Intel about Apple Intelligence
Many would associate Apple’s Intelligence with Siri - a digital assistant included in nearly any Apple device. However, there is more than just that!
Origins of Intelligence
According to Wikipedia, Siri was a spin-out from the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center and an offshoot of the CALO project funded by US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Siri as a name is a short form of the Norvegian name Sigrid composed of the elements sigr -"victory" and fridr - "beautiful". The initial Siri prototype was developed in a joint project between SRI International and the Vrai Group at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Apple bought Siri in April 2010 and appeared in iPhone 4S in 2011. At that time Siri helped with very basics and entertained users. If asked "What is the meaning of life?" Siri would answer "All evidence to date suggests it's chocolate", or approached with "Will you marry me?" - it would firmly repeat that "My End User Licensing Agreement does not cover marriage. My apologies".
Siri was not the only company bought by Apple. Here are a few notable acquisitions that may contributed to the development of the Apple Intelligence.
VocalIQ acquired in 2015. The British startup specialized in improving speech recognition and natural language understanding. Similarly Turi, bought a year later, developed tools that simplified building AI models for natural language processing, image recognition, and recommendation systems. For example, Turi Create was an open-source software framework allowing developers to build machine learning models without extensive programming skills.
Silk Labs taken over by Apple in 2018. The company focused on developing AI for edge computing - processing data on devices rather than in the clouds. Similarly, Xnor.ai acquired in 2020 specialized in low-power AI - developing AI models on able to run on devices with limited processing power and battery life.
These acquisitions provided Apple Intelligence additional competencies making it much more user friendly and useful for daily tasks.
Best of Apple Intelligence
During Worldwide Developers Conference Apple officially introduced Apple Intelligence on October 28, 2024. It was described as a set of personal intelligence system “features”:
Deep Integration Across the Ecosystem: Apple emphasized that Apple Intelligence is not a standalone product but rather a suite of technologies deeply woven into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. This means AI features are available across various apps and functionalities creating a unified and intuitive experience.
Enhanced Siri: Siri received a major upgrade due to Apple Intelligence. The assistant is now more conversational, contextually aware and is able to respond to more complex and nuanced requests. Finally, Siri might actually be useful!
Writing Tools: Apple Intelligence introduces system-wide writing tools that can help users improve their writing: summarizing text, rewriting sentences for clarity and proofreading for grammar and spelling errors.
Smart Photo Management: The Photos app gets smarter with Apple Intelligence, offering features like object recognition, scene understanding and intelligent search. The app is like a super-organized photo librarian knowing everything about pictures inside out.
Privacy-Centric Approach: A core theme of the announcement was user privacy. Apple Intelligence leverages on-device processing whenever possible minimizing the need to send data to the clouds. Apple also introduced "Private Cloud Compute" - a system that uses Apple's own servers with strict privacy protections.
Apple Intelligence aims to provide a personalized, private and powerful AI experience - but is it able to succeed?
Media Reviews
Most of the media reviews wrote about many non-intelligent Apple Intelligence “features” but maintained an optimistic tone. NYT noted “the long-promised AI revolution isn’t yet here, and perhaps it never will be, but we’re starting to see what Apple thinks it might look like”. CNET wrote that “With iOS 18.1, it's clear that Apple Intelligence is in its early stages. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it just means you shouldn't expect your iPhone to feel radically different after this update”.
Other news outlets write more directly. MacRumors concluded: “In what may not come as much of a surprise, a new test of Siri's knowledge of Super Bowl history has revealed significant accuracy issues with Apple's virtual assistant”. Bloomberg - “Apple’s AI is proving it’s anything but intelligent”. The Verge was also not impressed: “Apple Intelligence is here, but it still has a lot to learn”.
Apple Intelligence users reveal the best it’s functionality so far: “IMO the most useful features are the summarizations – something I'm not sure the average user even recognizes as AI".
Should You Care?
Apple Intelligence represents Apple's vision for the future smart devices. It is a bold ambition and the road ahead will bring many challenges. Presently the AI promises might be a bit overhyped and overpriced. So far users praised Apple's focus on privacy and AI integration into its ecosystem. The general consensus still remains that the Apple Intelligence’s best moments to shine are in the future.