What You Should Know

What Does ‘apple intelligence’ mean for pr pros? 

Apple was early to innovations like digital music players, smartphones, and tablets. It was so late to artificial intelligence (AI) that it needed a wow factor to compensate for its tardiness. Yesterday, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company unveiled a slew of software and product updates, including what it deems “Apple Intelligence,” its own spin on AI.

Many of the capabilities sound familiar, like image and text generation, but are integrated into Apple’s operating system and applications so you don’t have to go to a separate website or service to use them. The company also said Apple Intelligence is “grounded in personal context,” meaning it understands the contents of your emails, text messages, and data — and doesn’t share that with other services or third parties.

AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and DALL-E are all about content generation. Apple Intelligence can do that, too, but what’s new (and potentially worth Apple’s long wait) is that it optimizes workflows, which helps PR professionals work faster. Instead of recording a call and uploading the audio file to a transcription service like Otter, you can hit the record button in the Notes or Phone apps to capture audio and generate real-time transcripts, and you’ll see AI-generated summaries when you’ve stopped recording. You can use the “Rewrite” function before sending an email to see different versions of what you’ve written based on alternate tones and the “Proofread” function without having to copy and paste text into a third-party website like Grammarly.

Apple also partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri. Users can access GPT-4o for free without creating an account and Siri makes it clear when ChatGPT is being used instead of its own capabilities. OpenAI subscribers can connect their accounts and use paid features.

Apple said early adopters can start using some of these features this summer, but most users will have to wait until fall, when iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia become available.

Elsewhere …

• LISTEN: AI Can’t Pitch Like You Can, But It Can Double Your Productivity
• Tennis Star Maria Sharapova: AI Helps Make a Better Informed Player
• Morgan Stanley CEO Says AI Could Save Financial Advisers 10-15 Hours a Week
• Google Opens Applications for AI, Climate Change Accelerator Programs
• Ancestry.com Uses AI to Boost Black Family Trees

Tips and Tricks

🔍 How AI can improve your SEO

What’s happening: Search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are changing, especially as AI becomes more integrated into web searches. It used to be all about keywords, which led people to create content just for clicks. AI made that very easy to do, but Google considers AI-generated content to be “spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results.” Google says it ranks “helpful, reliable, people-first content” higher on its search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why it matters: Using AI responsibly can help ensure your content meets Google’s requirements and improve your search rankings. For starters, you can use AI to generate content that offers real value and avoids “keyword stuffing.” Google values content that solves a user problem thoroughly and originally, rather than hastily produced, rewritten material. Beyond that, AI can help identify which keywords to target and how to structure the content.

Try it out: Let’s assume you already have a draft of your content. Paste it into ChatGPT and say you want to update it with an emphasis on SEO. Ask it to use web browsing (for some reason, ChatGPT tends to forget it has this capability) to find unique sources and popular keywords that align with your content. As with any AI result, you’ll want to ensure the results are accurate by confirming with a site like Google Trends or individual research. You can then either ask ChatGPT for suggestions on how to weave those keywords and sources into your content or just do so manually.

Quote of the Week

“Things are going to become more efficient. If you think about Siri as an example, you can now have a conversation with Siri. It can perform essentially multiple steps with one request, where today it takes multiple requests for that to occur. Writing tools: I get so many emails, and I realize everybody’s not on email, but everybody writes. And to have an assistant proofread to make things more professional or more entertaining, or whatever you want to do, is a big thing. The idea that it’s private, I think, is a very big idea in today’s world. People want to know in some kind of way that (AI) is personal to them, but also private. And these two things generally haven’t gone together very well. We found a way to thread the needle.”

— Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in an interview with the Washington Post