Speaker 1: Apple has a plan to win the generative AI race, and it's going to be quirky emojis. Early reports suggest that Apple is using AI to populate chats with completely random AI-generated emojis, and people are going to love them. After all, Apple is the company that brought us the animated emojis that are no longer in use, and the company that created Personas, characters from The Polar Express, that you can video chat with. Of course, there's a lot more to Apple's future artificial intelligence plans. [00:00:30] The ability to make emojis is more important than the ability to make emojis, whatever that may be. In this video, we address the rumors of new AI tools that Apple is expected to show off at WWDC, the developer conference on June 10th, but when we hear about these AI features that are reportedly coming this year, there's another twist to this news that fascinates me beyond the food animals. Speaker 1: I feel hopeful that Apple can set itself apart from all the other AI criticisms and controversies that are happening right now in the tech industry. [00:01:00] But apparently Apple isn't completely drama-free. I'm Bridget Carey. Here's another one. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told shareholders that the company is spending a lot of time and effort integrating AI into its products and is investing heavily in generative AI. We'll hear a lot more about that at WWDC, where Apple will talk about the next evolution of its operating system software. Bloomberg reporter Mark Jarmond set the tech world ablaze this week with his latest report. [00:01:30] We're going to talk about what AI will bring to iOS 18 and Macro 15. AI might help you edit photos, send messages, and reply to emails. AI might help you summarize long messages and transcribe voice messages. It might summarize the information you see. Speaker 1: Browsing searches in Safari might get smarter, and Siri might speak more conversationally. A lot of this isn't all that surprising, but I want to talk about three AI tools in this report. [00:02:00] It stood out to me. You may have already seen the tools to mix emoji icons together to make silly symbols. We've talked about this before on this show on sites like Emoji Kitchen, but Apple may release its own version of this in iOS 18. According to Bloomberg, iPhones may let you create emoji on the fly outside of the standard emoji library set by the Unicode Consortium. Now Apple knows how to have some fun with messaging. That's the Apple playbook. [00:02:30] It's a software update to give people something interesting to talk about. When Apple does something weird and cartoony, that feature always gets attention in the news. When Vision Pro was announced, we all marveled at its persona. The iPhone's true depth front camera is now even more fun to show off with animated emojis in chat. And when Apple announced the front camera slow motion, it's more exciting to call it slofie. Yeah, I didn't hear that. Speaker 2: On, but I [00:03:00] Seriously, I think Apple is really clever with this idea of giving people a casual playground of AI image generation. In an age where AI systems are ethically questionable and stories of them failing horribly are rife. Last week, Google opened up its Gemini AI to searches, and people made fun of the weird results it spits out. Gemini pulls jokes from Reddit and The Onion, spitting out these answers as fact, telling people that eating rocks is good for you, or recommending that they apply glue. [00:03:30] The same week, movie star Scarlett Johansson publicly criticized Open AI. She got lawyers involved over the lack of transparency regarding the origins of Chat GBT's voice, claiming it was eerily similar to her own, after the company denied her the right to use her voice for the charming chatbot. Speaker 2: The voice was then removed from Emoji Creation. Ava could also dodge the controversy by focusing on more light-hearted things, to get customers interested in using AI to create something interesting. [00:04:00] So, assuming you don't do anything horrible with emojis, let's not go crazy over eggplant people. Everyone will be watching to see how the Siri personal assistant improves its ability to understand our instructions. Bloomberg reports that a more advanced Siri will be installed not only on the iPhone, but also on the Apple Watch for on-the-go tasks. Even if Siri has fewer glitches, that's a big step forward for me, but if the assistant works really well on the iPhone, [00:04:30] That's exactly what sets Apple apart. If Apple could equip its wearables with a handy AI helper, it could do what others have tried and failed to do: create an AI companion you can carry anywhere without needing a phone. Speaker 2: About a month ago, the AI Pin was released, a $700 AI computer you can wear on your shirt, but early reviews panned it as a disappointing, buggy device. Humane, the startup that developed the AI pen, is reportedly now trying to pitch its own product. [00:05:00] It was acquired for $1 billion. Last month, it also unveiled another small AI handheld gadget called the Rabbit R, which was also meant to be a portable AI assistant that would answer your questions, but it didn't do much to disappoint tech pundits. If Apple were to introduce an AI-savvy line of Apple Watches, it would