AI This Week: Major Moves by Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple

March 28, 2024

This week, the artificial intelligence landscape witnessed significant milestones, with Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple each unveiling initiatives that push the boundaries of AI’s application in creative and communicative realms. Let’s delve into the specifics of these transformative announcements.

Adobe Launches Firefly Services for Creative AI Development

Adobe introduced Firefly Services this week, offering over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools, and services. This move makes Adobe’s Creative Cloud features, like those in Photoshop, available to enterprise developers, facilitating innovative content creation workflows and solutions.

The key to this launch is Custom Models, which enables businesses to customize Firefly models with their assets. Firefly Services includes APIs for background removal, image cropping, horizon levelling, and access to Photoshop’s AI features like Generative Fill.

Microsoft Teams Enhances AI with New Copilot Features

Microsoft announced significant enhancements to its AI-powered Copilot in Microsoft Teams, aimed at making meetings and communication more efficient. Copilot will soon offer a unified view of spoken transcripts and written chats for easier meeting catch-ups. Additionally, it will enhance message composition in chat, enabling users to adjust messages for tone or context and generate new messages based on chat history.

The forthcoming intelligent call recap feature in Teams Premium will auto-summarize calls and highlight follow-up actions, eliminating manual note-taking. These improvements are part of a broader initiative to integrate more flexible and intelligent AI capabilities into Teams, building on existing features like meeting summaries and speaker recognition.

Apple’s WWDC 2024: An AI-Forward Agenda

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is officially on the calendar for June 10-14, 2024, drawing heightened anticipation around the company’s strategic moves in artificial intelligence (AI).

The buzz leading up to WWDC 2024 suggests Apple has been investing heavily in AI, from training proprietary models to exploring content partnerships for training data. Speculation is rife about potential collaborations with major players like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, or even Baidu for cloud-based AI functionalities while maintaining on-device generative AI features. Beyond AI, WWDC 2024 will continue to serve as the launchpad for updates across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and other Apple operating systems.

Following last year’s Vision Pro headset reveal and updates across WatchOS, macOS, and iOS, this year’s conference is expected to further Apple’s narrative in the post-Apple silicon transition era.

Spotlight on AI: Tome.app

This week, the AI spotlight shines on Tome.app, a creative tool that’s transforming how professionals create presentations and documents. It stands out by offering a more dynamic alternative to traditional decks, simplifying the creation process akin to building a webpage, but without the complexity.

Tome.app leverages artificial intelligence to streamline the creation of polished presentations, ensuring that users can express their ideas without compromising on detail or nuance. The platform’s AI capabilities include refining writing tone and phrasing, generating fitting images, and conducting web searches for references, thereby enriching narratives with the envisioned depth and accuracy.