by all that Apple has to offer.
baby 2y ago
I just wanted a folding iPhone
dgellow 2y ago
We will see, in practice Siri has been pretty much useless even if hyped in demos. I keep pretty low expectations
PaulHoule 2y ago
It is really “the app” that has to die in order for AI to show its potential in user interfaces. If you want to, say, order from a restaurant, your personal agent should order it for you, any attempt for the restaurant to “own” the consumer by putting an app in his face has to end.
- l1tany11 2y ago
  I don’t think I am understanding what you mean, but isn’t one of the potential use cases of AI to say: “Siri order me the thing I always get from _restaurant_ and it navigates the app for you in the background? Potentially this can be done without API integration; the AI synthetically operates the app. Maybe it “watches” how you used the app before (which options you choose, which you dismiss, etc) to learn your preferences and execute the order with minimal interaction with the user. This way annoying, bad, UI can be avoided. AI “solves” UI in this way? Are you saying this type of scenario kills the app, or are you saying the app needs to die, replaced by an API that AIs can interact with, thus homogenizing the user experience, and avoiding the bad parts of Apps?
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Preferably the latter but if the agent can use a crappy app for you (maybe using accessibility APIs in some cases) that’s better than the bad experience that “download our app” usually is. Better yet the system should know about all the commercial options available to you and be a partner in getting food you like, taking advantage of discounts, all of that.
imabotbeep2937 2y ago
"brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup" Yeah but what about people going to the wrong airport, or getting scammed by taking fake information uncritically? "Well it worked for me and anyway AI will get better.". Amen.
- lancesells 2y ago
  Even moreso why does brother take the time to bring up Siri if he can't read the flight code? It's the same thing correct?
  - cchance 2y ago
    You do know siri works while driving and other times when you don't want to go fumbling around?
gavmor 2y ago
> the platform owners where you have most of your digital life Yup! The hardest part of operationalizing GenAI has been, for me, dragging the "ring" of my context under the light cast by "streetlamp" of the model. Just writing this analogy out makes me think I might be putting the cart before the horse.
- rootveg 2y ago
  Whenever I read that expression I have to think about the Porsche commercial from a few years back. I guess it’s not always a bad idea :) https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dws4dru0usmgt9n6vwgm.jpg https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dw...
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  The UI design part? The integration part? The iteration part? Apple products tend to feel thoughtful. It might not be a thought you agree with, but it's there. With other companies I feel like im starving, and all they are serving is their version of grule... Here is your helping be sure to eat all of it.
dereg 2y ago
Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins. I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS. Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end? There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.
- cyberpunk 2y ago
  I don't get this at all, how does integrating siri with a llm mean you get an interpreter and allowing development?
  - hmottestad 2y ago
    As much as I hoped for Xcode on the iPad, I still don’t think any of this AI stuff or “private cloud” is related. Though I don’t know if I would use my iPad for programming even if it was possible, when I have a powerful Macbook Pro with a larger screen.
- wayeq 2y ago
  > allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins. Are we sure there is a Siri team in Apple? What have they been doing since 2012?
  - dereg 2y ago
    Learning how to write llm function calls.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
[flagged]
- skhunted 2y ago
  I don’t follow your second to last paragraph. It’s called Apple Intelligence. If you want to use something else do so but don’t expect Apple to build its own product and let you use whatever you want for it. Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product. If that turns out anything like Siri, then surely you would understand why people want a bring-your-own-model framework.
    - skhunted 2y ago
      Their desires may or may not be rational in this but clearly Apple isn’t going to allow it. They have a history of doing their own thing.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        Their desires are expressly illegal, in many countries. We're past the whole antitrust stuff now, we are in a post-FAANG society and Apple doesn't just get away with that stuff for free anymore. I'm not crazy for expecting competition. This is also coincidentally the reason I got rid of my Apple products. The experience fucking sucks! The only way things get better is if you buy more hardware, which probably makes the average mall-addicted American smile but makes me want to vomit. Everything is upsell, and not just upsell where you can improve the experience. No, you have to buy Apple's solution because every third-party is wrong and can't be trusted. They will gimp anyone that does not compensate them handsomely and rob the only people brave enough to offer their users an improved experience. The devil takes notes during Tim Cook's business meetings. They deserve everything coming to them, and they know it too. So try it. Watch them go along, "doing their own thing", and then watch them come back limping and bruised after the FTC gives them a worse beating than Microsoft got in the 90s. We know why Apple is mad about this, it doesn't matter. They can go quietly or we can make this a long, protracted process. Microsoft got away lucky when you think about it, still all in one piece.
amelius 2y ago
What do you mean into hands of platform owners? The point of having an Apple device is that you can run stuff on your device. The user is in control, not any platforms.
- gowld 2y ago
  Apple owns the software platform. Can I run my non-Apple Intelligence software on the data in "my" iPhone?
  - jagger27 2y ago
    They did mention they’re adding support for other providers.
  - alwillis 2y ago
    Of course. There will be plenty of APIs that 3rd parties can use access the same data Apple Intelligence has access to.
- Tagbert 2y ago
  Apple owns the platform. The user owns the device that embodies the platform.
- croes 2y ago
  >Private Cloud Compute But it runs in their cloud.
