Apple is finally introducing the conversational and context-oriented AI it promised two years ago. Its competitors have already moved on to agents, Axios reports, according to UNN.
Details
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other AI companies are moving beyond chatbots to agentic tools that can write code, search for information in complex file structures, use applications, and perform work tasks.
At its annual developer conference on Monday, Apple announced that the long-awaited Siri update will be released this fall, thanks to Apple's partnership with OpenAI.
Apple says its new conversational assistant is "significantly more capable" and includes deeper "understanding of personal context" that can surface relevant information from text messages, emails, photos, and more.
The updated version of Apple Intelligence also includes integrated tools for writing text and generating images, as well as other AI features in Safari, Messages, and Photos.
Developers already have access to the new Siri and other tools, with public beta testing scheduled for next month, and final versions set to be released in the fall, typically coinciding with the new iPhones going on sale.
Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic are competing to advance their agentic AI tools for both coders and office workers.
In a subsequent meeting with journalists, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi addressed the issue of autonomous AI agents. "I think it's still early to talk about solving such useful tasks in the long term, but at this stage, we are all building our architecture based on agents," he noted.
Federighi said Apple's own developers are using agentic coding tools, and that people experimenting with agents are using Apple hardware to run them in more controlled environments.
However, at this point, Apple Intelligence is more focused on the task of information gathering.
In one example, Apple showed how Siri can help find and play a podcast recommended by someone in a message. In another example, it demonstrated how it can take camping recommendations from an email and add them to a hiking checklist in Notes.
Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said Apple likely did the right thing for consumers by focusing on privacy, security, and trust.
"If it takes them more time to achieve this, it doesn't matter," Wang said. However, according to him, this does not apply to software developers. "They see all this happening at AI speed and want to move faster," he noted.
Apple is betting that consumers will appreciate an AI assistant that can use personal data while keeping that information on the device and preventing it from falling into the hands of other companies.
At the same time, as Euractiv notes, Apple has blamed the bloc's rules for Big Tech for the delay in rolling out Siri AI on iPhones and iPads across the EU.
"On Monday, the tech giant announced the global launch of a new version of its AI-powered virtual assistant, but blamed the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) for creating an EU-sized 'gap' in the rollout," the publication states.