Apple is cutting its work to fill the AI gap with Google, but the specific upgrades coming to iOS 18, especially Siri, can be a valuable time-saving feature. According to the Power On newsletter from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is working to give the iphone's virtual assistant the ability to automatically summarize notifications.

Perhaps Apple will call this "aggressive intelligence" and use the processing on the device, in line with the company's privacy spirit. As Gurman says, iOS18 gives Siri "an automatic summary of notifications from the iPhone, providing a brief overview of news articles, posting voice memos, auto-filling of calendars and app suggestions."

In addition, the voice feature of the assistant is set for an overhaul that will give it a "more conversational feel."

Gurman also noted other AI features that appear on iOS 18, such as AI—based editing of photos, but interestingly, the Chatgpt-style chatbot is somewhat pasted compared to Apple's upcoming WWDC event

Siri is somewhat pasted compared to Google's assistant - and the latter will become more popular as it transforms into Gemini. It's just getting stronger. But Apple is committed to running as many on-devices as possible. The aforementioned privacy factor is working, but it also reduces the response time as it does not need to communicate with the server.  In Gemini Nano, Google condenses the multimodal LLM and runs it on the device, while Apple seems to be deploying the same tactic to iOS18 using the iPhone's neural engine. 

When I first saw the iOS17.4 beta on May, there was a reference to a private framework called "SiriSummarization" that relays it to the ChatGPT API. But Apple has also developed several new models from its own research department that could play a role in the next iteration of Siri. 1 of them is called ReALM (reference resolution as language modeling) and is designed to run on the phone, like Gemini Nano.

Apple's ReALM is a visual model that reconstructs what is displayed on the screen, labels each entity, and passes it to Siri as additional context for clues to user requests. Such models can capture notifications, label them, and generate accurate summaries without the need for anything from the user or the cloud, so you can quickly see how they help with summaries. On the other hand, the clutch of iOS18 rumors we've already collected include playlists generated by Apple Music, slide making in Keynote, recommended text in Pages documents, and content on web pages

The good news is that you don't have to wait long to hear about all of these in person.WWDC is less than 1 month.