- verdverm 2y ago
  I take it as 3rd party alternatives will have a much harder time because they have to ask the user to share their data with them. Apple / Google already have that established relationship and 3rd parties will unlikely have the level of integration and simplicity that the platformers can deliver.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  I think what they're getting at is that the platform owners have power because they can actually leverage the data that users give them to be useful tools to those users. I would contrast this with the trend over the last year of just adding a chatbot to every app, or Recall being just a spicy History function. It's AI without doing anything useful.
iLoveOncall 2y ago
> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations I can't think of something less exciting than a feature that Gmail has supported for a decade. Overall there's not a single feature in the article that I find exciting (I don't use Siri at all, so maybe it's just me), but I actually see that as a good thing. The least they add GenAI the better.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  The difference is that this is on-device and private. Gmail just feeds your emails to Google's servers and they do the crunching. And in the meanwhile train their systems to be better using your content.
  - iLoveOncall 2y ago
    It changes nothing about the impressiveness (or lack thereof) of the feature. Detecting an appointment from an email doesn't even require AI. You're also over-indexing on the fact that some processing will be done on device. The rest will go to Apple's servers just the same as Google. And you will never know how much goes or doesn't.
    - chipotle_coyote 2y ago
      Apple Mail has been able to detect appointments and reservations from email for years, just like Gmail -- and at least in my experience, Apple Mail pulls more useful information out of the mail when it creates the calendar entry. What they showed today is, in theory, something different. (I presume the difference is integrating it into the Siri assistant, not the mail application.)
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      The "AI" bit (a word they didn't mention during the keynote BTW) is the processing of a natural language user command to something the existing ML model can understand. Most of the things shown during the keynote, can already be done with older iPhones - on device, but they need to be "talked to" like a computer, not with natural language that's not completely perfect.
ethbr1 2y ago
> I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem. It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft. I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't. Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text. I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.
- TreetopPlace 2y ago
  "AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`' Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.
  - parl_match 2y ago
    For what it's worth, those platform investments are the difference between Apple being applauded for this, and Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.
  - olddustytrail 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - practicemaths 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - abhpro 2y ago
      That might be "trust" in a relative sense
  - 2y ago
WheatMillington 2y ago
>I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly That's a little premature, let's try not to be so suckered by marketing.
- theshrike79 2y ago
  Apple is again going where Google (the world's largest ad company) cannot follow: 100% user privacy. They really hammered in the fact that every bit is going to be either fully local or publicly auditable to be private. There's no way Google can follow, they need the data for their ad modeling. Even if they anonymise it, they still want it.
  - Spod_Gaju 2y ago
    "100% user privacy." That is a huge stretch and a signal as to how good Apple is with their marketing. If they are still letting apps like GasBuddy to sell your location to insurance companies then they are no where near "100% privacy".
    - cyberpunk 2y ago
      Why should apple be in control of what individual apps do with your location data? You explicitly grant the app access to your data, and agreed to the terms. The difference between that and this is extremely clear is it not?
      - Spod_Gaju 2y ago
        If I want a device that’s giving me apps on a locked in platform why shouldn’t they care about what the apps do with my information? Imagine if we had a smart phone maker that Cared about this so we didn’t have to worry about it all the time?
    - its_ethan 2y ago
      GasBuddy is an optional app, right? Apple is very up front about what apps are going to get access to things like location, with user prompts to allow/deny. Meaning you are opting in to a lack of privacy, which is very expected behavior? The default Apple apps (maps, messaging, safari) are solid from a privacy perspective, and I don't think you can say the same about the default apps on competitors phones.
pmarreck 2y ago
> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context Given that this will apparently drop... next year at the earliest?... I think it's simply quite a tease, for now. I literally had to install a keyboard extension to my iPhone just to get Whisper speech to text, which is thousands of times better at dictation than Siri at this point, which seems about 10 years behind the curve
- QuinnyPig 2y ago
  Ooh, which keyboard extension is this?
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    Auri AI. Note that it's not free, and the way it works is via the clipboard, so it's a bit hacky, but mostly works well.
Loveaway 2y ago
Some of it will undoubtly be super useful. Things like: - Proofread button in mail. - ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools in macOS I expect once you'll get used to it, it'll be hard to go without it.
constantcrying 2y ago
I do believe much of what they showed was impressive. It actually seems to realize the "personal digital secretary" promise that personal computing devices throughout the decades were sold on. The most important question to me is how reliable it is. Does it work every time or is there some chance that it horribly misinterprets the content and even embarrasses the user who trusted it.
- dom96 2y ago
  Yeah, reliability is the crucial bit. Like that example he showed where it checked whether he can make an appointment (by checking driving times), a lot can go wrong there and if the assistant tells you "Yes, you can" but you cannot then I can see lots of people getting angry and not trusting it for anything.

