Just as other companies have been doing for a while, Apple is preparing to make heavy use of the AI buzzword, with AI being introduced in a big way to its web browser, Safari, this year, according to a new report. It is said that there are plans to do so.
The next version of Safari introduces AI and is expected to be released at the same time as iOS 18, meaning it will most likely be announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. .
Safari features Intelligent Search, which leverages on-device AI to identify and summarize topics and key phrases within the web pages you're viewing. Apple's Large-Scale Language Model (LLM) identifies sentences that describe the description or structure of an object depending on the text on the page, and recognizes repeated words and important sentences as topics.
This is said to be a counterpart to ChatGPT (what else?), but of course Apple will add its usual twists in terms of making the experience on the device more secure.
Web Eraser allows you to “relatively easily” remove specific parts of a web page, such as banner ads, images, text, or even entire page sections. Safari remembers your changes even after you close the original tab or window, so erasing persists between sessions.
When you visit the same page again, you will be notified that the page has been modified to reflect your desired changes, and you will be given the option to undo the changes and return the web page to its state without any warnings, if necessary.
This sounds like a super complicated way to create an ad blocker and use AI buzzwords for it, but ad blockers exist too, and have been around since before all these AI shenanigans. , I'm not sure what to make of this.
The new Safari also comes with an updated UI, with a new page control menu that makes it easier to access many of the options that were previously dotted around the UI. Apart from the aforementioned intelligent search/intelligent browsing and web content erasure, this includes features like zoom options, privacy controls, content blocking options, in-page text search, reader mode, and extension shortcuts.
Next year, Apple will integrate “much more powerful visual search capabilities” into its browser that will allow users to “get information about consumer products as they view images.” This seems similar to the Visual Lookup feature that allows Siri to identify plants, pets, and landmarks in photos.
All of these are said to be already in development, but keep in mind that it's not impossible for Apple to delay the launch or even cancel some of them altogether. That's all that's happened before.
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