During the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple’s long-awaited entry into artificial intelligence took shape. While a recent OpenAI conference showing off new tech evoked comparisons to the title character in the 2013 film Her, Apple Intelligence brought to mind someone else: Gary from Veep.
For the uninitiated, Gary (Tony Hale) is a body man for Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in the world of the HBO hit. The veep may have a gold-plated gift of gab and can work a room with seasoned slickness, but she’d be in deep trouble without Gary. His job is to anticipate her every need, keeping chapstick and aspirin handy, sure, but more importantly, supplying her with sotto voce reminders about everyone who may not be important enough for the vice president to remember. As he reminds her in a memorable scene, “I’m your calendar, I’m your Google, I’m your Wilson the Volleyball.”
If the WWDC presentation is to be believed, iPhones are about to get a lot more Gary-like. According to one demo, when iPhone users get a text about an upcoming meeting, Apple Intelligence will soon allow them to ask Siri, in natural language, whether it will make them late for their daughter’s recital, spurring Siri to cross-reference all pertinent emails, texts, calendar invites, and even city traffic patterns — synthesizing all that data into a succinct response. Classic Gary move.
In the remainder of the presentation, the Apple team illustrated with just about every kind of example how easily important details can slip through the cracks of our overtaxed memories these days, and how easy the company’s new AI tech makes sifting through digital detritus to find it.
