Apple aficionados welcomed the unveiling of the new iPhone 16 on Monday. The device, which will officially be sold starting on September 20th, still has many of the features that make Apple so popular, but there is one key twist- this iPhone will be the first to incorporate AI into its workings. ABC News technology reporter Mike Duboski appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to discuss the new bells and whistles that has Apple hoping sales of iPhone 16 are brisk.
“At its core, these are new iPhones,” Duboski told Berman and Riedel. “The big argument that Apple is making this year is that these are the first phones they say that are built from the ground up to support what is called ‘Apple Intelligence’. This is Apple’s umbrella term for all their generative artificial intelligence tools that they have cooking. This means that you can use AI to generate emails, to help you change the tone of a text message, you can create images in a new app… and the big one here is Siri. Siri is their voice assistant. It can be used with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. It’s often kind of laughed at for being not very good; they think that using generative artificial intelligence, Siri will not just get a lot smarter, but become easier to talk to, because you will be able to talk to it in natural language.”
But there’s a twist to the twist- the AI technology won’t actually be ready until a software download is made available in October, and other features won’t be ready for use until early 2025. Duboski says Apple is banking on people wanting the tech before the bugs are worked out. “A lot of this stuff is just not kind of ready for prime time yet. We’ve seen these tools go wrong in the past. We’ve seen Google integrate this into Search and that go horribly awry… but Apple is a $3 trillion company, and they’re now integrating this technology into one of the most popular technology products ever, the iPhone, so clearly they want to hold off and make sure this stuff is ready first.”
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