Apple is planning a $1B/year push of integrating gen AI into products like Music, Siri, HomePod, and Pages.
Industry analysts and commentators have summarized how Apple has been pretty much left behind with the explosion in generative AI and every major tech company getting in the trend, from Microsoft and Google to Meta and Amazon. Apple, so far, only managed to put a foot inside the door and now has plans to scale up its AI offerings with the help of new integrations rolling out for its existing slew of products such as HomePod and Siri.
As per a Bloomberg report, senior executives at Apple are spearheading a new generative AI push, ready to spend about $1 billion annually. The biggest improvement is supposed to be in Siri. The revamped version of Siri “could be ready as soon as next year,” writes Mark Gurman, who has covered Apple’s AI efforts extensively in the past.
AI is also being added to the next version of iOS, which can allow Siri and Messages to field questions and auto-complete sentences. Xcode is also something where AI is going to play a big role, as the teams behind the new push attempt to integrate AI into as many apps as possible (for example, Xcode to rival Copilot, Apple Music to rival Spotify’s auto-generated playlists, and Pages or Keynotes to rival automatic content creation and design in Word and PowerPoint).
Commenting on the progress of these teams, Gurman notes that one debate that’s going on internally is about the deployment: on-device, cloud-based, or something in between. Local deployment can guarantee privacy and speed whereas remote deployment can offer better features and improvements.
