I finally got access to AI on the Mac, and writing tools doesn’t seem to work for me. Were you testing on macOS or iOS?
Anyone else out there tried Writing Tools on the betas?
Citing the USA DOJ is a very weak argument considering the people in control of it today. I’ll have to agree with @jimscard that we’ll have to agree to disagree and hopefully move on to areas where we can be productive.
I’m underwhelmed with Apple’s current GenAI implementation. While I like the local nature, at this time it is little more than a Grammarly replacement. I expect more from their research and product development teams. There was a lot of low-handing fruit for Generative AI implementation that would be extremely low risk and they skipped it all. Very disappointing. It is why I did not bother the Agenda team further since there seems little for them to do.
Examples:
- AI powered Help instead of the current nearly useless system
- AI powered Search
- AI powered building of Shortcuts (planning and building, not just a Trigger/Action)
- AI powered AppleScript editor
- Replace the current Assistant tech for system voice control with a GenAI/App Intents system for Finder and at least their productivity suite (iWork, Finder, etc.)
This is just a few things that don’t need to go outside of the local SLM approach Apple has talked about but of which there is nothing to be seen. I don’t think that you are going to see much in the way of iPhone 16 AI phone sales because there is little AI usage to talk about.
I think most of the interesting use cases will come from having context, in Spotlight and Siri. That’s where you will see interesting search improvements etc.
But it won’t be here for a while in all likelihood. We’ll see a little in iOS 18.1, but the rest won’t come until later.
Not just citing DOJ, of course. Citing just about every single governing body in the World, from Australia to Japan and France. Everybody is sick of this anticompetitive model, and Apple are going to have to stop dragging their feet.
(BTW The idea that AI is delayed due to DMA is questionable, given it will only ship with English support. Seems that was just a smokescreen. They never could have released it in France or Germany without language support anyway.)
I completely agree about context. Combined with the apparent approach to user privacy I have great expectations for Apple Intelligence. However, I might be dead before Apple ships the most basic context aware functions on a wide scale (i.e. beyond making summaries in your email). Even in 1987 (Knowledge Navigator) Apple had an idea what an intelligent assistant could do. So far, all they’ve released (I’ve been running Mac and iPad developer versions with Apple Intelligence) is a replacement for Grammarly. Yes, I’m over simplifying a bit but that is the essence of the AI tools so far. To make it seem like they are doing more–a smokescreen you would call it–they are rolling their machine language stuff into the "Apple Intelligence umbrella along with connections to OpenAI and Google Lens.
On a side note, it defeats the privacy argument to send my information to Google for anything and I’m glad that is asks for permission before it sends anything to them.
I’m curious what anticompetitive model you are speaking about? Maybe we are not talking about the same things.
I’m not a fan of the DMA in Europe or the Patriot Act in American. I would like the governments to get out of my business…all of them.
Apple’s never given a reason why Apple Intelligence is not available on iOS or iPadOS in the EU or China, but it is available on macOS. We all assume it has something to do with the DMA because that’s the primary difference between the platforms, with respect to the EU regulators.
Privacy advocates, like myself, suspect that the reason is related to EU wanting backdoors in things so that they can require the vendor to supply, e.g., what queries were made via Siri by an individual. They did a similar thing, for example, to Telegraph recently. Since Apple Intelligence, including the PCC, is designed privacy-first, there are no mechanisms for the EU or anyone else to receive any information about what was asked of the PCC, or what it actually did — it’s been designed specifically so that there aren’t even any elevated accounts etc., which may be a blocker for EU governments.
WRT to language support, I suspect one of the reasons that AI will be labeled “beta” is because of limited models. Apple has said that in December, they will add support for English dialects in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Apple committed to launching Apple Intelligence in Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish in 2025.
AI powered Help is in the new Siri in iOS/iPadOS 18.1 - ask her how to do something.
AI powered Search - what do you mean by that? I’m already using Siri on 18.1 for most things that I would have done a web search for. Haven’t used it on a Mac yet, though as my Mac is Intel.
I think your bullet about Shortcuts and your last one are essentially the same thing, and what IS implemented in the new Siri, just there aren’t a lot of apps with the necessary AppIntents yet.
AppleScript - does anyone actually use AppleScript anymore? I will note that Xcode now has AI powered code generation on all Apple Silicon Macs.
You are correct. Basic help is now there (it wasn’t a couple of weeks ago). This is a great step. Unfortunately it is very limited still. For example, when I ask it how to get a URL link from Safari to Agenda, it gives me a list of websites to go and find my own answer. I guess it is a start but it has huge holes.
Maybe this will require developers to participate in an API that I am unaware of, at the moment for it to connect knowledge about apps with each other.
I wouldn’t expect Siri to know anything about Agenda out of the box, but yes, there are App Intents APIs that a developer could use to make the app’s functionality available to Siri, make app data available in Spotlight, etc.
Yes, apps have to vend their data to Siri and Spotlight. We have just added these extensions, and they are coming to 19.2 in a few days for the 18.0 launch. That gives Siri much more context.
There are much bigger improvements to Siri coming though. Apple tells us they are not imminent. Won’t be in 18.0 or 18.1, but sometime after that.
Re: AI not being available due to DMA. Pretty sure Apple just came straight out and said that publicly. Apple Intelligence features probably won’t launch in the EU in 2024 - The Verge
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