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago

>The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails I did not see the announcement. Can Siri also send emails? If so then won't this (like Gemini) be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks? Edit: Supposedly Gemini does not actually send the emails; maybe Apple is doing the same thing?

dudus 2y ago
It doesn't look like it does. It seems to only write the email for you but not send. At least yet.
theshrike79 2y ago
It just writes the content, it doesn't actually send anything. We'll find out later if there's an API to do something like that at all or are external communications always behind some hard limit that requires explicit user interaction.

b33j0r 2y ago

I will believe it when siri isn’t the stupidest decade old idea ever. I’m sorry if I sound anything but snarky, but they have had Star Trek abilities this whole time, nerfed for “safety” and platform product integrity —from my iPhone

tonyabracadabra 2y ago

The image generation is dalle 2.5 level and feels really greasy to me, beyond that I think the overall launch is pretty good! I also congratulate rabbit r1 for their timely release months before WWDC https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb

wwalexander 2y ago
Yeah, the image generation felt really…cheap?…tasteless? but everything else was really impressive.
- tonyabracadabra 2y ago
  I think that basically stretched the limit of what local model can achieve today, which also makes their image API almost useless for any serious generative art developers.
  - foolofat00k 2y ago
    Fwiw I don't think "serious generative art developers" are the target audience at this point, that's probably on the order of .01% of their users
- mholm 2y ago
  Personalization really feels like the missing link here. The images it creates are highly contextual, which increases their value dramatically. Nobody on Reddit wants to see the AI generated T. rex with a tutu on a surfboard, but in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer. The image AI can even use photos to learn who a person is. That opens up a ton of cool ways to communicate with friends
  - chockablock 2y ago
    > in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning to surf, it’s a killer. Maybe, but this class of jokes/riffs is going to get old, fast.

paganel 2y ago

> but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. No-one is hitting anything out of the park, this is just Apple the company realising that they're falling behind and trying to desperately attach themselves to the AI train. Doesn't matter if in so doing they're validating a company run by basically a swindler (I'm talking about the current OpenAI and Sam Altman), the Apple shareholders must be kept happy.

kcplate 2y ago
> No-one is hitting anything out of the park I kind of feel like their walled garden and ecosystem might just have created the perfect environment for an AI integrated directly to the platform to be really useful. I’m encouraged, but I am already a fan of the ecosystem…

Jayakumark 2y ago

Google is doing this as well but they are doing it on single app like gmail assuming all info is there and also across websites with agents but not cross apps like apple is doing across mails, messages, maps etc.

ethbr1 2y ago
100%. Based on what I've seen so far, unified context is king. Which at the backend means unifying necessary data from different product silos, into organized and usable sources.
cchance 2y ago
Not to mention tied into their underlying SDK API that basically the whole system is based on, and seems they are using those same API's for the internal integrations so they can feel whats missing themselves as well.

richardw 2y ago

I’ve been waiting for Apple to arrive. They bring so much polish and taste. Two features I really want: “Position the cursor at the beginning of the word ‘usability’” “Stop auto suggesting that word. I never use it, ever”

teh_infallible 2y ago
Apple auto suggest can be ducking annoying
RheingoldRiver 2y ago
legitimately good voice recognition would probably be the "killer feature" to get me to switch from android to iOS after all this time. I'm so frustrated with the current state of voice recognition in android keyboards, but ChatGPT's recent update is amazing at voice recognition. I type primarily by voice transcribing and I would be so happy if I could go from 70% voice 30% I need to type to 95% voice 5% I need to type.

