The latest iPhones, unveiled by Apple at a marketing event Monday, look virtually identical to last year’s models. But Apple hopes that what’s underneath — new software that brings what it describes as artificial intelligence to the new phones — will persuade people to upgrade.
Apple Intelligence, the company’s new suite of AI services, automates tasks including generating images, rewriting emails and summarizing web articles. Only the iPhone 16s unveiled Monday or last year’s iPhone 15 Pro can run the new software because older models are too slow to handle those tasks, according to the company. The faster iPhone 16 devices start at $800 and will arrive in stores later this month.
But what if I told you there was another way to get the same perks?
Long before Apple introduced Apple Intelligence at a software conference in June, many apps for automatically producing text and images had been widely available. Relying on a technology known as generative AI, which predicts what words and images belong together to write a catchy poem or generate a realistic-looking image of a cat on a windowsill, for instance, these types of services have been trendy for the last two years.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
By downloading a handful of apps, iPhone owners can get similar benefits and hold on to their older devices longer. After I tested dozens of generative AI apps in the last year, here are my recommendations.
Summarizing text
One of Apple Intelligence’s most anticipated features is its ability to take large blocks of text and distill the main points into a few sentences. This capability could be useful for summarizing a lengthy web article or lecture notes.
But there’s already a popular tool for summarizing web articles: Arc Search, a free browser developed by a startup. To test it, I loaded an 8,000-word feature from ProPublica about a chemist who blew the whistle on the manufacturer 3M. When I pinched the screen, the app generated a one-sentence overview of what the article was about, followed by three bullet points summing up the highlights. While the bullet points glossed over important details you would have gotten from reading the full article, I found the summary accurate.
For summarizing notes, the free web app Humata AI has become popular among academic researchers and lawyers. By visiting Humata.ai on a web browser, you can upload a document such as a PDF, and from there, you can type requests in a window to ask a chatbot to summarize the most important points. In response, the chatbot will show a digital copy of the PDF and highlight relevant portions of the text.
Writing tools
Apple Intelligence also includes tools to rewrite text — to make an email sound more professional, for instance. Lots of free apps can handle this task proficiently.
The best known include the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI, along with rivals like Gemini from Google and Bing AI from Microsoft — all apps that can be downloaded in the App Store. Just paste text into the app and …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Business
