Every year, Apple and Google announce major software updates that bring new features to our smartphones, like cosmetic overhauls of the home screen, stronger privacy protections, and fun messaging tools. This year, the changes will feel more radical because companies are focusing on reinventing our phones with artificial intelligence.
At its annual software developers conference on Monday, Apple showed off a series 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, that’s easier to talk to, and an artificial intelligence system that will generate images, create web article summaries, and craft responses to text messages and emails.
The Apple news followed Google’s Android announcements last month, which included an AI system that automatically summarizes audio transcripts, detects whether a phone conversation is likely to be a 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 texting, also known as the green bubble. Apple said its new software would adopt a messaging standard that would allow iPhone users to send higher quality messages to Android, addressing a problem that has made it difficult for people to communicate for more than a decade.
Apple and Google will release their free software updates for iOS and Android this fall. Here’s what you need to know about how our smartphones will change.
Siri will receive an AI brain transplant
Apple said it had completely redesigned 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.” That type of AI technology uses complex statistics and algorithms to guess which words go together, similar to the autocomplete feature on your phone. It’s the same type of underlying technology we’ve seen in chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Apple said its system was more private than others because people’s data would remain on their iPhones.
The update will make Siri capable of processing the context of a conversation and will allow users to speak more naturally with the virtual assistant. For example, you could say: “How is the weather in Santa Cruz? Oh wait, I mean San Francisco,” followed by “Schedule a coffee meeting there tomorrow at 9am.”
The new, more capable Siri will also be able to handle more complex tasks, such as searching your photo album for an image of your driver’s license and extracting the ID number to paste into a form, Apple said.
By contrast, the older version of Siri could only react to a database of commands and questions that it was programmed to understand, such as “What’s the weather like in San Francisco?” and “Schedule a coffee meeting in San Francisco.”
Apple Intelligence will also allow iPhone users to automatically generate images within messages, Apple said. For example, if you wish a friend a happy birthday, the AI could search your photo album for a picture of that friend, after which it could generate an avatar of that person with balloons.
AI can also be used in writing applications such as Mail and Notes. Users can highlight text to correct it or rewrite it in a different style. Within the Safari web browser, users can also highlight articles to generate short summaries.
Apple said it had partnered with OpenAI so Siri could access ChatGPT for help with tasks like generating a list of recipe ideas.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
AI features will come only to the newest and fastest iPhones, including the iPhone 15 Pro, this fall.
Google is revamping Android with ‘Gemini’
Only Google Pixel phone owners can use most of Google’s latest AI features; Support for other Android devices is expected later this year.
Over the past year, Google has allowed users to try out Gemini, its new AI assistant, which requires downloading an app. (By default, Android phones will still come loaded with Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa-like virtual assistant, and the older version of Siri.) Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini acts as a chatbot that generates responses to any message you send 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 instead of processing requests on Google servers, for privacy reasons.
One scam detection feature involves using AI to listen to your phone calls. If the conversation fits the pattern of a scam, such as when a scammer asks for your online banking password, an alert is sent to your phone.
Another feature, Circle to Search, allows users to circle an image to ask Google for information. 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 an audio 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.
Text messaging improvements
For more than a decade, smartphone users around the world have faced the divide between the green and blue bubble. When iPhone users send text messages to other iPhones, the messages appear in blue and they can take advantage of exclusive benefits like fun emojis and animations. But if an iPhone user sends a text message to an Android user, the bubble turns green, many features break, and the quality of photos and videos deteriorates.
Apple is finally taking a step to close that gap. It said that in iOS 18, its messaging app would adopt Rich Communication Services, a standard that Google and others integrated into their apps years ago. Text messages sent between iPhone and Android will remain green, but images and videos will be of higher quality.
The result will likely be profound. Many iPhone and Android users said they were discouraged from messaging each other because the image quality was poor. The Justice Department, which this year accused Apple of imposing restrictions on its phones to maintain a monopoly, saw the incompatibility of messages as a pressure tactic to persuade people to buy iPhones.
Apple also said it would bring a feature to its iMessage app that might have seemed long overdue: the ability to schedule a message to be sent later. That could help iPhone users respect others’ boundaries by scheduling a message to send when the recipient is not at work, for example.
