Apple CEO Tim Cook somewhat pushed back on the idea that the company was behind on AI in his fourth-quarter earnings call with investors, as he highlighted technological developments Apple had recently made that "wouldn't be possible without AI. Specifically, the executive pointed to new iOS 17 features like Personal Voice and Live Voicemail as examples of his innovation with artificial intelligence technologies. Additionally, Cook confirmed that Apple was working on generative artificial intelligence technologies.
Consumers don't necessarily consider the features Cook mentioned to be AI, and that may be by design. Cook suggested that Apple doesn't necessarily label features as "AI."
"We label them based on the benefit their consumers get," Cook said. But the fundamental technology behind this is artificial intelligence and machine learning».
Personal Voice, for example, is an accessibility feature designed to create an automated voice that sounds like you. It is intended for people who are losing the ability to speak due to various health conditions, including ALS. To use the feature, people first spend 15 minutes reading text prompts into the device's microphone. Then, using machine learning technologies, the audio is processed locally on your iPhone, iPad or Mac to create your own Personal Voice that sounds like them.
Meanwhile, Live Voicemail is a new consumer-facing feature in iOS 17 that displays a live transcription of a voicemail while it is recorded in real time.
"AI is at the center of these features," Cook told investors. “And then you can access the life-saving features on the watch and on the phone, like fall detection, accident detection and ECG on this device. This would not be possible without AI,” he noted.
The Apple executive also confirmed that the company was developing generative AI technologies, saying, "obviously, we're working on it." But he declined to share details, pointing out that Apple doesn't really do that.
«But you can bet that we are investing, we are investing quite a bit, we will do it responsibly and that is how it will be; "Over time you will see advancements in products where those technologies are at the center of them," Cook added.
Apple, however, appears to have some catching up to do in terms of consumer-facing AI technologies, which have garnered attention in recent months thanks to the launch of tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and others from companies like Anthropic and Google.
The company is said to be expanding its budget for developing AI to “millions of dollars a day” according to what was published by The Information, and is employing several teams working on LLM (large language models) as it tries to put the technology into practice. The hope is that one day users will be able to automate tasks through Siri that today must be programmed manually, for example through the Shortcuts app. Additionally, Siri could gain new AI abilities, such as being told to rotate the latest photos a user took with their iPhone and text them to a friend, according to the aforementioned article.
Bloomberg also noted that the next version of iOS will include more AI capabilities, including changes to Siri and the Messages app, in terms of answering questions and completing sentences, similar to Google's autocomplete for Gmail. The outlet also suggested that generative AI would come to Apple's development tools, such as Xcode.
