IOS 18 May Be The biggest software update in iPhone’s history
After many years of fighting adoption for RCS, Apple has finally agreed to support it in the up and coming software update. Rich Communication Services (RCS) support is significant for a variety of reasons:
- Enhanced Messaging Features: RCS support elevates the standard SMS experience by offering features similar to modern chatting apps. These include read receipts, typing indicators, group chats, and the ability to send high-resolution images and videos.
- Business Communication: RCS provides businesses with more sophisticated methods of engaging with customers. They can send enriched and interactive content such as QR codes, receipts, boarding passes, and product carousels.
- Improved Connectivity: Unlike traditional SMS, which relies on mobile networks, RCS can function over Wi-Fi or mobile data, much like iMessage and other internet-based messaging platforms.
- Interoperability: One of the major advantages of RCS is that it is designed to work across all devices and carriers who support the protocol, creating a unified, rich messaging experience for users worldwide.
Another update IOS users are excited about is the use of generative AI for Siri. Siri has long been the recipient of much criticism due to its limited usefulness. The introduction of generative AI has sparked the interest in virtual assistants because of the incredible capabilities of AIs such as GPT and Bard.
Generative AI would be beneficial for Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant on iPhone, in several ways:
- Enhanced User Interaction: Generative AI can learn from past interactions and predict appropriate responses, providing more relevant and personalized interaction with users.
- Better Natural Language Understanding: Generative AI can significantly improve the way Siri understands and responds to complex queries, making the conversation more fluid and natural.
- Context-Aware Responses: Generative AI can provide Siri with the ability to understand the context of conversations better, enabling it to deliver more accurate and relevant responses.
- Continuous Learning: Generative AI models can continuously learn and adapt to users’ preferences, leading to a more personalized and refined user experience over time.
- Creative Problem Solving: Being ‘generative’ means the ability to create new content, potentially allowing Siri to craft unique solutions to user queries, rather than simply pulling from a set database of responses.
Imagine having the power of GPT/Bard accessible in the palm of your hands. You would immediately see improvements in all of the following and more.
- Virtual Assistants: Siri on iPhone, Google Assistant on Android, and Cortana on Microsoft devices use AI to understand voice commands and provide relevant responses.
- Camera Applications: AI is heavily used in smartphone cameras for features such as object detection, image recognition, and enhancing images. Functions like portrait mode, scene detection, or night mode on many phones utilize AI.
- Predictive Text and Auto-Correct: Smartphones use AI to predict what you might type next, learn from your language usage, and even correct your spelling errors.
- Facial Recognition: AI is used to unlock many smartphones using facial recognition, with algorithms that can accurately identify specific individuals.
- Recommendation Systems: AI enables personalized content recommendations in app stores, music apps, or news feeds based on users’ previous activities and preferences.
- Health and Fitness Tracking: AI is used in health apps to track and predict health trends, performance, and provide recommendations for users’ fitness plans.
- Anomaly Detection: AI can monitor for unusual behavior, perhaps indicating fraudulent activity, in applications like banking or security apps.
- Speech Recognition: AI can transcribe speech to text in real time, which is particularly useful for hands-free messaging or note-taking.
- Augmented Reality (AR) Applications: Apps like Snapchat use AI for facial feature detection to apply various AR filters, while other apps can identify objects or text in the real world.
Exciting times ahead, stay tuned for more.