Paul Stenhouse: Apple's next software developer conference and Microsoft pulling back on some AI features due to safety concerns

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Apple's big software developer conference is next week - what will they be announcing?

Lot's of AI features... Surprise! Apple is set to unveil its AI strategy which is going to be more focused around automating tasks and summarizing information, rather than image and video generation. For example, the upgraded Mail app will use AI to sort emails in your inbox, there will be a way to 'catch up' on everything that's happened on while you've been away from your device, voice messages will be transcribed for quick scanning, and Siri will be able to complete more 'app-level' tasks like reply to a specific email or delete it, edit a photo, or summarize a news article.

Apple has played a big security card for the past few years so just how much personal data it lets leave your device will be interesting... and if it does, how it sells the security of its cloud processing.

Outside of AI:

Apple's password manager called "keychain" has been hidden away in the settings for years, but it's going to be made into its own app.
The calculator is coming to iPad!
Your iPhone home screen will be more customizable than ever before, including arranging app icons in something other than a rigid grid, and being able to change the colour of the icons.
And you'll be able to schedule an iMessage to be sent in the future.

Microsoft has had to pull back on some of its new AI features because of security concerns

The new Copilot Plus PCs come with a feature called "Recall", which effectively takes screenshots of what you're doing and stores them so you can go back to check what that price was for that item or recover a sentence from an email you decided you preferred. The feature was going to be turned on by default, which Microsoft has now reversed. There are also concerns the way it stores the images and the associated metadata was unencrypted, so bad actors could have installed ransomware and had full access to the Recall data.

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