Every year, Apple and Google announce major software updates that bring new features to our smartphones, like cosmetic fixes to the home screen, stronger privacy protections, and fun messaging tools. This year, the changes will be more radical as companies focus on reinventing our phones with artificial intelligence.
At its annual software developer conference on Monday, Apple unveiled a slew of improvements coming this fall to iOS 18, its operating system that powers iPhones. The new tools include a revamped version of its voice assistant, Siri, which is easier to talk to, and an AI system that will generate images, create summaries of web articles, and create responses to text messages and emails.
Apple’s news followed Google’s Android announcements last month, which included an AI system that automatically summarizes audio transcripts, detects whether a phone conversation is a potential scam and helps students with homework.
Because AI technology is still new, it’s unclear whether these improvements will resonate with the masses. The change that will have the most immediate effect has to do with old-school text messaging — also known as the green bubble. Apple said its new software will adopt a messaging standard that will allow iPhone users to send higher-quality messages to Android, addressing a problem that has made it harder for people to communicate for more than a decade.
Apple and Google are set to release free software updates for iOS and Android this fall. Here’s what you need to know about how our smartphones will change.
Siri gets an AI brain transplant
Apple said it had completely overhauled Siri, its 13-year-old virtual assistant.
The assistant will soon be powered by Apple Intelligence, the company’s version of a “large language model.” This type of AI technology uses statistics and complex algorithms to guess which words belong together, similar to the autocomplete feature on your phone. It’s the same type of underlying technology we’ve seen powering chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Apple said its system was more private than others because people’s data would stay on their iPhones.
The upgrade will make Siri able to process the context of a conversation and allow users to speak more naturally with the virtual assistant. For example, you could say, “What’s the weather like in Santa Cruz? Oh wait, I meant San Francisco, followed by “Schedule a coffee meeting tomorrow at 9am”
The new and more capable Siri will also be able to handle more complex tasks, such as searching your photo album for a driver’s license image and pulling your ID number to paste into a form, Apple said.
In contrast, the old version of Siri could only react to a database of commands and questions it was programmed to understand, such as “What’s the weather in San Francisco?” and “Schedule a coffee meeting in San Francisco.”
Apple Intelligence will also allow iPhone users to automatically create images within messages, Apple said. For example, if you wish a friend a happy birthday, the AI ​​could check your photo album for a picture of that friend, after which it could create an avatar of that person with balloons.
AI will also be able to be used to write apps like Mail and Notes. Users can highlight text for correction or rewrite in a different style. Within the Safari web browser, users can also highlight articles to create short summaries.
Apple said it had formed a partnership with OpenAI so Siri could use ChatGPT to help with tasks like creating a list of recipe ideas.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and partner Microsoft for copyright infringement on news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
AI features are only coming to the newest, fastest iPhones, including the iPhone 15 Pro, this fall.
Google overhauls Android with ‘Gemini’
Only owners of Google’s Pixel phones can use most of Google’s latest AI features. Support for other Android devices is expected later this year.
Last year, Google allowed users to try Gemini, its new artificial intelligence assistant, which requires downloading an app. (By default, Android phones will still be loaded with Google Assistant, the virtual assistant similar to Amazon’s Alexa and the older version of Siri.) Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini works like a chatbot that produces responses to any prompt you throw at it including “Write a poem about dogs in San Francisco.”
A new version of Gemini, called Nano, focuses on handling AI tasks directly on Pixel phones rather than processing requests on Google’s servers, for privacy reasons.
A fraud detection feature involves using artificial intelligence to listen to your phone calls. If the conversation matches the pattern of a scam, such as the scammer asking for your online banking password, an alert is sent to your phone.
Another feature, Circle to Search, allows users to circle an image to request information from Google. This feature has now been expanded to allow students to circle a math or physics problem for help. Google’s AI will then generate a list of steps on how to solve the problem.
Gemini Nano can also take an automatically generated transcript from a recording and create written summaries, which could be useful for meetings. Another tool, Magic Compose, can be used within the Google Messages app to quickly rewrite a message in a different style.
Texting improvements
For more than a decade, smartphone users everywhere have faced the green vs. blue bubble divide. When iPhone users send messages to other iPhones, the messages appear in blue and can take advantage of exclusive benefits such as fun emojis and animations. But if an iPhone user sends a message to an Android user, the bubble turns green, many functions break, and photos and videos degrade in quality.
Apple is finally taking a step toward bridging that gap. It said that in iOS 18, its Messages app would adopt Rich Communication Services, a standard that Google and others built into their apps years ago. Texts sent between iPhone and Android will remain green, but images and videos will be of higher quality.
The effect will probably be profound. Many iPhone and Android users said they felt discouraged from messaging each other because the image quality was poor. The Justice Department, which this year accused Apple of placing restrictions on its phones to maintain a monopoly, viewed the messaging incompatibility as a pressure tactic to get people to buy iPhones.
Apple also said it’s bringing a feature to its iMessage app that may feel delayed: the ability to schedule a message to be sent later. This could help iPhone users respect each other’s boundaries by scheduling a message to be sent when the recipient is out of work, for example.