Hippocrates 2y ago

The AI/Cartoony person being sent as a birthday wish was super cringey, like something my boomer father would send me. I'm a fan of genmoji. That looks fun. Less a fan of generated clip art and "images for the sake of having an image here", and way, way less into this "here, I made a cornball image of you from other images of you that I have" feature. It's as lame as Animoji but as creepy as deepfakes.

wwalexander 2y ago
Yeah, the genmoji feel like a proper Apple feature, but the full images feel cheap and pointless.
- cchance 2y ago
  LOL you haven't been in group chats with idiot drunk friends apparently shit like that kills, i had a friend who hates iphones, i sent a dozen bing ai images of him as a cartoon doing... things... to the phone... entire chat was dieing for days.
jnaina 2y ago
Aimed at a different demographics. Peepaw and Meemaw are absolutely going to love it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

discordance 2y ago

In the context of off-device processing, it's worth keeping in mind that US surveillance laws have recently expanded in their scope and reach: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-government-surveillance-senate https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...

ENGNR 2y ago
For this reason, I really hope we can self-host our "private cloud" for use with apple devices. That would truly, properly allow end to end privacy. I don't trust Apple given the legislation you've just linked to, both claims obviously can't be correct.
- doug_durham 2y ago
  Only a diminishingly small percentage of users have the ability to do this properly. I have 40 years of development experience and I don't trust my self to set up and properly run these types of servers.
  - ENGNR 2y ago
    Fair, but we could conceivably have an ecosystem of providers, like ProtonMail or whoever the user feels comfortable with. If it's just Apple we're headed for honeypot

brundolf 2y ago

An interesting consequence: I started to think about how I'll be incentivized to take more pictures of useful information, and might even try setting up a Proton Mail proxy so I can use the iOS Email app and give Siri more context

krrrh 2y ago
I’m curious if simply running the proton mail bridge on a Mac at home would allow the native mail app feed “semantic” context across devices to iOS.
- brundolf 2y ago
  The native mail app would have my full inbox, so it could (presumably) do whatever local analysis it would do with a normal email account

tomcam 2y ago

I’ll be thoroughly impressed when Siri learns my wife’s name for good. Yes, I trained it, but somehow the lesson was forgotten.

eppsilon 2y ago
You can set a relationship type in her contact card. I think Siri uses that data.
BoringTimesGang 2y ago
Ah, you mean my good friend 'heart emoji wife heart emoji'

nox101 2y ago

I have no confidence this will work as intended. The last MacOS upgrade had the horrible UX of guessing which emoji you want and being wrong 95% of the time. I don't expect this to be any better. Demos are scripted. I also expect it to fail miserably on names (places, restaurants, train stations, people), people that are bilingual, non-English, people with strong accents from English not being their first language, etc.

everdrive 2y ago

Do you think Apple could develop an AI so powerful that it would allow me to uninstall Siri from my iPhone?

citizen_friend 2y ago
You can turn it off in settings

uhtred 2y ago

The willingness you seem to have to sacrifice all your privacy for a few gimmicks is astounding

deepGem 2y ago

One really powerful use case they demoed was that of meeting conflicts. "Can you meet tonight at 7?" Me "oh yes" Siri "No you can't, your daughter's recital is at 7" It's these integrations which will make life easier for those who deal with multiple personas all through their day. But why partner with an outside company ? Even though it's optional on the device etc, people are miffed about the partnership than being excited by all that Apple has to offer.

baby 2y ago

I just wanted a folding iPhone

dgellow 2y ago

We will see, in practice Siri has been pretty much useless even if hyped in demos. I keep pretty low expectations

PaulHoule 2y ago

It is really “the app” that has to die in order for AI to show its potential in user interfaces. If you want to, say, order from a restaurant, your personal agent should order it for you, any attempt for the restaurant to “own” the consumer by putting an app in his face has to end.

l1tany11 2y ago
I don’t think I am understanding what you mean, but isn’t one of the potential use cases of AI to say: “Siri order me the thing I always get from _restaurant_ and it navigates the app for you in the background? Potentially this can be done without API integration; the AI synthetically operates the app. Maybe it “watches” how you used the app before (which options you choose, which you dismiss, etc) to learn your preferences and execute the order with minimal interaction with the user. This way annoying, bad, UI can be avoided. AI “solves” UI in this way? Are you saying this type of scenario kills the app, or are you saying the app needs to die, replaced by an API that AIs can interact with, thus homogenizing the user experience, and avoiding the bad parts of Apps?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Preferably the latter but if the agent can use a crappy app for you (maybe using accessibility APIs in some cases) that’s better than the bad experience that “download our app” usually is. Better yet the system should know about all the commercial options available to you and be a partner in getting food you like, taking advantage of discounts, all of that.

