Yahoo Finance

Apple's AI features called Apple intelligence. They're expected to become a or come to a device near you this week here with more on what's to come. We've got Yahoo Finance's tech editor Dan Haley. Hey Dan. So, what is a brewing over at Apple right now?

Hey Brad, this is going to be an update that users will get sometime this week. Apple hasn't said exactly, but it's part of iOS 18.1, iPad OS 18.1, and Mac OS 15.1, Sequoia. And essentially, the big takeaway from this is it's a start for Apple. This isn't going to be the thing that gets people rushing out the door to buy iPhones right away, but it does start to lay the groundwork for what we will see that could get people more interested in re-upping their phones when it comes to the next iteration of Apple intelligence, and that's currently in beta. That includes things like chat GPT integration with Siri and Apple's Visual intelligence lookup. But what let's go over what's included in this update itself. There's notification summaries. That's essentially going to cut down on the number of notifications that you get throughout the day just by literally summarizing everything that comes in. For instance, yesterday I was getting my fantasy football updates summarized, text messages summarized, news reports summarized. This morning, I got my dose of Yahoo Finance News summarized as well. Uh, it shows up on your your home screen on your iPhone, the notification center if you want to pull that up as well, and it's easy to use this to kind of triage your notifications and know, okay, I can skip this, or I don't have to skip this, and I need to get to it right away. One of the other things that they announced is writing tools. This is something that we've seen from other companies as well where essentially you'll be able to summarize, proof read, change the style of tone for some of the things that you write and get some ideas for for writing as well. And so, that's going to be available across the entire, uh, uh, uh, excuse me, operating system, whether that's iOS, iPad OS, or Mac OS. So you'll be able to do that in text messages, you'll be able to do that in emails, third-party apps. It's just going to be all over the place. And it can be a helpful tool, especially if you don't feel like reading through a whole long email, and you want to summarize it. Uh, speaking of emails, they also have priority inbox. So that's something where you're going to get notifications for what Apple intelligence believes are priority emails, things that are based on time, uh, uh, timeliness, things along those lines. Uh, I've been getting it for our, uh, kind of, you know, Yahoo Finance, uh, video team notifications. I'll get that in my priority inbox for the next morning. Uh, and you can also get email summaries in the email app. So that's something that's also very helpful. On the fun side of things, there's some photo changes as well. There's something called photo cleanup. Uh, basically, it'll let you take small objects out of your your shots or people in the background. This isn't something where you can say take a picture and remove your ex from it. Uh, it can't take out huge chunks. It's going to look awkward, but you can take out small things. So if there's, you know, trash and uh, in in the background or something, you can get rid of that, and no, your ex wouldn't count as trash either. Uh, and then there's also natural language search. There's something where you're able to say, okay, uh, if I want to look at photos of my wife from when we were in Paris, I could say look up pictures of Lisa in Paris or look up pictures of Lisa in a red dress in Paris. You can get that specific. And so it's able to do that. It can be a little hit or miss sometimes, though. Uh, it won't show you all of your photos either, so you may still have to do some scrolling. Uh, and then there's some Siri updates as well. Basically, Siri's getting a facelift with when you press the the side button or say, hey Siri, it'll show kind of a glowing rectangle around your your device. You'll also be able to type to Siri now, which is very helpful. Sometimes you just don't want to talk out loud and ask Siri a question. Uh, there it's going to get a lot smarter with chat GPT. Hopefully, we'll see when that's available. It's currently in a beta for developers. Uh, and those are really the the biggest things I think that you're you're going to get to play around with when this finally drops. As I said, I don't think it's going to be a big sales driver for the iPhone, but that may happen with the next round of updates.

Yeah. That's so interesting, Dan, because, I mean, I'm I'm taking a look at some of the IDC data. I think it dropped last week. You may have seen it as well talking about Apple re-entering into the top five in terms of the smartphone companies out there and and really what they had focused in on was despite the ongoing economic challenges, consumers highly motivated to purchase new smartphones after three years of pent up demand. And it was driven by some of these features that you're talking about. Net net, were were you impressed, and do you expect consumers to be impressed once they get it within their fingers and within their hands?

I think that when it comes to being impressed, I think the notification summaries is really going to be what what people notice and use the most. Uh, you know, writing tools, I I think that it's something that, you know, most people probably won't dive into it very often, but when they need it, it's there. I think the photo cleanup is going to be something that people like to use when you want to post on Instagram or something like that, and you want, you know, the perfect shot. Uh, that's something I could see people using. Uh, you know, the natural language search in in photos is incredibly helpful because we've all been at a party, you're talking to someone, like, oh, let me show you a photo, and then you end up scrolling forever. That's hopefully going to eliminate situations situations like that. But I don't necessarily know if this is really going to have people super jazzed. They may think, well, that's it. Uh, because the ads that they're running kind of make you think that this is the whole kit caboodle when they when they start to launch Apple intelligence. Uh, you know, and they they kind of are probably overselling a bit versus what's available or going to be available. I think the next kind of set of features, that that 18.2, uh, for iOS and iPad OS and 15.2 for Mac OS, I think that's where people might start to get really excited.

Embellishment and marketing. Say it ain't so, Dan. Come on now. Dan, thanks so much. Appreciate it.