Apple Intelligence Needs These Three Features To Compete

Apple made its official entry into the AI landscape during last year's Worldwide Developer Conference with the unveiling of Apple Intelligence. However, some of the most significant updates announced at WWDC 2024, including a revamped Siri and an AI that understands your personal context from daily phone usage, are still pending deployment, which has left users feeling frustrated. Nevertheless, there's still reason for optimism.

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET

Apple has demonstrated competence with the limited features it has already shipped, offering a promising look at future capabilities. For instance, many new additions like Genmoji, voice memo transcriptions, and photo clean-up tools are both useful and easily accessible, without being aggressively pushed onto iOS users.

It's also worth noting that Apple Intelligence's true potential on iPad and Mac might extend significantly through third-party app integration.

Crucially, Apple's A18 chip equips the iPhone 16 models with the necessary infrastructure and computational power for Apple to support more demanding AI features. This is all while upholding Apple's commitment to on-device processing, which safeguards user information privacy and security. Although the complete suite of Apple Intelligence tools is yet to be unveiled, the groundwork has been laid.

Here are three features that, if implemented, would make me a firm believer in Apple Intelligence.

1. A More Siri-ous Voice Assistant

While Siri boasts a new look, with a screen glow upon activation and a new text-based interaction method, it still lags behind many contemporary AI voice assistants.

The primary advantage of conversational chat with a voice assistant is its ability to provide almost instant feedback on a wide range of thoughts and queries, from simple tasks like weather updates and notifications to more complex ones such as seeking advice or solving math problems. Siri currently lacks the knowledge and intelligence to offer this breadth of assistance.

Its actionable capabilities are still quite restricted, and more advanced conversational prompts necessitate a reliance on ChatGPT. Since ChatGPT is a third-party application, there's a noticeable delay when sending the query to the chatbot and then receiving Siri's response. There is significant room for Apple to reduce this dependency on ChatGPT and enhance its own assistant's capabilities, both in terms of knowledge and actionable tasks, which brings me to my next point.

2. Go All In on Agentic AI

Agentic AI, which elevates AI assistance by enabling it to take actions on your behalf to complete tasks with minimal intervention, has been the most significant AI trend since last year's WWDC. Interestingly, at WWDC 2024, even before AI agents became a major talking point, Apple mentioned that Apple Intelligence would be capable of performing tasks for you, such as "Pull the files that my coworker shared with me last week."

While this was a cutting-edge feature last year, to remain competitive this year, it's especially crucial to roll out these features as quickly as possible to meet user expectations for that extra something.

For context on AI agents, you can learn more about what AI agents are and how to access a team of personalized assistants.

Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic all held their annual developer conferences recently, and each unveiled agentic AI products. Apple Intelligence was initially positioned as a "personal assistant," and I believe adding this agentic functionality can bring it much closer to that vision.

3. Timing, Timing, Timing

The concept of Apple Intelligence being grounded in your personal information and context, capable of retrieving data from across your apps and referencing on-screen content, was a unique and potentially very helpful approach to integrating AI into an ecosystem. While it would be fantastic if Apple could ship this feature promptly, it is a relatively complex undertaking. I anticipate potential further delays.

In the interim, Apple could announce another unique feature that is less of a major project, such as the rumored revamped Health app featuring an AI agent designed to replicate the insights a doctor might provide based on biometric data. A key factor in the success of any new feature Apple announces will be its readiness to ship, which would help restore user confidence that may have been diminished due to extended waiting periods for previously announced features. You can read more about Apple's rumored AI doctor potentially being ready next spring.

A combination of the features discussed above would also help provide users who purchase a new phone with the A18 chip specifically for Apple Intelligence a return on their investment beyond the phone's standard functionalities.

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