Apple’s WWDC Might Feature AI Emojis and OpenAI Partnership

For the first time, Apple will talk about AI at WWDC 2024, but it might not be about the flashy features that Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI show off. Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today says that Apple may instead roll out basic AI features like transcribed voice memos or auto-generated emoji at the event. They may also announce a rumoured partnership with OpenAI.

There have been rumours lately that Apple will let chatbots work better with its operating systems. It looks like OpenAI is getting the chance to try this out first with ChatGPT. Gurman says that Apple is still working on a deal with Google to do the same thing with Gemini. It is also said to be talking to Anthropic. (Those talks began before OpenAI’s current Scarlett Johansson mess, but they show why Apple might want more than one deal for an iPhone chatbot.) Regardless of what those possible partnerships mean, Apple’s approach to AI will likely be based on being useful.

According to Gurman, one big, noticeable improvement Apple might show off is a “smart recap” feature. It looks like this will summarise texts, alerts, and other things like “web pages, news articles, documents, notes, and other forms of media.” That could be especially helpful when dealing with iOS notifications, which can be too many and hard to handle. Plus, if you look closely, it looks a bit like Microsoft’s new Recall feature, which lets you see what you did on your computer.

Gurman writes that AI-made transcripts could also be very helpful for the Voice Memo app. That will be very helpful for me when I listen to interview recordings, but it could also be useful for other people, like students who record their lessons to listen to later. Apple products already have features that are similar, such as voicemail transcripts that are made automatically and system-wide captions for audio, video, and conversations. Reports say the company also wants to make AI-powered changes to Spotlight search on the device, Safari’s web searches, and writing suggestions for emails and texts. The company may also use AI to fix up photos and make up emojis based on what you’re texting.

Improved Siri and Customization

Using Apple’s own large language models, the company could show off a Siri voice that sounds more natural, as well as better Siri features on the Apple Watch. Gurman writes that Apple devices will do all of this locally when they can, but when the job is too hard, they’ll send it to Apple’s own M2 Ultra-based servers for processing.

Gurman says the company may also announce an AI feature for iOS 18 that will let users change the colours of app icons. With the iOS Shortcuts app, you can do something similar now, but I’d really like a simpler way to do it. This is on top of the other rumoured change to the iPhone home screen that will finally let users put app icons wherever they want instead of forcing iOS to arrange them from top to bottom and left to right.