Apple CEO Tim Cook pushed back a bit on the notion that the corporate was behind in AI on yesterday’s Q4 earnings call with investors, as he highlighted technology developments that Apple had made recently that “wouldn’t be possible without AI.” Specifically, the exec pointed to latest iOS 17 features like Personal Voice and Live Voicemail as examples of its innovation with AI technologies. As well as, Cook confirmed Apple was working on generative AI technologies.
The features Cook called out aren’t necessarily considered AI by consumers, and that could be by design. Cook suggested that Apple doesn’t label the features as “AI” necessarily.
“We label them as to what their consumer profit is,” Cook said. “But the basic technology behind it’s AI and machine learning.”
Personal Voice, for instance, is an accessibility feature designed to create an automatic voice that seems like you. It’s intended for people who find themselves losing their speaking ability because of various health conditions, including ALS. To make use of the feature, people first spend quarter-hour reading text prompts into the device’s microphone. Then, using machine learning technologies, the audio is processed locally on their iPhone, iPad or Mac to create their very own Personal Voice that seems like them.
Live Voicemail, meanwhile, is a latest consumer-facing feature in iOS 17 that displays a live transcription of a voicemail because it’s being recorded in real time.
“AI is at the guts of those features,” Cook told investors. “After which, you possibly can go all of the technique to the lifesaving features on the watch and the phone like fall detection, crash detection, ECG on the watch. These wouldn’t be possible without AI,” he noted.
The Apple exec also confirmed that the corporate was developing generative AI technologies, saying “obviously, we’ve got work happening.” But he declined to share details, noting that Apple doesn’t really do this.
“But you possibly can bet that we’re investing, we’re investing quite a bit, we’re going to do it responsibly and it should — you will note product advancements over time where those technologies are at the guts of them,” Cook added.
Apple, nonetheless, seems to have some catching as much as do by way of consumer-facing AI technologies, which have gained attention in recent months because of launches of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others from firms like Anthropic and Google.
The corporate has been said to be expanding its budget for constructing AI to “thousands and thousands of dollars a day,” in line with The Information, and is employing multiple teams working on LLMs (large language models) because it attempts to place the tech to make use of. The hope is that in the future users would have the ability to automate tasks via Siri, which today must be manually programmed, for instance via the Shortcuts app. As well as, Siri could gain latest AI skills, like being told to show the previous few photos a user has taken on their iPhone and text it to a friend, the report said.
Bloomberg also noted the following version of iOS will include more AI capabilities, including changes to Siri and the Messages app, by way of answering questions and completing sentences — much like Google’s autocomplete for Gmail. The outlet also suggested generative AI would come to Apple development tools, like Xcode.