Apple executives used the keynote address of this week's annual WWDC developers conference to debut all of the artificial intelligence capabilities that are coming to iPhones, iPads, and Macs. The team showed off how generative tools will help users write emails, clean up iPhone photos, illustrate presentations, and make custom emoji characters.
Adding AI to everything is par for the course in 2024, as all of the Big Tech companies have been loading up their software with similar generative features. But Apple is late to this particular party. The company has been perceived as being “behind” in generative AI, since OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and a whole bunch of startups have already made massive inroads. But is Apple really behind? And what makes Apple’s AI—cheekily named Apple Intelligence—different?
This week, we welcome WIRED senior writer Will Knight back onto the show to talk about Apple Intelligence, the new Siri, and how Apple is trying to differentiate itself in the AI race.
Show Notes
Read Will’s new story about Apple Intelligence’s launch, and his news analysis piece on how Apple will need to make sure its AI doesn’t disappoint, annoy, or offend iPhone users. Read Boone Ashworth’s roundup of everything Apple announced at WWDC. Lauren tells us why Apple’s AI play is also its best shot at getting you to upgrade your iPhone. Julian Chokkattu has a comprehensive overview of all the AI features coming to iOS. Read all of our WWDC coverage.
Recommendations
Will recommends the AutoGen multi-agent conversational framework. Mike recommends Klean Kanteen’s Rise Food Box. Lauren recommends the Lunya washable silk sleep mask.
Will Knight can be found on X @willknight. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Do you generally subscribe to the idea that Apple doesn't do things first, but then often does it better?
Michael Calore: Yeah, I mean, it worked with the iPod. It worked with the iPad very well. It has maybe not worked with Vision Pro. They came out with the iPhone first, but I'm not entirely sold on iPhones. I mean, I use a Pixel.
Lauren Goode: It seems like they did something right with the iPhone, but you are not sold.
Michael Calore: Yeah. I mean, by and large, though, yes, Apple has done very well with its wait-and-see and then do it better than everybody else approach.
Lauren Goode: What about AI?
Michael Calore: What about it?
Lauren Goode: Do you think that Apple's artificial intelligence is going to be better than the other tech companies?
Michael Calore: I mean, maybe Apple Intelligence looks good, but it's not going to make me switch to an iPhone. I mean, it's not that much different than what I already have in my Pixel, right? The features they showed off, they're pretty familiar to me at this point. Somebody who lives in the world.
Lauren Goode: We should talk about this. And not specific to phones, but just AI in general.
Michael Calore: OK, fine.
Lauren Goode: Let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm WIRED's director of consumer tech and culture.
Lauren Goode: Such a fancy title. I'm still not over your new title. We're also joined this week by WIRED’s senior writer, Will Knight, who has joined us before to talk all about AI. Will, you're so close but so far away. You are dialing in from a hotel room in Cupertino, just about an hour south of where we are. We couldn't bring you into the lab here, but it's nice to have you on this coast.
Will Knight: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's nice to be back.
Lauren Goode: So today, we're talking about Apple. Yep. This week was WWDC, Apple's Annual Developers Conference. We had people on the ground there in Cupertino like Will. A lot of us were covering it from our desks. If you follow tech news or even if you're just longtime fans of our podcast here, as I'm sure most of you are, then you know how these developer conferences go. There are thousands of app makers gathered in one place where a series of tech executives go on stage and give keynote presentations and then later on host some developer-specific sessions. And it's all about building things on top of the latest and greatest software.
And a lot of regular people will watch and listen to it because something like Apple's WWDC is basically going to change the way that your iPhone works. But this year, the conference was different because the last portion of it was entirely about AI, AI, AI, AI. We talk about this a lot on this show, but this is a really important one. Apple has been perceived as "behind" in generative AI since OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and a whole bunch of other startups have already made inroads. But is Apple really behind? And what makes Apple AI different? I mean, in addition to the different name they're giving it.
So Will, based on your very expert opinion, what makes Apple's generative AI different from the others?
Will Knight: Well, they are not unveiling a huge language model or a competitor to ChatGPT that's going to be more capable than everybody else's. They're limiting what their AI does. And they're trying to emphasize running AI on devices, which is part of their whole privacy and security marketing thing partly. So in a sense, they are behind and then they've not unveiled anything that's as capable as ChatGPT, but I do think that you're right to question whether they're really that behind because the stuff they've developed running on devices, it's pretty impressive in its own way, and I'm not sure anybody's going to notice that much, the difference between their AI and one of these more powerful models in many instances.
