Apple has already invested heavily in artificial intelligence and intends to add it to its existing products and services - CEO Tim Cook made it clear during a recent earnings call. The Apple boss also confirmed that the company will be rolling out generative AI tools like those coming to Android phones and Windows 11 next year, which it plans to do "responsibly."

While Microsoft announced Copilot, Google rolled out Bard, and others embraced generative AI, Apple remained tight-lipped. It mentioned the use of foundational models in transcription and machine learning in the iPhone, but did not jump on the AI hype bandwagon.

This led to speculation about how the company would respond to such a dramatic shift in the tech ecosystem. On the Q4 earnings call, Cook said that while Apple does not label its products with AI, that does not mean it is not using artificial intelligence in its tools.

Cook told investors that an expanded look at Apple's releases shows that AI and machine learning are "integral to almost every product we ship."

He further cited personal voice cloning and live voicemail in iOS 17 and fall detection and EKG reading in Apple Watch as examples.

More recently, in the beta release of iOS 17.2, Apple announced new features that let CarPlay and AirPods describe the content of images sent through iMessage.

"We don't label them as such, to say," Cook said. 'But the underlying technology behind them is AI and machine learning.'

The big change will come when Apple adds big features to tools like Siri, follows in the footsteps of Microsoft's Copilot and Google's Duet, and includes generative text and image capabilities in its office products.

Cook said this is in development, but is being done responsibly. He says Apple is investing heavily in generative AI. We're investing quite a bit."

"We're going to do it responsibly and it's ...... You're going to see those technologies progress over time with the products that are at the heart of them."

This could include the rumored AppleGPT, a chatbot AI model similar to ChatGPT that is said to be used internally by Apple developers, but not publicly available.

Apple's delay in deploying generative AI tools is likely tied to high-level privacy requirements, as it wants to find a way to process personal data on devices using the neural engine built into its chips.

These are already being used to transcribe speech, train voice clones, copy text from images, and remove backgrounds from photos.