Apple is expected to detail its AI plans at the conference
Two years ago, Apple promised to bring artificial intelligence to more than one billion iPhone users worldwide. The technology, said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, will be “the next big step for Apple.”
But the company’s AI product, Apple Intelligence, arrived later than expected and made mistakes, leading Apple to disable one of its features. Then the company delayed the release of an improved version of its digital assistant Siri due to quality issues.
On Monday, Apple is expected to make another attempt at that big move with AI at its annual developer conference in Cupertino, California.
Siri will be “more personalized,” Apple said, or more tailored to users’ routines, as well as their relationships and interactions with other people. It is expected to help the digital assistant, which has long frustrated consumers with its limited capabilities, become more conversational.
But unlike other Big Tech companies like Google and Meta, Apple hasn’t emerged in the field of artificial intelligence, nor is it spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the technology. It’s sticking to what it’s done for the past two decades: building a sophisticated ecosystem that consumers can easily connect to with their devices. Artificial intelligence is complementary to Apple’s core consumer electronics business, not the center of the company.
“Apple’s core value is to be in your life — like in your pocket, in your hand, in front of you, in your ear,” said Tom Gruber, who co-founded Siri before Apple acquired it and worked at Apple until 2018. “AI is a thing you want to do or use, not a replacement” for Apple products.
The conference coincides with Apple’s most important inflection point in years. Mr. Cook plans to step down as CEO this year and be replaced by John Ternus, the company’s head of hardware engineering. Mr. Ternus said Apple doesn’t want consumers to think about AI when using its products, even though the technology is behind the new feature.
Apple’s conference is expected to bring thousands of people — mostly those who build apps for its devices — to its headquarters. The company uses the event to showcase new software and technologies in operating systems for iPhones, Macs and other devices.
Apple declined to comment.
The AI strategy will test Apple’s ability to push the new technology into the mainstream. The company is known for merging once nascent technologies like digital music files into popular products with polished software like the iPod. But since its efforts to reboot Siri in the AI era have been so messy, it’s unclear whether its software-centric approach will remain relevant for years to come.
Apple is “skating where the puck was three years ago,” said Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology analyst who worked as a product marketer at Apple from 2013 to 2016. The company has downplayed the importance of AI because it hasn’t caught up yet, he added, even though people are starting to use AI for all kinds of things like searching the web and checking email.
“They’re doing a very good job of selling plate glass that photographs very well, and they can probably continue to do that because it’s a good business,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “I just don’t think it’s something people can get excited about, like Microsoft releasing a new version of Windows.”
The rest of the tech industry is taking a much more aggressive approach to AI. Google, for example, has incorporated AI into its core products, including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome and YouTube. It requires people to use the technology in its most popular service, its search engine, and has released AI phones that can control users’ apps for them.
The expected update to Siri will be the biggest since Apple released the digital assistant in 2011. At the time, Siri was able to provide the time in Paris and pull up a list of Greek restaurants. But Siri languished over the next decade.
In 2024, Apple said it will revamp Siri and introduce Apple Intelligence, which will include features like notification summaries and improvements to email and text messages. The company also struck a deal with OpenAI so consumers could enable Apple products to use OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, to answer more complex questions.
But Apple has struggled to deliver on its promises, culminating in the postponement of the Siri upgrade and a strained relationship with OpenAI. In January, Apple said it would team up with Google to use Google’s artificial intelligence models and cloud computing services to power Apple’s AI products.
Apple has a long history of using technology from Google, with Google paying about $20 billion a year for the default search engine in Apple’s Safari web browser.
But Apple and Google also clashed. Tensions flared between the two in the late 2000s when Google released features in the Android version of Google Maps but not in the Apple iOS version. Apple eventually created its own mapping app.
“Apple has deep scar tissue that a competitor put over its barrel,” said John Burkey, who worked on Siri from 2014 to 2016. But the company could find itself in that position again with artificial intelligence, where “Google can take Apple’s lunch money right now,” he added.
Apple is a latecomer to the artificial intelligence boom, although it has long pursued the idea of a digital assistant. In 1987, the company released a concept video for a digital assistant called Knowledge Navigator. This video helped inspire a group of researchers at SRI International to create Siri in 2008. In 2010, Apple bought Siri for over $200 million.
“The vision was to have an assistant that helps you navigate the digital world, your activities, your interactions,” said Dimitra Vergyri, president of information and computer sciences at SRI International.
With today’s advances in AI, Ms. Vergyri said, Siri and other digital assistants face a new question: “What is the next level of capability that we get from this?”