Apple joins AI competition by leveraging its developer community for a competitive advantage.

• To remain competitive in Silicon Valley's AI race, Apple is leveraging its greatest strength: its vast community of 34 million app developers.
• To enable Apple Intelligence to communicate with a vast array of non-Apple apps, developers must create hundreds of code snippets known as App Intents.
• If Siri is not well-supported by developers or does not meet customers' expectations, it could negatively impact iPhone sales and lead customers to opt for a competitor's voice assistant.

To compete in Silicon Valley's AI race, Apple is leveraging its greatest strength: its vast community of 34 million app developers.

The iPhone 16, Apple's latest generation of smartphones, will feature Apple Intelligence, the company's artificial intelligence system, as its strongest selling point.

Apple's AI is not as advanced as the state-of-the-art models coming from top labs, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama. Apple is not using the largest models and cannot perform some of the more impressive tricks of the cutting-edge voice models, like OpenAI's latest, which can sing.

Apple aims to differentiate its AI through Siri's ability to perform tasks on a phone, such as sending emails, deciphering calendars, and editing photos. Unlike other company's AI chatbots, Siri can accomplish these tasks. To achieve this, Apple is inviting third-party developers to collaborate with Apple Intelligence. In the future, Siri may be able to trigger any action in an app that a user can take, aligning with Apple's long-term vision for Siri, as stated in June.

In the Apple Intelligence launch video, Kelsey Peterson, Apple's director of machine learning, announced that Siri will be able to perform hundreds of new actions within and across apps.

To enable Apple Intelligence to interact with non-Apple apps, developers must adopt a new programming approach and write hundreds of additional code snippets known as App Intents.

Apple consistently attracts developer support for new platform initiatives through personalized attention, engaging events, and the promise of App Store promotion, which can result in millions of downloads.

If third-party developers join in and the Siri system performs as promised, it could be one of Apple's greatest and most enduring advantages in the AI competition.

Jordan Morgan, an iOS developer, stated that with the use of Siri conversationally, one should be able to accomplish multiple tasks at once, as it is the future we have all imagined.

The success of Apple in persuading its vast developer base is a crucial matter, with significant implications for the company.

The company is counting on Apple Intelligence, which only functions on the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 models released this year, to drive a surge in upgrades and increase flat iPhone sales. However, if Apple's enhanced Siri is not well-supported by developers or does not meet expectations, it could negatively impact iPhone sales, and customers may opt to use a competitor's voice assistant through an app rather than the built-in Siri.

What are App Intents?

Apple has created approximately 10 intents within the Music app, such as "Add to Playlist," "Play Music," and "Select Music." Each intent should represent a single action, according to programmers.

An intent of a caffeine tracking app is to display a summary of the total caffeine consumed by the user on a given day, according to Morgan.

The tracking app's caffeine intake log will be displayed on Apple's various "system experiences" such as widgets, live activities, control center, and Shortcuts without the user having to open the tracking app.

Some developers find system search to be a significant attraction. With App Intents, apps can display specific emails or more detailed information within Spotlight, Apple's search system.

Developers claim that writing App Intents is not a time-consuming task, typically requiring only a small amount of code.

Michael Tigas, the developer of Focused Work, a productivity app, advised developers to adopt App Intents for their most critical features, as recommended by Apple in previous years.

Tigas advised creating an App Intent for any general action that can be adjusted in your app.

Although Apple Intelligence is set to launch next month, the most significant enhancements to Siri are not yet planned for release until the following year.

Apple has to incentivize developers

Apple's Siri system will improve its ability to comprehend questions even when users make mistakes, thanks to Apple's collaboration with language models, which are related to the large language models used in systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Understanding a user's request for applying a photo filter to an image taken yesterday will be much easier for Siri with its flexibility in comprehending various ways of phrasing the command.

To comprehend the most likely commands and questions for any category of apps, Apple must train and test its model.

The new Siri from Apple will initially support only a limited number of app categories, specifically photo and email apps. However, the company plans to expand Siri's capabilities to include support for various other app categories, such as books, journaling, whiteboards, file management, word processing, browsing, camera, and photos, in the future.

Developers are already envisioning ways for users to interact with their apps through voice commands.

Superhuman, a top-tier email application, announced to CNBC that it intends to integrate Apple's AI technology to facilitate queries regarding email content, such as "Hey Siri, when does my flight depart?" or "Hey Siri, when am I meeting with James to discuss his proposal?"

Some developers are concerned that Apple's plan may lead to users spending less time in their apps and confusing Apple Intelligence with the AI features they've developed themselves.

Igor Zhadanov, CEO of Readdle, which makes the email app Spark, wrote in an email that if the story were solely about App Intents, developers would be concerned that their products might be reduced to the role of the plumbing that powers Siri, leaving them uncertain about how to build sustainable businesses around it.

The limited availability of Apple Intelligence features on older iPhones may discourage developers from investing in the technology in the near term.

Tigas stated that Apple is restricting Apple Intelligence features to the new 2024 iPhones and the expensive models from last year, which means it won't be possible to create something accessible to the general public.

According to Dan Ives of Wedbush, Apple Intelligence signifies a "renaissance of growth" for the company.