How will an iPhone powered by Google's Gemini AI work?

作者 | Boone Ashworth

译者 | Hirakawa

Curated | Ling Min

Apple and Google are reportedly teaming up to integrate Google's generative AI service, Gemini, into iOS. Bloomberg was the first to report the news, which was subsequently confirmed by the New York Times. If the deal goes through, it will be a huge collaboration between two tech giants that have long competed in the field of software and hardware.

This also raises a lot of questions about how Gemini will run on Apple devices and which company will continue to hold control. Neither Apple nor Google have publicly responded to the news.

Judging by past experience, there is a chance that this deal will fail. Michael Gartenberg, a tech analyst and former Apple's marketing director, said: "In the past, this kind of leak could have killed the deal. The first rule of trading with Apple is not to talk about Apple. But in the current situation, Gartenberg said, there's a real good chance the deal will actually go through. At the very least, Apple needs to make the deal.

Over the past year and a half, all the most suffocating technological innovations have been related to artificial intelligence, and Apple needs to prove that it is also a player in this game. Not to mention that Google has announced that they will soon launch their in-device AI service, Gemini Nano, on the Pixel 8, marking the beginning of an explosion of mobile AI.

Apple is already lagging behind big generative AI companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. Apple has big plans internally when it comes to large language models, but whatever tools they're working on are not ready to be released to the world. Gartenberg said Apple's sluggishness makes it look more like it's being caught off guard by a generative AI movement in full swing.

Patrick Moorhead, Founder and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights &Strategy, said: "The competition is fierce. The whole of Silicon Valley is scrambling to develop this core capability, and this time Apple missed out. ”

For Apple, time is of the essence. Apple's largest software development conference, the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), is usually held in June. As the conference approaches, expectations for Apple's generative AI strategy will come to a head.

"If Apple's answer is just to focus on face computers or add more widgets, it will feel pretty hollow," Gartenberg said. Because when it comes to artificial intelligence, Apple really needs to have something to get its hands on by June 2024. This is the deadline. And then people will look at Apple and say, "What's your story?"

Apparently, Apple is feeling the pressure. Recently, the company abandoned its self-driving car program and refocused resources on its internal generative AI projects. Now, it's partnering with Google to bring new AI features to its most popular devices.

So, if the deal goes through, what will Gemini look like on the iPhone?

First of all, Gartenberg said that the phone will most likely have a label that clearly does not belong to Apple. "It's probably something that Apple can't cover up with its own brand," he said. Maybe it will be a setting where you can choose the assistant, which can be Siri Classic or Siri Sequel. If I were Google, I would stick to putting my own stamp on it. ”

He pointed out that the default search engine on iOS is now Google Search and has not been renamed as an Apple service. Any AI feature based on Gemini is likely to be similarly branded with Google's signature, especially at a time when Google is so keen to show off its AI.

Apple is also likely to remain focused on its own ambitions. Siri, the occasionally useful but much-maligned voice assistant, has long lagged behind other digital assistants. Not expecting it to shine, but Apple may expect Gemini's advanced AI technology to give its struggling digital assistant a new lease of life.

"I think they're going to double down on Siri and say, 'This is the Siri we envisioned when we launched Siri 10 years ago,'" Moorhead says. Essentially, things aren't any different, just more valuable. It's going to be something that really works. ”

This powerful super Siri can be a very complete chatbot that integrates conversational artificial intelligence to take a deep look at your life. It is likely to drive real-time language translation, although this may be worrying. Apple can also use Gemini to support advanced photo and video editing techniques, such as swapping backgrounds, combining multiple photos with just the right face for each person, or using AI editing tools to process photos more holistically.

The image generation feature may appear on the desktop, just like something generated with Dall-E or Midjourney. Moorhead suggests that Apple could even integrate this functionality into Siri, such as using voice commands to ask a digital assistant to "set the background to blue" or "set this photo to a sunny day" and see the results directly in the picture scroll.

Moorhead said one of the key features that AI phones are expected to roll out across is – not just iPhones, but Android phones – augmented AI life snapshots. The idea is that the on-device AI can record everything that happens on your phone during the day and compile it for future recall.

"Snapshots are going to be a big hit," Moorhead says. It would be a great thing for someone like me who can't remember anything and has to write everything down. ”

Of course, these are all features that companies like Google and Samsung have previously hyped up, or at least are already in development. But Apple is what Apple is, and while it's not usually the first company to bring new innovations to market, it has ways to make its ideas more appealing or easier to use — even when forced to integrate another company's technology.

"Apple has an opportunity to explore how the next generation of AI can be implemented at Apple and combined with Siri to create better products," Gartenberg said. It's not enough for them to just provide basic generative AI capabilities. They must be able to say that while they have adopted something from Google, on top of that, they have their own innovations and breakthroughs. ”

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