Broadly perceived as having fallen behind within the high-stakes AI race, Apple is anticipated to make a renewed bid to meet up with opponents at its annual Worldwide Builders Convention (WWDC) slated from June 9 to June 13.
The iPhone-maker’s AI reboot will embrace letting third-party builders construct on high of its smaller, in-house AI fashions, in line with a report by Bloomberg. The brand new framework may even let builders combine its flagship AI providing, Apple Intelligence, throughout their apps.
Whereas Apple appears to ramp up its long-term AI technique to win over customers, main Indian builders have stated that they’re already collaborating with the tech large to combine present Apple Intelligence options within the software layer.
On-line meals supply platform Swiggy has stated it depends on Apple’s machine learning-based Translation API that was introduced in iOS 18 final yr.
“Apple’s in-app translations allow you to translate from English to any language with out utilizing any third-party libraries. So, for our meals menu, which could be very textual, we used Apple’s APIs to translate these textual content to Hindi language,” Agam Mahajan, iOS developer and engineering lead at Swiggy, informed indianexpress.com at a current digital developer showcase organised by Apple.
Mahajan additionally revealed that Swiggy Instamart leveraged Apple’s Imaginative and prescient frameworks to develop its in style Buying Record characteristic that lets customers add their handwritten buying lists to create a cart with these gadgets on the app.
Swiggy has additionally developed a brand new characteristic (in beta) round Apple’s Picture Playground API. This characteristic lets customers immediate for AI-generated photographs for use because the profile image for his or her accounts. “We’re additionally utilizing Siri intents in order that the search on Siri might be extra personalised to the top client,” Mahajan stated.
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Past e-commerce, Apple can also be enabling Indian builders to roll out AI-focused content material creation instruments. LightX is one such graphic design and picture modifying app developed by Noida-based AndOr Communications.
“We presently have 7.55 million downloads globally and we have now a 4.7 ranking primarily based on 1,38,000 customers’ experiences,” stated Sharad Shankar, the founder and CEO of AndOr Communications. In 2024, India emerged as the biggest marketplace for AI app downloads, contributing 21 per cent of complete downloads globally, in line with knowledge supplied by SensorTower. Eight out of the ten highest grossing graphic design apps on the App Retailer in India have AI within the identify, which is indicative of the surging recognition of AI-based inventive apps.
“Once we began our firm round December 2015 as AndOr, we realised that smartphones are getting increasingly more highly effective, and we needed to construct one thing much like Photoshop. We additionally realised that individuals are going to create extra content material by way of their smartphones. That’s the reason we developed LightX,” Shankar, an IIT Kanpur graduate, informed indianexpress.com.
LightX offers customers with a collection of instruments for graphic design in addition to picture modifying and video modifying. When it was first rolled out, LightX was a paid app that was priced in a different way in several territories. It noticed almost 1.2 million downloads and with a 4.7 ranking, LightX was ranked on the sixteenth spot within the App Retailer within the US and on the seventeenth spot in a couple of European nations as properly.
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Nonetheless, the corporate has since pivoted to a subscription-based enterprise mannequin because it was now not “financially viable for us to maintain constructing options only for $3 or so,” as per Shankar.
It has additionally moved past providing frequent picture modifying duties like crop, resize, picture cleanup, and touch-up. “We have now began investing increasingly more vitality in direction of constructing AI instruments. We now have a collection of AI choices the place customers can take an image of an individual, change the outfit or coiffure of the individual, and even create a professional-looking headshot,” Shankar stated, including that customers also can create AI-generated, Ghibli fashion animated photographs and cartoon caricatures utilizing the app.
It’s also engaged on a semantic picture editor, the place customers can dictate modifications to photographs. Its graphic design options have additionally been revamped to be extra AI-oriented, offering AI-generated birthday playing cards, for instance.
Citing the excessive value of constructing foundational fashions, Shankar revealed that LightX is constructed on high of open-source AI fashions like Stability Diffusion whose outputs are fantastic tuned primarily based on consumer necessities. He added that LightX utilises Apple’s core graphics engine and imaginative and prescient libraries with a purpose to improve its inventive AI options by detecting faces, recognising poses, and eradicating the background from photographs.
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The App Retailer has additionally been a fantastic facilitator for us, Shankar stated, particularly in terms of that includes us for various occasions like Holi and Diwali in India.
By way of guardrails, LightX has a backend filter which disallows any sort of NSFW content material. “If there may be any quantity of nudity that we discover in photographs, we utterly block it and we relay an error message. That’s sort of very strict as a result of we have now fixed tips from Apple in addition to Google. They don’t permit you to generate such content material,” Shankar stated.
When requested if the AI-modified photographs on LightX carry any labels, invisible watermarks, or hidden identifiers within the metadata, Shankar stated that they might be pleased to undertake such provenance efforts if there was some sort of regulation that demanded it.