show all other companies how useful a real AI voice assistant can be when worn on the go, and that seems like a big possibility. [00:05:30] Take a step in that direction. Other companies are now trying to put AI in their watches as health and training assistants—Amma Cheeta has something of an AI running coach, and Google's Fitbit Labs is launching a new program that uses generative AI to answer questions and give you more context about your activity data—the idea is to use AI to help you set realistic fitness goals. A year ago, Bloomberg reported that Apple was working on some kind of AI-powered health coaching service, but no one knows how close we are. [00:06:00] Plus, Apple's launch took a small step of putting a more powerful chip in its latest watch models, which meant that Siri requests would be processed faster and more securely on the device instead of processing the data in the cloud. With the latest watches, you can ask Siri about your health data and it will record information about your health, but it's all private, on the device. This leads to another area where Apple can really set itself apart from every other company: just like with its watches, privacy. [00:06:30] As you can imagine, Apple said the new AI chip will allow the iPhone to perform AI tasks on-device, and those tasks will stay on-device, like the old ad said. What happens on the iPhone, stays on the iPhone. Bloomberg reports that most of Apple's AI processing in the new iOS and macros will be done on-device, which is a bit worrying. Speaker 3: And reports also say that if an AI function requires more processing power, that work will be pushed to cloud data centers. [00:07:00] It is equipped with Apple's M2 Ultra chip. So Apple really needs to talk about how our data is protected and we need to give examples of what tasks are computed in the cloud. What is being sacrificed here? According to the information, Apple may protect cloud data with some kind of virtual black box. We'll just have to wait and watch. Apple's AI system will reportedly be able to summarize our private notifications, text messages, sites visited, and media. [00:07:30] The data we consume is important to our privacy. So in the rapidly evolving world of AI, privacy is going to be a big issue. There are a lot of questions about what data AI companies are siphoning off to train their systems, and what we are providing to feed these monsters. Speaker 3: There are two other rumored announcements that could involve drama that Apple can't escape with just a silly emoji. The same report says that Apple will announce that it has partnered with Open AI. It's unclear how Apple will walk this line. [00:08:00] While promoting a secure private environment, they boast that they also invite troublemakers into their backyard to play in their sandbox. If you trust Apple, does that mean you have to trust your friends at Apple? Another concern here is the rumor about the Safari browser, supposedly called Web Eraser. This was reported by Apple Insider and topped by Business Insider, which claims it could potentially remove any element of a website, including ads. [00:08:30] We are reporting that a group of French publishers and advertisers are asking Tim Cook to stop this tool and not to publish it at WDC because it could harm publishers who rely on advertising. It hasn't even been released yet and there are already signed letters of opposition, so we'll have to wait and see what it's all about. So how will Apple dodge all this? The drama is simple: just tell everyone this is a beta. Speaker 4: Bloomberg reports that Apple is likely to call its AI features beta. [00:09:00] It's still in testing, other tech companies are going in with too much confidence, and if their product fails, it fails, etc. Apple can just slap a beta label on it. Sure. Every iPhone customer is going to try it, but they can't be mad at Apple when it malfunctions and breaks, when their abstracts leave out facts, when their transcripts skip words, when their website goes down because they're not making money anymore. Apple puts up a “under construction” sign. Kind of overconfident and underconfident. [00:09:30] But even if it's labeled as a beta, there's no room for privacy mistakes. I expect Apple to be smart when it releases AI. I sometimes hear criticism that Apple isn't the first, but this time it's good for companies to take time to cool off, and WWDC is also an opportunity for Apple to take a different stance than its competitors. Speaker 4: I'd like to see how Apple's software smarts can help improve the level of humanity by saving us time and enhancing our capabilities in the ocean. [00:10:00] A giggling chatbot or a search engine that tries to read the web for you. AI has given me the impression lately that it thinks I'm a bit stupid. Maybe I'm too lazy to read my emails, decide how to spend my money, or decide where to go on vacation. And, hey, maybe I choose a voice assistant because it suits my appearance. Hey, are you kidding? We'll all end up choosing our favorite AI based on what silly emojis we can send. What AI features would you like to see in the next Apple software? [00:10:30] Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next Friday, the Friday before WWDC, when we'll talk about another story from the world of Apple.
