Despite a range of major ‘Apple Intelligence’ advancements being released by the company at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, users may have to wait for the full roll out extending uptil as late as next year.
During the conference, Apple had mentioned that the services of Apple Intelligence would be effective largely from the fall of 2024 and ending in 2025.
A reported reason for this has been to avoid the “pitfalls” that have been faced by other AI systems following their releases. The WWDC 2024 therefore only provided a roadmap for the AI’s full phased release.
The reasons:
Though Apple Intelligence’s features were announced in totality at the WWDC 2024 , their release dates are expected to be spread over a period of months to a year. Some reported reasons and benefits of the phased release as highlighted by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg included:
Staffing allocation: The staggered roll out can make optimum use of Apple’s engineers focussing on certain features first and then moving them on to the next set.
American English launch: By focussing on a one language model- American English, the company can buy time to devote to training AI models in other global languages more effectively.
Cloud infrastructure: “an effort that includes outfitting servers with Mac-grade chips to handle Apple Intelligence features. Apple can’t risk having too many users trying the new capabilities at once and crashing its network. Apple partner OpenAI, which relies on Microsoft Corp. servers to host its chatbot, also will be able to better manage the surge of users with a slower approach.”
What could be expected in the first phase this fall:
Priority notifications: The system will be ready to prioritize notifications and “give a quick recap of your alerts and text messages.”
Summary features will allow for summarizing webpages, voice memos, meeting notes and emails.
New Writing Tools and its functions, image generation and the AI creator- Genmoji will all be available.
Other user friendly features that “transcribe voice recordings, improves voicemail transcriptions and handles automatic calculations for typed-out math equations” are also expected to be rolled out in the current first phasing.
Later in 2024:
The most talked about ChatGPT integration is also likely to miss the fall roll out and instead may be expected later this year.
With the initial iOS 18 release, “Mail app’s new features, including a redesign that can group emails in categories like newsletters, announcements and shopping” can be expected later on in 2024.
“Swift Assist, a new programming companion for Xcode (Apple’s software for writing apps for its platforms) that uses cloud-based AI models. It helps people write code, answer programming questions and put development frameworks in place.”
Lastly, “Apple also has hinted that some non-AI features won’t be ready for the first versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, visionOS 2 and macOS Sequoia.”
Siri’s highly anticipated features are likely to be made available only in 2025
While the new Siri will come with improvements like a more natural interface and ability to understand the user more effectively and intuitively, some crucial upgrades will feature only in 2025.
Contextual based searches and actions such as referring to previous conversations, earlier shared podcasts or documents on the basis of simple commands from the user will come in next year. This also extends to “semantic indexing, which helps Siri understand the context of your on-device content and personal data.”
The on-screen awareness feature is also likely to see a delayed roll out. The feature allows Siri to understand what a user is doing at that moment on their device and provide relevant assistance.