imabotbeep2937 2y ago

"brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup" Yeah but what about people going to the wrong airport, or getting scammed by taking fake information uncritically? "Well it worked for me and anyway AI will get better.". Amen.

lancesells 2y ago
Even moreso why does brother take the time to bring up Siri if he can't read the flight code? It's the same thing correct?
- cchance 2y ago
  You do know siri works while driving and other times when you don't want to go fumbling around?

gavmor 2y ago

> the platform owners where you have most of your digital life Yup! The hardest part of operationalizing GenAI has been, for me, dragging the "ring" of my context under the light cast by "streetlamp" of the model. Just writing this analogy out makes me think I might be putting the cart before the horse.

rootveg 2y ago
Whenever I read that expression I have to think about the Porsche commercial from a few years back. I guess it’s not always a bad idea :) https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dws4dru0usmgt9n6vwgm.jpg https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dw...
zer00eyz 2y ago
The UI design part? The integration part? The iteration part? Apple products tend to feel thoughtful. It might not be a thought you agree with, but it's there. With other companies I feel like im starving, and all they are serving is their version of grule... Here is your helping be sure to eat all of it.

dereg 2y ago

Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins. I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS. Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end? There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.

cyberpunk 2y ago
I don't get this at all, how does integrating siri with a llm mean you get an interpreter and allowing development?
- hmottestad 2y ago
  As much as I hoped for Xcode on the iPad, I still don’t think any of this AI stuff or “private cloud” is related. Though I don’t know if I would use my iPad for programming even if it was possible, when I have a powerful Macbook Pro with a larger screen.
wayeq 2y ago
> allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins. Are we sure there is a Siri team in Apple? What have they been doing since 2012?
- dereg 2y ago
  Learning how to write llm function calls.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

[flagged]

skhunted 2y ago
I don’t follow your second to last paragraph. It’s called Apple Intelligence. If you want to use something else do so but don’t expect Apple to build its own product and let you use whatever you want for it. Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product. If that turns out anything like Siri, then surely you would understand why people want a bring-your-own-model framework.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    Their desires may or may not be rational in this but clearly Apple isn’t going to allow it. They have a history of doing their own thing.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      Their desires are expressly illegal, in many countries. We're past the whole antitrust stuff now, we are in a post-FAANG society and Apple doesn't just get away with that stuff for free anymore. I'm not crazy for expecting competition. This is also coincidentally the reason I got rid of my Apple products. The experience fucking sucks! The only way things get better is if you buy more hardware, which probably makes the average mall-addicted American smile but makes me want to vomit. Everything is upsell, and not just upsell where you can improve the experience. No, you have to buy Apple's solution because every third-party is wrong and can't be trusted. They will gimp anyone that does not compensate them handsomely and rob the only people brave enough to offer their users an improved experience. The devil takes notes during Tim Cook's business meetings. They deserve everything coming to them, and they know it too. So try it. Watch them go along, "doing their own thing", and then watch them come back limping and bruised after the FTC gives them a worse beating than Microsoft got in the 90s. We know why Apple is mad about this, it doesn't matter. They can go quietly or we can make this a long, protracted process. Microsoft got away lucky when you think about it, still all in one piece.

amelius 2y ago

What do you mean into hands of platform owners? The point of having an Apple device is that you can run stuff on your device. The user is in control, not any platforms.

gowld 2y ago
Apple owns the software platform. Can I run my non-Apple Intelligence software on the data in "my" iPhone?
- jagger27 2y ago
  They did mention they’re adding support for other providers.
- alwillis 2y ago
  Of course. There will be plenty of APIs that 3rd parties can use access the same data Apple Intelligence has access to.
Tagbert 2y ago
Apple owns the platform. The user owns the device that embodies the platform.
croes 2y ago
>Private Cloud Compute But it runs in their cloud.
verdverm 2y ago
I take it as 3rd party alternatives will have a much harder time because they have to ask the user to share their data with them. Apple / Google already have that established relationship and 3rd parties will unlikely have the level of integration and simplicity that the platformers can deliver.
dialup_sounds 2y ago
I think what they're getting at is that the platform owners have power because they can actually leverage the data that users give them to be useful tools to those users. I would contrast this with the trend over the last year of just adding a chatbot to every app, or Recall being just a spicy History function. It's AI without doing anything useful.

