Benjamin Lannon

Select a theme. Click on the overlay or the button again to exit

The True Killer Feature of Apple Intelligence: Personal and Contextual Knowledge

Posted on:

At WWDC this year, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, their platform for Generative AI tooling across their Operating Systems. A lot of the things they are offering is similar to other companies (text generation, image generation / manipulation, etc), but one thing sticked out to me that I've been thinking about for the past few months since, being able to use your personal context to locally solve problems by fusing a bunch of data together.

At 1 hour and 11 minutes into the keynote, they had this to say:

TL;DW: Craig Federighi commented a hypothetical situation that a meeting was rescheduled on the day of his daughter's play performance, and supposedly Apple Intelligence will be able to:

and fuse all of that data to figure out if the meeting would interfere with his previously scheduled event. This isn't too difficult for a human to quickly figure out, but hasn't really been done to this extent by our phones or computers.

Now the question I have is even if when the contextual Siri & App Intents integrations that are expected to land in Spring 2025 with iOS 18.4 is actually able to make all of this work, will it always work and how? Will you have to use solely Apple apps to get the best of all of this info, or will third parties also play ball and expose these various endpoints. Will I have to ask Siri if the meeting conflicts, or will my device be proactive and when I open the email have a popup saying "Hey, this may cause an issue with a scheduled event you have later today".

On this same note, you could have another hypothetical that I am say working with a coworker and they sent me a link to a website for a solution to a problem I ran into a few days ago, but I communicate with this coworker over both IM / chat apps and email. I may not remember where he sent that link, so will Siri or Apple Intelligence have the know-how to query all of the places that I communicate with this coworker and get the relevant info I need?

If Apple can pull this off and get developers to integrate with these systems, it could truly be groundbreaking. Knowing my personal context and tap into all of the places I work, play, create, and consume is something that can be extremely difficult to manage, and if a single system could integrate all of that info to be easily accessed, I feel life could get a lot less tedious when we are surrounded by so many apps each with their own silos of data. Instead, just ask for the info you need and it will find it out of any of those corpuses of your personal data. But at the end of the day, it was a marketing demo of what is on the horizon and what Apple wants to build, and we don't know if we will land in that future in early 2025, or if it is still years or decades away.