Apple IS Focusing On AI, But They Aren’t Saying So
There’s a lot of Artificial Intelligence going on inside Apple. We just got a whiff of it!
In the race of being innovative, Apple is thought of being a notch behind Google and Facebook, especially when developments in the much sought-after field of artificial intelligence (AI) are taken into consideration.
Artificial Intelligence is no doubt being hailed as the next big thing in computing. In fact, that’s been the moniker it’s worn for years now, perhaps even decades (most people didn’t see smartphones, phablets and tablets coming!).
If Google and Facebook’s developments in this field are taken into account, then they have developed self-learning AI agents that can learn and master even complex games like Go, whereas Apple only has Siri on board, that we know about at least.
Facebook has demonstrated Chatbots and Microsoft made its place in the world of bots with Tay, a debatable Twitter bot that ended up disappointing and offending many.
Well just because Apple is not spelling it out loud or making headlines about its ongoing work related to AI, doesn’t mean that Apple is sitting idle.
It’s just that Apple practices great introversion to works-in-progress. This is one brand that is loathe to talking about plans and experiments, and make things public only when it figures out how to employ the technology in its products.
In fact, Apple is making a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is hunting for secure locations in the San Francisco Bay area to test it. This too, is a rumour. Not a verifiable fact!
Anyhow, at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the team hinted strongly at the fact that Apple is by no stretch of imagination, “out of the league” or behind anyone. Among the many announcements that the company announced at the WWDC were, iPhone voicemail transcription, facial recognition features within Apple Photo and keyboard recommendations based on text message conversation.
All these features count on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to a huge extent. These make use of software that considers what’s going on (be it in a message thread or a photo library) and then provide a suitable suggestion accordingly.
It won’t be justified if we say that these features are new or unique to Apple but one thing is for sure that these features are getting better with each passing day, becoming more user-friendly on its devices than on other platforms.
Apple’s new version of iOS will include voicemail transcriptions; Federighi announced this in the WWDC conference in San Francisco. This implies that instead of having to listen to long, tedious voicemails, the users will now be able to see text transcriptions of the new messages in your voicemail inbox.
Also announced was a new facial recognition system — blink and miss, unless you were watching closely.
This facial recognition system came as part of an upgrade to Photos, which will soon help you to organize or list your pictures according to the faces in them. “The big news in Photos this year is Advanced Computer Vision”, Federighi told the eager audience out. “We’re applying advanced deep learning techniques to bring facial recognition to the iPhone”.
This might sound a little similar; because it is indeed similar to Facebook’s established system of auto-tagging photos and cataloguing them by person. In fact, it has resemblance to Google Photos also.
So it can be said that Apple seems to be “catching up”.
Next up in Photos is Faces and Places. Places, has made a comeback on iOS with an Advanced Computer Vision which brings facial recognition to the table and also works with objects and scenes for search just like Google Photos. Advanced AI also searches locally on device to search photos for Memories to re-emerge trips and highlight reels of certain dates. Thereby, taking you down by the memory lane.
All this is an indicator to Apple not being lazy, but probably sitting there, observing other companies’ experiences, finding talent in companies, planning acquisition, boosting budgets, creating the best products it call, and only then setting its foot down in the battlefield to deliver its best shot in (some) September.
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
