At the 35th annual Worldwide Developers Conference — set to take place from June 10 to June 14 — a raft of important software updates will be announced, two of which are being discussed after a recent report from Bloomberg. Apple is expected to roll out features like transcribing voice memos and auto-generated emoji.

Among the big improvements to be announced will be a “smart recap” feature, which will reportedly summarise missed texts, notifications, and other things like “web pages, news articles, documents, notes and other forms of media”, according to Bloomberg. It will help deal with notifications, which can come in a rush on the smartphone. The question is whether it mirrors Microsoft’s recently-announced Recall feature that lets you look back at what you’ve been doing on your computer.

The Voice Memo app may also get a shot of AI in the form of AI-generated transcripts. It will be handy for students who record college lectures and also journalists recording interviews. Apple devices have similar features already, like auto-generated voicemail transcripts and system-wide captions for videos, audio and conversations.

Artificial intelligence may also find a space in the Spotlight search, Internet searches with Safari, as well as writing suggestions for emails and texts.

More importantly, AI may help Siri sound more natural. Apple’s own large language models can come into play to improve Siri functionality. Apple’s devices will process all of this stuff locally, but for complicated tasks, they’ll offload processing to Apple’s own M2 Ultra-based servers, Bloomberg reports.

iOS 18 may have features to allow users change app icons to different colours, besides allowing users to put app icons wherever they want on the iPhone home screen. instead of iOS forcing a top-to-bottom, left-to-right arrangement.

Recent rumours have suggested that Apple may allow chatbots to integrate more deeply into its operating systems, and OpenAI could be the first to do this with ChatGPT. Apple is also working on an agreement with Google to do the same with Gemini. Discussions are also apparently on with Anthropic. The partnerships are expected to make Apple’s approach to AI practical, helping users achieve certain goals easily.

Apple will kick off WWDC24 with a keynote at 10.30pm IST on June 10, and the event for developers continues through June 14.