Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new generative AI offering, won’t just be a consumer-facing feature; developers will be able to take advantage of the latest technology, too. In Apple’s keynote address at WWDC 2024 on Monday, the company announced that developers would be able to integrate the experience powered by Apple Intelligence into their own apps.
Apple’s SDKs (software development kits) have been updated with a variety of new APIs and frameworks that will allow app makers to do things like integrate the Image Playground — or genAI image creation — with just a few lines of code. Apple showed off how an app like Craft could use this offering to make users’ documents more visual by allowing them to add AI images.
AI-powered writing tools will also be automatically available in any app that use the standard editable text view. For this, Apple demonstrated how an app like Bear Notes would automatically be able to allow users to rewrite, proofread and summarize their notes.
In addition, Apple is building more ways for developers to take actions in apps with Siri. Developers who have already adopted SiriKit — an SDK for integrating Siri into their apps — will see immediate enhancements for many of Siri’s new capabilities without any extra work on their part, Apple said. This includes areas like Lists, Notes, Media, Messaging, Payments, Restaurant reservations, VoIP calling and Workouts.
The App Intents framework, which allows for lightweight app-like interactions without the app being installed, will also gain access to Apple Intelligence. Apple is defining new intents and making them available to developers across categories starting with a subset of categories including Books, Browsers, Cameras, Document Readers, File Management, Journals, Mail, Photos, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Whiteboards, and Word Processors.
These intents are defined and tested so they’re easier for developers to adopt, Apple claims.
With these intents, a photo-editing app like Darkroom could leverage the Apply Filter intent so users could just say “Apply a cinematic present to the photo I took of Ian yesterday” to have the app take action.
Also on Monday, the company announced its own password-manager app, AI-generated Bitmoji and Calculator for the iPad.
