Apple is looking to its army of developers to gain an edge in the artificial intelligence race

On September 20, 2024, an Apple store on Regent Street in London, England displayed Apple’s new iPhone 16.

Rasid Necati Aslim | Rasid Necati Aslim Anatolia | Getty Images

as apple Apple Intelligence is gearing up to join Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence race, banking on one of its greatest strengths: its army of 34 million app developers.

iPhone users will get their first taste of Apple Intelligence, the company’s artificial intelligence system, later this month. The company relies on Apple Intelligence to become the strongest selling point of its latest generation smartphone, the iPhone 16.

Apple’s artificial intelligence isn’t as advanced as the most advanced technology coming out of state-of-the-art labs, such as competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Yuan camel. Apple isn’t using the biggest models, and it can’t pull off some of the more amazing tricks in cutting-edge speech models—OpenAI’s latest one can sing, for example.

What Apple hopes will differentiate its artificial intelligence is that Siri might actually be able to do things on your phone — send emails, hack calendars, and take and edit photos. That’s something other companies’ AI chatbots can’t currently do, and to make it happen, Apple is calling on its army of third-party developers to fine-tune their apps to work with Apple Intelligence. Apple said in June that eventually, Siri might be able to trigger any action a user can take in an app, as part of the company’s long-term vision for Siri.

“Siri will be able to perform hundreds of new actions within and across apps,” Kelsey Peterson, Apple’s director of machine learning, said in a video released by Apple Intelligence.

Apple could easily implement this in its own apps, but in order for Apple Intelligence to interact with the millions of non-Apple apps, developers would need to adopt a new approach to app programming. This means developers will need to create up to hundreds of additional code snippets called app intents.

Apple has a long history of getting developers to support new platform initiatives, and it’s running a well-worn tactic to get them on board — the personal attention of developer relations, the party atmosphere at the company’s annual developer conference, and most importantly Best of all, it’s promoted through app store promotions, which can generate millions of downloads for developers who join.

If third-party developers come on board and the Siri system works as advertised, it could represent one of Apple’s biggest and most enduring advantages in the artificial intelligence race.

“You should be able to connect everything together and achieve the future we’ve always envisioned, where you can use Siri conversationally and do many things at the same time,” said iOS developer Jordan Morgan. Wrote a tutorial About application intent.

Whether Apple can successfully attract millions of developers is a key question, and the stakes for the company are high.

The company is relying on Apple Intelligence, which only applies to last year’s iPhone 15 Pro or this year’s iPhone 16 models, to spur a wave of upgrades and boost flat iPhone sales. If Apple’s revamped Siri doesn’t get support from developers or fails to impress, it could hurt iPhone sales, and customers could end up choosing to use rival voice assistants through apps instead. Siri built-in.

Apple Intelligence Photos

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What are application intents?

For example, in the Music app, Apple has created about 10 intentions, including actions such as “Add to playlist”, “Play music” or “Select music”. Programmers say that a single application intent should define a single operation.

For example, Morgan says, if you use a caffeine tracking app, one purpose is to be able to show an overview of how much caffeine the user has consumed today.

When the app intent is complete, Apple’s various “system experiences” such as Widgets, Instant Activities, Control Center, and Shortcuts will be able to quickly display the currently running tracker, showing the amount of caffeine logged, without the user having to Turn on the App Tracking app.

System hunting is another big draw for some developers. App Intents will allow apps to display specific emails or other more granular data in Apple’s system search Spotlight.

Developers say app intent doesn’t take long to write, typically requiring only a few lines of code.

Michael Tigas, developer of the productivity app Focused Work, said that in previous years, Apple recommended that developers use App Intents for their most important functions.

“Now, if there’s a way to adapt your app to perform any general action, you should create an app intent for it,” Tigas said.

Fortunately for developers, they still have time to write all the code needed for the application’s intent. While Apple Intelligence will begin rolling out next month, the biggest improvements to Siri aren’t expected to be released until next year.

Apple must incentivize developers

Apple’s new Siri system can better understand questions even when users make speaking errors, a direct result of Apple’s use of language models, a counterpart to the larger language models that power systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

This means Siri will be more flexible in understanding the hundreds of different ways users express themselves, such as “Apply a photo filter to the image I took yesterday.”

Apple must train and test its models to understand the range of commands and problems that are most likely to occur with any given category of apps.

One drawback to Apple’s approach is that the new Siri will only support a handful of categories of apps at first, starting with photo and email apps. Eventually, Siri will support apps focused on books, journaling, whiteboarding, document management, word processing, browsers, cameras and photos, the company said.

Developers are already imagining how they plan to let users interact with their apps through sound.

A representative for premium email app Super Human told CNBC that the company plans to use Apple’s artificial intelligence system to answer questions about email content, such as “Hey Siri, when is my flight leaving?” or “Hey Siri, When will I meet with James to review his proposal?”

A drawback of Apple’s plan is seen by some developers, who worry that users will spend less time in their apps or confuse Apple intelligence with the artificial intelligence features they have built themselves.

Readdle CEO Igor Zhadanov said: “If this story only involves App Intents, developers will be worried that their products may be reduced to the role of conduits for powering Siri, and it will make them unclear how to build a sustainable business around it. .

Another drawback is that the Apple Intelligence feature is only available on the latest iPhones, which is a small portion of the total iPhone user base. The limited market of iPhone users may prevent developers from investing time and effort in supporting the technology in the short term.

“Apple limits these Apple Intelligence capabilities to new 2024 iPhones and last year’s more expensive models, so you can’t build something for the masses anyway,” Tigas said.