iLoveOncall 2y ago

> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations I can't think of something less exciting than a feature that Gmail has supported for a decade. Overall there's not a single feature in the article that I find exciting (I don't use Siri at all, so maybe it's just me), but I actually see that as a good thing. The least they add GenAI the better.

theshrike79 2y ago
The difference is that this is on-device and private. Gmail just feeds your emails to Google's servers and they do the crunching. And in the meanwhile train their systems to be better using your content.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  It changes nothing about the impressiveness (or lack thereof) of the feature. Detecting an appointment from an email doesn't even require AI. You're also over-indexing on the fact that some processing will be done on device. The rest will go to Apple's servers just the same as Google. And you will never know how much goes or doesn't.
  - chipotle_coyote 2y ago
    Apple Mail has been able to detect appointments and reservations from email for years, just like Gmail -- and at least in my experience, Apple Mail pulls more useful information out of the mail when it creates the calendar entry. What they showed today is, in theory, something different. (I presume the difference is integrating it into the Siri assistant, not the mail application.)
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    The "AI" bit (a word they didn't mention during the keynote BTW) is the processing of a natural language user command to something the existing ML model can understand. Most of the things shown during the keynote, can already be done with older iPhones - on device, but they need to be "talked to" like a computer, not with natural language that's not completely perfect.

ethbr1 2y ago

> I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem. It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft. I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't. Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text. I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.

TreetopPlace 2y ago
"AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`' Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.
- parl_match 2y ago
  For what it's worth, those platform investments are the difference between Apple being applauded for this, and Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - practicemaths 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - abhpro 2y ago
    That might be "trust" in a relative sense
- 2y ago

WheatMillington 2y ago

>I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly That's a little premature, let's try not to be so suckered by marketing.

theshrike79 2y ago
Apple is again going where Google (the world's largest ad company) cannot follow: 100% user privacy. They really hammered in the fact that every bit is going to be either fully local or publicly auditable to be private. There's no way Google can follow, they need the data for their ad modeling. Even if they anonymise it, they still want it.
- Spod_Gaju 2y ago
  "100% user privacy." That is a huge stretch and a signal as to how good Apple is with their marketing. If they are still letting apps like GasBuddy to sell your location to insurance companies then they are no where near "100% privacy".
  - cyberpunk 2y ago
    Why should apple be in control of what individual apps do with your location data? You explicitly grant the app access to your data, and agreed to the terms. The difference between that and this is extremely clear is it not?
    - Spod_Gaju 2y ago
      If I want a device that’s giving me apps on a locked in platform why shouldn’t they care about what the apps do with my information? Imagine if we had a smart phone maker that Cared about this so we didn’t have to worry about it all the time?
  - its_ethan 2y ago
    GasBuddy is an optional app, right? Apple is very up front about what apps are going to get access to things like location, with user prompts to allow/deny. Meaning you are opting in to a lack of privacy, which is very expected behavior? The default Apple apps (maps, messaging, safari) are solid from a privacy perspective, and I don't think you can say the same about the default apps on competitors phones.

pmarreck 2y ago

> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context Given that this will apparently drop... next year at the earliest?... I think it's simply quite a tease, for now. I literally had to install a keyboard extension to my iPhone just to get Whisper speech to text, which is thousands of times better at dictation than Siri at this point, which seems about 10 years behind the curve

QuinnyPig 2y ago
Ooh, which keyboard extension is this?
- pmarreck 2y ago
  Auri AI. Note that it's not free, and the way it works is via the clipboard, so it's a bit hacky, but mostly works well.

Loveaway 2y ago

Some of it will undoubtly be super useful. Things like: - Proofread button in mail. - ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools in macOS I expect once you'll get used to it, it'll be hard to go without it.

constantcrying 2y ago

I do believe much of what they showed was impressive. It actually seems to realize the "personal digital secretary" promise that personal computing devices throughout the decades were sold on. The most important question to me is how reliable it is. Does it work every time or is there some chance that it horribly misinterprets the content and even embarrasses the user who trusted it.

dom96 2y ago
Yeah, reliability is the crucial bit. Like that example he showed where it checked whether he can make an appointment (by checking driving times), a lot can go wrong there and if the assistant tells you "Yes, you can" but you cannot then I can see lots of people getting angry and not trusting it for anything.