Paul Stenhouse: Apple's next software developer conference and Microsoft pulling back on some AI features due to safety concerns

Apple's big software developer conference is next week - what will they be announcing? 

Lot's of AI features... Surprise! Apple is set to unveil its AI strategy which is going to be more focused around automating tasks and summarizing information, rather than image and video generation. For example, the upgraded Mail app will use AI to sort emails in your inbox, there will be a way to 'catch up' on everything that's happened on while you've been away from your device, voice messages will be transcribed for quick scanning, and Siri will be able to complete more 'app-level' tasks like reply to a specific email or delete it, edit a photo, or summarize a news article. 

Apple has played a big security card for the past few years so just how much personal data it lets leave your device will be interesting... and if it does, how it sells the security of its cloud processing. 

Outside of AI:

Apple's password manager called "keychain" has been hidden away in the settings for years, but it's going to be made into its own app.
The calculator is coming to iPad!
Your iPhone home screen will be more customizable than ever before, including arranging app icons in something other than a rigid grid, and being able to change the colour of the icons.
And you'll be able to schedule an iMessage to be sent in the future. 

 
Microsoft has had to pull back on some of its new AI features because of security concerns 

The new Copilot Plus PCs come with a feature called "Recall", which effectively takes screenshots of what you're doing and stores them so you can go back to check what that price was for that item or recover a sentence from an email you decided you preferred. The feature was going to be turned on by default, which Microsoft has now reversed. There are also concerns the way it stores the images and the associated metadata was unencrypted, so bad actors could have installed ransomware and had full access to the Recall data. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks at b.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
It's time to catch up with our tech spert, who
is counting down the days to Apple's big software development
conference or develop or conference this week. What are they
going to be announcing?

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Paul?

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Well, can you?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Can you guess Jack AI AI? Paul AI?

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, surprise, No, It's actually really interesting because Apple has
not been a first mover in this space. I think
what we're going to see from Apple is how you
can apply AI to actually be useful to your day
to day life. Right, So they're not going to do
anything crazy. The expectation isn't. They're not going to do
anything around image and video generation, leave that to the

(00:51):
folks of like Adobe. Right. What they're going to do
is they are going to probably play more of a
virtual assistant, a digital assistant for your life, right, think
about some arising information, think about doing tasks for you. So,
for example, this that they're going to be upgrading the
mail app on your iPhone for example, to start to
you know, help sort your emails into maybe slightly smarter

(01:13):
categories to help you prioritize. There's talk of a summary
of all the things that might have happened on your
phone since you last looked at it. That sounds quite valuable.
You can put it in your phone away and you
can just get a nice little summary of mails or
the text messages that want all of your attention. See,
that's the type of stuff I think to be quite interesting.

(01:35):
They're talking about as well, making Siri smarter, and she's
going to be able to do things like kind of
at the application level, so potentially reply to specific emails,
delete specific emails, maybe edit photos, or even do things
like summarize a news article. But can I just say
one thing, Jack Apple, the kings of marketing, right, they

(01:58):
are going to rebrand AI as Apple Intelligence, which I
saw that and I just thought that is genius. You
know how much they paid, but it was worth every
single season.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
It is very interesting because there's, I mean, there's the
hype around AI at the moment is absolutely bananas. But
like you say, you like you say, Apple hasn't really
been a fast mover relative to other companies likes of Microsoft.
Open AI obviously kind of dominating the AI space at
the moment, and very interesting this week in video, which
is the silicon chip maker that started making chips for

(02:37):
use in computer games, has now overtaken Apple as the
second most valuable publicly listed company in the world by
capital valuation, So three trillion US dollars market cap, which
is just crazy. So are you expecting as well as
that AI Apple Intelligence announcements this week? Are you expecting

(02:57):
anything in terms of a universal operating software across Apple
devices or are we still away way away from that.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
I'm hoping so there hasn't been an indication that the
it's coming yet. Look, can I just go back to
one thing you mentioned about Apple and AI. I think
it's really fascinating is that Apple has been a company
that has talked a lot about security, and they've actually
kind of said made part of their marketing that they're
different to Google, they're different to Meta because they keep

(03:25):
all your device, all your information on the device. I'm
really interested to see if they're going to do if
they're going to move away from that and move to
the cloud and tap into some of the processing that
they can do there, or if they're going to do
a lot of that on the device, because that's the
piece you mentioned, right, the universal operating system, that's Apple
sweet spot. They can do both. They can do the
hardware and they can do the software. And I think

(03:46):
what we're starting to see and one of the things
that they are talking about launching outside of AI at
this is actually taking some of the features that are
available on mac os, on iPad and on your iPhone,
such as the keychain, which is effectively a password manager
hidden in your settings. And what they're going to do
is they're going to pull that out of the settings
and they're going to make that an application that works

(04:08):
across all of those different devices. So that may actually
be their strategy and the shorter term, which is, hey,
we know that things now can play across universally, but
we're still recognizing that they are different, but we are
going to allow you to use the same applications across
more across more devices. Because remember too, they've also got

(04:29):
their vision pro headset. That will be interesting to see too.
How much they play into that. They're kind of caught
between two different hype machines in some way, right, Yeah,
between the AI hype machine and the court between the
spatial computing hype machine. So how long they spend kemos
typically ninety minutes to it. Yeah, yeah, sorry, ninety minutes
to two hours. How much time they spend talking about egos,

(04:50):
I'm sure is going to be on the minds of
many watery analysts.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Oh very good, can't waite. Thank you, Paul. That is
our texpert Paul Stenhausk.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, Listen live
to News Talks' B from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.