Apple quietly goes big on AI as it looks to keep up with Google and Facebook

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, made the announcements at WWDC. Google and Facebook are widely regarded as being more innovative than Apple when it comes to developments in the coveted field of artificial intelligence (AI) - hailed as the next major area for computing. While Google and Facebook have developed self-learning AI agents that can learn and master complex games like Go, Apple has remained relatively silent - offering little more than a personal assistant known as Siri. Facebook has also shown off Chatbots, while Microsoft made a regrettable foray of its own into the world of bots with Tay, a controversial Twitter bot that ended up being highly offensive (as a result of humans). But Apple made a series of practical product updates at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday that show it is not ready to be left behind just yet.