Apple Intelligence Shows Early Signs of Life: Expectations vs. Reality

Apple Intelligence Shows Early Signs of Life: Expectations vs. RealityAugust 5th: Apple's newly unveiled "Apple Intelligence" hasn't yet taken the market by storm

Apple Intelligence Shows Early Signs of Life: Expectations vs. Reality

August 5th: Apple's newly unveiled "Apple Intelligence" hasn't yet taken the market by storm. Despite a leadership shake-up in the design team and the company's third-quarter financial performance fueling expectations around Apple Intelligence, it still has a long way to go before meeting the market's eager anticipation.

Last week, Apple gave developers their first glimpse of "Apple Intelligence," ushering in a new generation of AI features. However, consumers will need to be patient, as Mark Gurman, an Apple analyst, predicts these features won't be available in the initial releases of iOS 18 and other new operating systems. Instead, they are expected to launch in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. This means the official release of Apple Intelligence will miss the September iPhone launch frenzy and likely won't begin rolling out publicly until October.

Even then, consumers will only experience the tip of the iceberg of the Apple vision presented at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. After personally trying out the first beta of Apple Intelligence, Gurman points out that current features aren't yet groundbreaking. The current performance falls short of the disruptive technological change that the public and investors have come to expect from Apple Intelligence.

Since June, Apple stock has significantly outperformed the broader market, reflecting optimistic market expectations of new technology driving sales. Some analysts have even compared it to the breakthrough of the first iPhone. However, Gurman remains cautious, stating that Apple Intelligence is not yet at that level.

Admittedly, this is just the first beta, and Apple will undoubtedly refine it over the coming months. He expects Apple Intelligence to showcase more polished features when it makes its official debut around October.

Here's an overview of the features already available in the first beta of Apple Intelligence:

• Short Reply Suggestions in the Messages app: This feature is slightly upgraded compared to the previous version. In the Mail app, more comprehensive reply suggestions are introduced.

• High-Priority Mail Highlight in the Mail app: The Mail app adds a new area that highlights high-priority emails identified by the system, including email summaries.

• Information Summary in Notifications: Apple Intelligence can summarize text messages and emails in notifications, and it can also intelligently summarize relevant information.

• Reduced Distractions Focus Mode: It's essentially a flexible "Do Not Disturb" mode, allowing users to receive important notifications like urgent text messages, smart home alerts, or specific emails.

• Call Recording and Transcription: It comes with call recording functionality and can automatically transcribe and summarize calls. Notably, similar voice transcription features have been present in early beta versions of iOS 18 as part of the Voice Memos app.

• Article Summary in Safari Reader Mode: Safari's Reader Mode allows summarizing web pages and articles.

• Text Prompts in the Photos app: Users can create movies with photos and videos using this feature.

• Writing Tools: It's a suite of efficient functionalities that activate when focusing on text. It can convert paragraphs to lists or tables, summarize and simplify text, proofread, and rewrite content in different styles.

• New Siri Interface: It features an animation that surrounds the device screen. Users can activate the "Type to Siri" option by double-tapping the bottom of their iPhones or iPads, while Siri's cross-query context retention capability is also enhanced.

Gurman considers the email summarization feature to be extremely practical, effectively distilling the core content of emails, especially in email previews, offering a significant improvement over the previous method of displaying only the first few lines. However, the summarization of text message conversations, particularly in fast-paced group chats, performs poorly and lacks practical value. While the article summarization in Safari is helpful, Gurman believes it's unlikely to be a particularly popular feature.

The most impressive features so far are the "Writing Tools," "Type to Siri," and call recording summarization functionality. The Writing Tools skillfully blend grammar and style features, performing exceptionally well, even though similar features have long been available on the Android platform. In testing, these tools effectively improved the professionalism or friendliness of text in most cases (around 80%). The proofreading feature is also commendable, although it's been a long-standing basic feature in applications like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages.

As for the reply suggestions in the Messages app, Gurman isn't satisfied, believing they haven't significantly surpassed the keyboard suggestions already present in iOS. He suggests Apple could further enhance this feature, for example, by utilizing the context of the conversation more deeply instead of merely relying on the last message.

The standout feature is undoubtedly the call recording with its accompanying conversation transcripts and event summaries. This functionality performed almost flawlessly in Gurman's testing, with its summarization capabilities proving particularly exceptional, making it a significant time-saving tool.

The upgrades to "Type to Siri" are also noteworthy, with the new visual cues ensuring users clearly understand when Siri is activated on iPhones, iPads, and CarPlay. But these two interface improvements aren't directly related to artificial intelligence. In fact, the ability to type commands to Siri has been part of accessibility features, and the new screen-surrounding design is primarily a visual innovation. While it doesn't directly enhance AI capabilities, it noticeably improves the user perception of the new platform.

It's worth mentioning that there are currently two search interfaces in Apple's operating system: "Type to Siri" and Spotlight. This creates a degree of redundancy in the user interface. It's perplexing that Apple hasn't integrated the two initially, and they may need to take action to avoid user confusion in the future.

Overall, while the aforementioned improvements hold some value, they are largely refinements at the detail level and may not be compelling enough to drive iPhone 14 Pro users to upgrade to the iPhone 16. Of course, the allure of marketing videos could be sufficient to entice some consumers.

The initial beta of Apple Intelligence doesn't yet include all the key features, such as the Genmoji tool, which allows users to create custom emojis using AI and is expected to be a highlight of Apple's advertising. Also missing is the Image Playground app, designed to utilize AI to generate unique photos and enhance the system's automatic prioritization of missed notifications.

In the future, Apple's Mail app will introduce new categorization features similar to Gmail, incorporating OpenAI's ChatGPT technology. These features are anticipated to roll out in November or December. However, a full revamp of Siri will have to wait until 2025, with the new interface introduced this year focusing mainly on upgrades to appearance and interaction experience. Next year, Siri will undergo a fundamental architectural overhaul based on a more advanced AI model.

New technologies will include:

• Screen Awareness: Allows Siri to identify what the user is currently viewing, enabling contextually accurate responses to queries. For example, if you're looking at a photo of NBA star LeBron James, you can directly ask: "How many points did he score last night?"

• Personalized Data Integration: Enables Siri to respond to requests more intelligently. For instance, after picking you up, it can help you book a restaurant. Theoretically, Siri can automatically understand the arrival time of your friends based on previous email or text message conversations.

• Precise App Control: Allows you to ask Siri to bring up a specific document or article from your reading list or to edit a photo and send it directly to the family chat.

However, even with the full deployment of Apple Intelligence features, Apple is still catching up to other companies. Take photo processing, for example, where Google has a significant lead over Apple. While Apple's Photos app AI features can accurately separate people or objects from the background, Google and other AI providers have already achieved the ability to completely alter photo backgrounds and simulate different camera angles as if captured while moving.

Furthermore, Samsung Electronics and Google have both introduced Circle to Search, allowing users to search by selection without typing. While Apple has a highly efficient translation app, its competitors have moved ahead in real-time phone translation and image optimization, offering features like de-blurring and video quality enhancement. Apple also lacks a convenient option to automatically check calendars when responding to emails inquiring about schedules.

In conclusion, Apple's current efforts are more of a proactive response to the AI wave led by Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. To take a leading position in more areas, Apple needs to accelerate the rollout of more practical and valuable features.