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This week Apple made a splash by trumpeting the coming arrival of “Apple Intelligence,” it’s brand of AI for the current edition and new iPhone. Macs and iPads, saying the tools would be helpful in making our lives easier.
I don’t doubt that Apple’s AI will be selectively good.
But reality check: this is from the company that has spent 13 years trying to make us love the personal digital assistant Siri, an app tech publication The Verge refers to as “vaguely annoying.”
And Siri is the centerpiece for cool new photo things you’ll be able to do with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max and next premium editions of the phones, with the iOS 18 software, which will be released in September.
But wait a minute. Siri? Can the iPhone assistant do any more for you now than just creating reminders, alarms and the like? Or does it too often respond to your queries without a true audio response, and instead maddeningly say “I found this on the web. Check it out.”
This is the same Siri Apple claims will soon respond with better answers, and be able to actually conduct a rolling conversation, like we do now with ChatGPT, the gold standard of AI.
To stay current and beloved on Wall Street, Apple had to do a better job of showing that it too can play along with Microsoft, Google and other AI pioneers, even if much of the technology is still early. (Sometimes it’s great though, as in what Photoshop can do with generative AI and some of the AI generated images from prompts.)
Apple Insider has a great primer on all the new things Apple says Siri will be able to do in iOS18, and the best parts are photo related.
Highlights:
Beyond just asking Siri to take a photo, which you can do now, you’ll soon be able to ask the camera app to open to a specific mode - photo, portrait, video, slow motion - and set a timer. (“Hey Siri, set the Camera Timer to ten seconds.”)
I love this one. Accessing the iPhone Camera timer by voice would be incredibly useful, as it’s a feature I reach for all the time, but the tool is way hidden in the camera menu and takes too many clicks.
In the Photos app, Apple says Siri will be able to locate certain photos (I’ve heard that one before, and it rarely works now) and do simple edits like rotating a photo (thank you) add photos to specific Albums and apply an AI edit to an image.
Pro: All potentially very useful.
Con: Have you ever used Apple Photos’ Memories collections in the “For You” section, where AI pulls photos from your trips and makes mini-movies with canned music? For me, it’s not worth the effort to look, as it always gets about 60% of the images right, but also throws in a bucket of clunkers that deserve to be deleted.
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For instance, in the automatically generated Memories from Yellowstone National Park, shot this week, the first shot is of a badly framed road. For a collection of images from a Cody, Wyoming Rodeo, it opens with a statue from Cody (far from the Rodeo) and then inserts an upside down shot of a guitar.
That’s fine, I never asked for the collection in the first place, and it’s free. But when it comes to all the great things Apple says it will be able to do with AI in just a few months from now, very simply, I’ll believe when I see it.
I hope it’s great. And I love the idea that I can soon record a phone conversation on the iPhone and have the AI transcribe it. That’s a reporter’s dream. (I know—I can already do this now on the desktop with Otter.ai, but that’s with Zoom calls.)
Sidebar:
Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant are no more useful than Siri, and also suffer from unrealized expectations. Both are also getting an AI infusement, but I’m also skeptical that we’ll see much of a change. I’ll revisit at the end of the year.
Apple Photos App
Meanwhile, the Photos app will get what Apple says is its biggest redesign, by adding specific sections to the wall of photos beyond just your most recent shots. As seen in the image above, Apple will add recents, people and pets and pinned collections to the main page. I doubt I’ll use any of them, but if it helps people find photos faster, I’m all for it.
Apple’s iOS 18 upgrade will be released in September. Many non AI features will work on older phones (from the XR on up, through the 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15) but only the Pro editions of the 15 and some of the 16s will work with AI because they have the more powerful processors.
My AI Motel in the Teton Valley
The week of the Apple AI WWDC hype we happened to be staying in a cute little roadside motel in Victor, Idaho, or should I say, a little “Bot Motel.”
There is no human being at the front desk. Ever.
You can’t call anyone for restaurant recommendations, directions, questions about how to get the air conditioner or coffee machine to work.
The idea of driving up late at night and hoping to snag a room from someone in the front desk? Impossible.
Get this: the owners will only communicate with you via text message.
They send you a text the day of your arrival with information about which room they have selected for you, the wifi password and the pin code to open the door.
When you respond with a question, like “Can I have more towels please?” you get this generated response from the motel bot:
“Thank you for your message. Please note that while we have limited availability for live responses, we have programmed many common questions to be answered automatically. If our system knows an answer to your questions, you will receive the response shortly.”
I don’t like talking to Bots now—in fact I hate it, and I especially don’t like spending $200 a night to stay somewhere and not have IRL human contact. I asked the owner (via text) what the deal was with this type of operation and got a curt response: with a human on premises, “The business wouldn’t work and employment could be challenging.”
Not buying it. Other Teton Valley motels and hotels employ live humans and charge the same rates. I checked.
How would you feel about staying in a Bot Motel? Let me know in the comments.
That’s a wrap for today’s edition and the seven week (!!!!) road trip. I’m back to the home desk Sunday, where I will celebrate Father’s Day by editing the first of the Photowalks episodes from the Mountain West and setting up a live show for Thursday. Hope you’ll join me!
Jeff
No BOT motel for me. We usually don’t require much but it’s good to know there is someone to help when you need it. We do stay at places that don’t have anyone on-site during the night but that’s never been a problem. Looks like you’ve had a great trip.
In this article you say SIRI can take a photo for you? Really? How does that work?