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apple is preparing to join silicon valley's artificial intelligence race, relying on a core advantage: its 34 million app developers.

it is expected that later this month, iphone users will get their first taste of the company’s artificial intelligence system, apple intelligence. apple is counting on apple intelligence to become a major selling point of its latest flagship product, the iphone 16.

it is worth noting that apple’s artificial intelligence technology has not yet reached the advanced level of top laboratories such as openai’s chatgpt, google’s gemini or meta’s llama. apple doesn’t go with the biggest models and doesn’t achieve the capabilities of some of the more compelling, cutting-edge models, such as openai’s latest singing voice model.

what apple hopes will be unique about its artificial intelligence is that siri may actually be able to perform a series of practical operations on the user's phone, such as sending emails, interpreting calendar information, taking and editing photos, etc. these are currently the artificial intelligence chats of other companies. robots cannot yet achieve this. to achieve this goal, apple is actively mobilizing its large team of third-party developers to fine-tune their applications to work with apple intelligence.apple inc.revealed in june, its long-term vision is for siri to trigger actions a user might take in any app.

"siri will have the ability to perform hundreds of new tasks within and across apps," kelsey peterson, apple's director of machine learning, emphasized in an apple intelligence release video.

while it would be relatively easy for apple to implement this functionality for its own apps, getting apple intelligence to interact with millions of non-apple apps would require developers to adopt an innovative programming approach, which would require developers to create a large number of apps called additional code snippet for app intent.

apple has a rich history of attracting developers to support its new platform initiatives, and it has always used a proven strategy to attract them - providing personalized attention in developer relations and creating the company's annual developer conference the cheerful atmosphere on the platform and, most importantly, promotion through the app store brought millions of downloads to developers who joined the platform.

if third-party developers actively respond and join in to make the siri system work as efficiently as advertised, then it is likely to become a core and lasting competitive advantage for apple in the field of artificial intelligence.

"you should be able to string together features to sort of achieve the future we've all been dreaming of - having a conversation through siri and getting things done at the same time," said ios developer jordan morgan. he has written a tutorial on app intents.

whether apple can successfully convince millions of developers to join the ranks is a critical question with far-reaching implications for the company.

apple is viewing apple intelligence as a key driver of the upgrade craze and boosting iphone sales. it is worth noting that apple intelligence currently only supports the iphone 15 pro series launched last year and the newly released iphone 16 series this year. if apple's improved siri fails to gain widespread support from developers or fails to impress users, it could have a negative impact on iphone sales, causing consumers to switch to competing voice assistants through apps. , instead of the built-in siri.

what is an app intent?

for example, in the music application, apple has designed about 10 app intents, covering specific operations such as "add to playlist", "play music" or "select music". programmers point out that each app intent should clearly define a specific action.

if you're using a caffeine tracking app, one of the intents might be to show you how much caffeine you've consumed that day, morgan said.

once the app intent is set up, apple's various "system experience" features, such as widgets, real-time activities, control center, and shortcuts, can quickly display the currently running tracker and visually display the amount of caffeine recorded. and users no longer need to open the tracking app separately.

for some developers, the system search function is another big draw. app intents will allow apps to surface specific emails or other more granular data in apple's spotlight system searches.

developers say that writing app intents does not take long and usually only involves writing a few lines of code.

michael tigas, the developer of the productivity app focused work, revealed that in the early years, apple recommended that developers develop app intents for the core functions of their apps.

"today, if you can tweak your app to perform any common action, you should create an app intent for that action," tigas said.

thankfully for developers, there's still plenty of time to write all the code needed for app intents. while apple intelligence will be available next month, major improvements to siri aren't scheduled to be officially released until next year.

apple must incentivize developers

apple's newly launched siri system has significantly improved its ability to understand user problems, even if users make errors when expressing themselves. this is due to apple's in-depth cooperation in the field of language models. andOpenAIcompared with the large language models used by chatgpt and others, siri has shown unique advantages.

today, siri is more flexible in capturing the diversity of user expressions, such as, “please add a filter to the photo i took yesterday.”

to ensure siri's accurate response, apple rigorously trains and tests its model so that it can deeply understand common commands and questions in various applications.

however, it should be noted that the initial support for the new siri is relatively limited, mainly focusing on photo and email applications. but apple revealed that future versions of siri will be expanded to support a variety of applications such as books, journals, whiteboards, file management, word processing, browsers, cameras, and photos.

at the same time, developers are also actively imagining how to use sound interaction to make their applications closer to user needs.

a representative for premium email app superhuman revealed that the company plans to use apple's artificial intelligence system to query email content, such as asking "hey, siri, when is my flight leaving?" or "hey, siri, when will my flight leave with james?" meet to review his proposal?"

however, some developers have reservations about apple's plans. they worry that users may spend less time on their apps or confuse apple intelligence with artificial intelligence features developed by developers themselves.

igor zhadanov, ceo of readdle, the developer of the email app spark, expressed his concerns in an email: "if it only revolves around app intents, developers may be worried about their products." it becomes a transmission pipeline for siri, making it difficult to build a sustainable business model around siri.”

in addition, another limitation of the apple intelligence function is that it currently only supports the latest iphones, and this group of users only accounts for a minority of the total number of iphone users. the limited iphone user market may become an obstacle for developers to invest resources and efforts in supporting the technology in the short term.

tigas pointed out: "apple has limited the apple intelligence function to the new iphone in 2024 and the high-end models launched last year, so it is difficult for you to build products for the mass market." (tencent technology special compiler jinlu)