Here Are Apple's Newest, and Biggest, Revolutionary Developments

Apple (AAPL 2.22%) held its Worldwide Developer Conference beginning on June 6 and announced some new features for its iOS operating system.

In this clip from "The Virtual Opportunities Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on June 7, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Demitri Kalogeropoulos, and Rachel Warren discuss some of the company's latest changes and how they may improve user experience.

Travis Hoium: Yes. They had their Worldwide Developer Conference keynote yesterday. So this is a whole conference that developers come and learn about what Apple is building on the back end. Basically, Apple makes the operating system for iOS devices, Macs, watch, all that kind of stuff, and then they provide tools for developers to build apps, so any app that is going to be on an Apple device is going to go through that Apple developer ecosystem and so what they're really announcing at an event like this is, "hey, here are the new tools that we're going to provide to you, to be able to build on," and it's interesting because when these conferences started, this is the 16th version of iOS, which is insane to say, but this has been going on for 16 years now and when these first started, this was all revolutionary stuff and so just simple changes like we're not going to just have a single, remember when they changed it from like all their screen sizes were exactly the same to now we're going to have like multiple screen sizes, so your app is going to have to adapt to the screen size and so you'd have apps that didn't update and they'd be like, wouldn't even fill up the whole screen.

That's how far we've come in the last 10 years is, they're announcing some really revolutionary stuff and people are just yawning at the announcement. I know there are some interesting things that came out of it, I just have a couple of noted, I don't know if you guys watch the whole presentation, it was two hours, so it's pretty long.

But you can lift subjects from the background in images, so basically you can do photoshop with your finger, which I think is crazy. Live, you can pull live text from a video, so you can pause a video on your iPhone and just pull text so you can go to the website or pull a phone number, something like that.

Quick actions in apps, so think about taking a picture or pull your phone up, you can convert currencies, translate languages, visit websites, call phone numbers. So visiting a foreign country, you're looking at a menu that you don't understand, you can just pull out your phone and in your app, it will translate it for you. Order tracking in ApplePay, and wallet, receipts in ApplePay, finally that's coming, updates to the Home app. There was updates to the CarPlay, so now they're going to be vehicles that are going to basically run iOS. It's not just going to be a screen that has a mini version of iOS on it with maps and music and things like that. It's actually going to be telling you how fast your car is going and they had an image of like the map display in directions, behind the steering wheel where you would normally see your speedometer or odometer.

So I think these are really cool changes for Apple and the theme that I took out of it and this goes to a discussion that we had a couple of weeks ago about the Google AR glasses, these are technologies and integrations that only a company like Apple can do, I mean the translation things, it'd be so much harder for another app to have you download the app, include the camera functions and then the translation functions. Now they're just doing this natively right in the app and they're also allowing some of these tools to be used by developers and third parties. I will also note that we talked last week about AR and VR and maybe we'll hear something about that, there was nothing about that so that's also notable, but I think there are a lot of really interesting changes and improvements coming to iOS and the Mac ecosystem as well, as the whole lineup of operating systems. Nothing super revolutionary, but a lot of little things that I think will be, "oh my gosh, how did we live without that?" five years from now.

Demitri Kalogeropoulos: Right. Some critical uses I saw in there for sure like the ability to edit a text after you send it.

Hoium: Yes.

Kalogeropoulos: Then send a text, I mean you can just hear people clapping.

Rachel Warren: I was so excited about that one.

Hoium: How are we a the point with technology where, that is like a revolutionary concept, Twitter and this has been asked for like 15 years. [laughs]?

Kalogeropoulos: Yeah, it's not like we're writing these things, this digital should be easy to change and stuff, but also, yeah, Travis, I was impressed with just how much smarter it seems, the apps are getting and the iOS system is getting. I think I saw something about dictation when you're just speaking like a lot of people tend to do for text and things like that, it's going to automatically detect punctuation and add punctuation to your entire paragraph and that's just one example of AI.

Hoium: Yeah, I don't know if you guys have used dictation for writing, but I have used it for writing articles, I've gotten to the point now and this will probably help me a lot where I can go for a walk and literally talk out loud and write an article in my notes app, and now if it will do punctuation for me, maybe my punctuation won't be so terrible and my editors won't be so annoyed with my punctuation. But yeah, I mean that I think is another game changer because that was always this pain point in dictation. You have to stop and say "period," "quotation mark," now it'll pull all this or you can even do emojis just with voice command, so I think that's small but really cool improvements.