Apple to put a price on advanced Apple Intelligence features

iOS 18 software update could enhance user experience with Apple Intelligence but users may have to pay a price for some of its advanced features.

AI is taking the world by storm and the smartphone industry is also implementing this tech on a wide scale. Apple is participating in this race to bring large language models (LLM) and generative AI to iPhones.

Apple Intelligence is a suite of gen AI functions for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS operating systems. That includes text summarization for easy comprehension of on-screen content or large texts. It improves the tone of text content with writing tools, providing gen image support to create emojis and stickers to share with friends and family.

Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research said that the iPhone maker is pushing big money into advanced AI technologies. And, it wants to share the cost burden with users reported CNBC.

Hence, the Cupertino-based firm could charge between $10 to $20 for Apple Intellignece. Shah emphasized that the price is likely to apply to advanced AI features.

At WWDC24, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI, a company behind the famous AI chatbot – ChatGPT. iOS 18 will integrate ChatGPT into the new Siri voice assistant and allow users to shift their conversation from Siri to ChatGPT.

By default, users will only be able to talk to Siri with voice and typing. Once permitted, users can continue this conversation to ChatGPT for more powerful cloud-based AI processing.

ChatGPT is free for use but the company charges about $20 a month to offer its best services. That being said, Microsoft Copilot, a bot based on the GPT model, also charges $20 for its Pro-grade features.

So, it may naturally draw Apple to do something similar to make the user pay and recover its share of the investment. For now, the iPhone maker has spilled no words on charging users for Apple Intelligence.

iOS 18.1

There are reports that Apple is not fully ready to seed all Apple Intelligence features at once. Therefore, it will wait until Gen AI matures through iOS 18 beta testing.

Recently, Apple pushed iOS 18.1 beta 1 for developers with Apple Intelligence preview. The software has a few AI features but doesn’t include the new ChatGPT-derived chat feature.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that Apple may take some time to introduce the new gen-AI. Even with that iPhone 16 might not introduce AI features out of the box and may have to wait until iOS 18.1 rolls out over the air.

Furthermore, the uncertainty around advanced Siri remains and there’s information on when it will be available for new devices.