Apple plans to improve Apple Intelligence and Siri by quietly using your data - here’s what’s changing

Apple had hedged hopes on its new artificial intelligence features (Apple Intelligence), which were first introduced at WWDC 2024 and were supposed to roll out with the iPhone 16 last year, however, the rollout did not fully materialise. 

While the Cupertino-based tech giant rolled out some of those features via new updates, many crucial features are still lacking even with the latest iOS 18.4 build. 

The problem isn't just that Apple's AI features have been delayed, even those features that have been rolled have failed to impress even the most loyal iPhone users. Meanwhile, Samsung and Google are adding newer AI features with every launch, many backed by Gemini AI. 

Apple's plan to catch up in the AI race 

Apple is now ratcheting up its plan to catch up in the AI race by improving the efficiency of its foundation model by analysing the data on customers' devices, according to a Bloomberg report. 

Notably, the iPhone maker currently uses synthetic data to train its AI models. This data mimics the real-life user inputs without any personal details but isn't always representative of the actual user data. 

In order to catch up with OpenAI and Google, Apple will use a new method to create ‘useful synthetic data’ by comparing its existing data with recent samples of real-world emails from iPhone, iPad and Mac email app. 

By comparing the real-world emails with the fake inputs, Apple will then be able to determine which part of its data is most in line with the actual use case. The new method is expected to help the company improve some of its AI features, like notification summaries and Writing Tools. 

“Synthetic data are created to mimic the format and important properties of user data, but do not contain any actual user generated content. When creating synthetic data, our goal is to produce synthetic sentences or emails that are similar enough in topic or style to the real thing to help improve our models for summarization, but without Apple collecting emails from the device,” Apple explained the process in a blogpost.