Google’s Pixel 8 series may not be the most desirable phone on sale today but one of its core features revolutionised the smartphone industry – the onboard generative AI experience. Now known as Gemini Nano, the Gen-AI suite of features put ‘smart’ back in the smartphone. As more Android-based phone makers like Samsung start adopting Gemini Nano, a big question has been looming over a million people’s minds – what’s Apple doing for the iPhone?
Unlike the Pixels and Samsung Galaxy phones, the iPhones, so far, have avoided all the mumbo jumbo associated with generative AI. Most of that may have to do with Apple complying with stricter-than-ever rules set by the EU for opening up its iPhones to third-party stores and making USB-C port a standard feature. Although Apple has begun work on its native generative AI models, it could take years to bear fruit (excuse us for the pun). Does that mean the iPhone won’t get generative AI anytime soon?
Based on the recent rumours, it seems that’s not the case. The iPhones might be getting generative AI sooner than we expected. Rumour has it that Apple is in serious discussions with Google and OpenAI for implementing their AI models into iOS. Although an official announcement might be reserved for the upcoming WWDC 2024 event, we couldn’t help but wonder how Apple could utilise the Gemini AI or ChatGPT to make the iPhone way cooler than it is today.
Let us unpack the possibilities of this rumoured deal between Apple and one of these AI biggies.
How Apple could use Gemini AI to make the iPhone a lot cooler
1. Siri becomes truly smart
Siri popularised the idea of a smart voice assistant residing on your smartphone a decade ago. Today, however, it’s nowhere near as good as its rivals. The Google Assistant took things up a notch for smart assistance and with Gemini on board, it’s like having a personal helper that can do more than just answer basic queries and control your home appliances.
Hence, whether Apple embraces Gemini AI or ChatGPT, we speculate that Siri could get a proper (and much-needed) upgrade in its capabilities for 2024 and beyond. From helping with your child’s homework to suggesting social media captions and buying guides, Siri could be more useful to iPhone users than ever.
We also expect Apple to implement multimodal capabilities in Siri, thereby letting users on iPhones, Macs and iPads make queries with images, audio and text.
On devices like the HomePod 2nd Gen and HomePod Mini, Siri could get the ability to have human-like conversations and remember all the key points of the chat. It could come up with better music suggestions and complex automation prompts. These may sound basic, but the tweaks can be pretty useful for those who haven’t explored beyond Apple’s ‘walled garden’.
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2. Safari browser can summarise webpages
In a fast-paced world where most of us barely have the time and patience to go through a long-format story, the ability to summarise them is a boon that most readers appreciate. With Gemini AI, your device could read the entire story and list down all the crucial information in pointers to quickly grasp the gist.
The feature works well on Samsung’s Galaxy AI suite and we’d like to assume that Apple would do just as much of a good job as Samsung, if not better.
3. Live call translation
iPhones have had a decent translator app for the last few years and with generative AI now, we can expect it to extend that magic to voice calls. Apple could use Gemini AI to directly translate voice calls from other languages and convey them in your language via text or voice.
If Apple can make it reliant on-device, it could come in handy for travellers stuck in foreign countries speaking different languages.
4. Gen-AI image editing
We have seen how Gen-AI brought interesting new image editing options to Google’s Pixel 8 and Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series. If Apple were to make the utmost use of Gemini AI, it could add advanced AI edit tools to the Photos app.
Imagine the possibilities that it could unfold for the average iPhone user. You could remove background subjects (or one of your friends) from your cherished group photos, reframe the photo by generating areas beyond the borders, move around existing subjects, erase shadows and more.
5. Better keyboard suggestions
The iPhone’s keyboard has always struggled with useful suggestions and predictive text. Google and Samsung, who already did better in this regard, were able to revolutionise the typing experience with Gen-AI predictive text. What if Apple implements the same on the iPhone’s keyboard?
Not only would you get more relevant predictive world suggestions while typing long texts, but the keyboard could also suggest better sentence reframing, grammar checking and typo correction. The dream keyboard for every single writer around the world, eh?
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(Hero and Featured Image Credits: Courtesy Sebastian Bednarek via Unsplash)
