Apple Wants to Use AI to Keep Google Off Your iPhone

Apple Inc.'s new artificial-intelligence capabilities may help it protect its software and services businesses from incursions by Alphabet Inc.'s Google -- and cut the internet giant out of lucrative search roles on its devices. At Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference this week, the company unveiled a crop of new AI-powered features: Its Siri voice-based digital assistant expanded from iPhones and iPads to its Mac laptop and desktop computers; natural-language processing brought new automated emoji creation to the iPhone maker's iMessage service; and image-recognition will give its gadgets the ability to automatically understand and organize photos stored on them. The capabilities are, in part, a natural riposte to recent AI-infused Google offerings, such as a mobile keyboard, a popular picture-organizing app named Photos, and a planned digital assistant that will live inside a new mobile messaging system called Allo. The Gboard keyboard was specifically designed for iPhones and is a way for Google to get its search service used in new ways on those devices. The Photos app works on iOS devices and Google's own Android mobile operating system and represents a twist on Google's search capabilities.