Apple has bought the “iWork.ai’ domain, fuelling speculation that its office suite, consisting of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, could all be getting some big artificial intelligence features soon.
According to BuyAIDomains, Apple became the owner of the domain very recently, with its company name and business address of Apple Park in the owner records of “iWork.ai”. In Mark Gurman’s ’Power On’ newsletter back in October 2023, he mentioned that Apple was already working on several AI features for many of its apps — including iWork. It seems that work is now ramping up.
This new domain only adds fuel to the fire that Apple’s office suite will be one of the first to take advantage of its AI efforts. The last update for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers was in March 2023 — which brought out better support for exporting documents using the share sheet, and added Apple Pencil hover support to the apps when used with compatible iPads.
With WWDC 2024, Apple’s yearly developer conference, rumored to have AI as its headline topic, we could soon see how Pages, Keynote, and Numbers will benefit from an AI injection.
How could AI improve iWork?
Rival Microsoft already offers AI features in its Office package with Microsoft 365 Copilot — such as letting users draft up emails with a language prompt, helping mock up a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, and much more.
An AI in Pages could play the role of an editor. This way, errors such as wrong tenses and incorrect grammar could be highlighted before the document is sent off to a teacher or a proofreader for example. For Keynote and Numbers, Apple’s take on AI could work in a similar vein to Copilot. With AI support, Keynote could generate several presentation styles or font suggestions that a user hadn’t considered yet. Alternatively, Numbers could create different graphs that have been generated from data on a spreadsheet, and present them to the user for potential inclusion.
We could see Apple’s AI platform supercharge its other apps outside of iWork, such as Messages, as well as its assistant, Siri. Having faster and more accurate responses to queries from Apple’s assistant is something that many users would love to see. When you use ChatGPT on an iPhone, the difference between what Apple and OpenAI’s assistants offer is huge — so to see Apple catch up in this regard would be great.
WWDC 2024 could finally showcase what Apple has been working on with AI. Fortunately, as June is usually when the developer conference is held, we may not have long to find out what that will entail.
