Apple’s announcement on artificial intelligence is a big shift for the company

It&#x27;s not so much about AI as it is about putting all services behind an Apple interface. &quot;Users will soon be able to use Slack, Uber, or Skype, by talking directly to Siri.&quot; That doesn&#x27;t mean launching the vendor&#x27;s app. It means bypassing it.<p>Apple is taking control of the user experience with third parties. It&#x27;s the next generation of the &quot;portal&quot; concept. Expect to see Apple standards on what your API needs to look like.

&gt; Such technology can make the phone or other device appear smarter because it anticipates the types of activities people want to do.<p>Currently all the attempts I seen to anticipate what I want make applications far more annoying (do you want to send this email to your mother as well?). Its kind of like an uncanny valley. An application that truly could anticipate my needs would be good, but when it tries to anticipate and gets it wrong, it becomes worse than the application that doesn&#x27;t try and silently waits for me to give it instructions.

Google at their last conference put AI so central – as the next big thing, that I just can&#x27;t help to think, that Apple was forced to follow that path. So they used the terminology of &quot;AI&quot; and &quot;deep learning&quot; in their presentation. Yet it didn&#x27;t make me confident they are really up to it. That they really have the expertise, to make this into something that does work (even on the phone itself! - all the other deep learning algorithm need huge frameworks with GPUs!)<p>Myself, I wasn&#x27;t able to experience the promised virtues of AI from Google itself. So I wouldn&#x27;t go as far to call it a bluff from Google. But definitely from Apple, as of now.

Note that the words &quot;Artificial Intelligence&quot; were not once uttered during the keynote.

&gt; For example, Apple will now scan your photos using facial recognition to cluster people together in your photo collection.<p>Apple&#x27;s OS X photo apps have done facial recognition since 2009. This new thing is more advanced as well as a first for iOS, but I&#x27;d hardly call it a &quot;big shift&quot;.

Good for Apple they are finally responding to the market and developers by opening up their wall a bit.

Apple lead with Graphical User Interfaces for the better part of 30 years. First with the original Mac bringing Xerox technology to the masses. Then with the NeXTStep revived iMac, the clever iPod, and the smart phone. Now they struggle in the post GUI era of Voice and A.I.

Another company going to do what they don&#x27;t have any clue how to do. Google+, Bing, ... Seems like we now have 4-5 companies copying each other in a silly way all the time. Apple&#x2F;MS simply can&#x27;t do cloud properly whereas Google barely keeps with Amazon, Amazon&#x27;s AI is horrible comparing to Google, Apple is copying MS&#x27; surface and design (!), Google+ can&#x27;t do Facebook at all, Facebook can&#x27;t do ads properly, MS can&#x27;t do search... Looks wonderful for Apple&#x27;s AI.

No it&#x27;s not, Apple have since decade facial recognition in iPhone, voice recognition in Siri (with a bit of AI to generate the answer), and handwriting recognition too.

Face recognition and picture processing is considered AI?

All of those features sound awful to me. I don&#x27;t want AI scanning my text messages and &quot;anticipating&quot; what I want to do. That&#x27;s just way too creepy. The photo stuff, irrelevant. I realized long ago that I never look at my photos later so i stopped taking them. But if I did I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d want Apple slurping them all up to run recognition algorithms.