Lauren Goode: So they're calling it Apple Intelligence. And as you mentioned, they're not doing what ChatGPT is doing because they didn't develop a separate chatbot or a search engine. This is all happening on your iPhone or another Apple device. Based on the demos that you saw, tell us exactly how it works and what it looks like. Why is this AI any different from other stuff we've been doing on our phones?
Will Knight: Yeah. I mean, it's … So I had some demos today, so I got to see some of this Apple Intelligence sprinkled across things, and rather than being a standalone app like Gemini or ChatGPT, as you say, it pervades a lot of different tools. I mean, I think some of it is relatively similar to the stuff that we've seen Google develop, but it seems a little more seamless, a little bit more well-integrated or thoughtfully integrated into devices. So, for example, in your email or in any application in macOS or iOS on a sufficiently advanced device, you can highlight text and then have it summarized or rewrite it in a particular style. It has the ability … You can take a drawing or sketch and turn that into a generative AI image. You can have this thing called Genmoji, create a new emoji for you, which I suspect might be the killer app that nobody really expected.
But all of those tools, they don't seem to me to be super, super sophisticated in terms of the capabilities that they're demonstrating. ChatGPT can do a lot more sophisticated text generation or whatever. It's a little bit more like they just seem to be putting the products first, which I think is probably a sensible approach when everybody's getting very obsessed with saying whose AI is bigger or better than the others. But I think that they have quite consciously limited it, which is probably sensible in some ways because the technology is prone to go off the rails and do crazy stuff, which it may well still do. When we see people generating their own emojis, they claim to have put a lot of guardrails out, and I'm sure they have. But no doubt, people will come up with something offensive before too long.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I'm sure you're right. That is going to be the killer app most likely.
Lauren Goode: Siri's going to flirt with us.
Will Knight: Well, I was asking about this because, obviously, OpenAI's new ChatGPT is notoriously a flirt and they have very consciously not made Siri … They could have actually, I think, added much more emotional emphasis and intonation into the voice. The new Siri they've unveiled with Apple Intelligence behind is much better at handling a conversation. So similar to the new ChatGPT, it can handle pauses and corrections and that will make it much better at being able to take commands, but they very consciously have not made it too emotionally or socially anthropomorphized, I guess. Definitely not a flirt they promised.
Michael Calore: The thing that a lot of the voice interaction chatbots have been trying to achieve is this idea of context awareness and it keeps getting better and better. And, obviously, the demos that Apple was showing on stage, which is on a video, is they're prerecorded so they're not live demos. And I'm curious if you had any experience in a live demo with Siri because the thing that is the big advancement that a lot of folks are pointing to, the thing that's really going to change how Siri feels is that context awareness. It's the ability for you to ask a question, get an answer, and then ask a follow-up question without having to repeat the key information, like the name of the movie that you were looking for or the time that you were talking about. It just remembers the things that you had just said within the last 30, 40 seconds. Alexa has been able to do this for a long time. Google's chat assistant has been able to do this for a while.
Lauren Goode: I think what Mike is saying is that it's really easy to make a good AI demo.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Does it work?
Will Knight: Well, they gave me and some others some demos, but they didn't let us play with it. I mean, it did seem to work better, but, yeah, we'll have to see if it's that much better.
The other thing that … They emphasized this idea of it being very personalized, this is one of their key things. They're like, "It's going to be so much more useful because it draws on your information." And it seems like Siri can tap into a lot of apps. It can look into those apps and it can also use the automations that you can already do on the iPhone to do some useful stuff. But I didn't see very much in summarizing or rewriting your emails or the interaction in Siri that seemed like it was very personalized. They're very much limiting how much you can train the models based on your data. And I didn't see anything that really struck me as like, "Wow, that makes it way more useful." Perhaps it is if you can really get into those apps and do things, but it wasn't clear from the demos.
Lauren Goode: Will, you mentioned privacy earlier. One thing that Apple is doing is they've created some private cloud so that when an AI process or request can't happen on the device, it gets offloaded to the cloud. But Apple is saying, “Yeah, but it's with our private servers running on Apple silicon.”
Michael Calore: It's the good cloud.
Will Knight: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Explain how this works.
Will Knight: Right. So, yeah, they've talked about this and put out this white paper showing how when a query does go off to the cloud, information is kept in some secure part of the silicon and they've got this whole architecture which is meant to be verified, but it's secure so outsiders can verify that it's all secure and everything is encrypted end to end. So in theory, it provides you with some assurance that your data is not being handed off to someone else or couldn't leak out in theory. But interestingly, in the demos they gave, it didn't seem like the model ever handed off to the cloud. It seemed like they're really focusing on doing stuff on device. I'm not sure when they would actually do that. Maybe they're more future proofing this for when they do develop their own much more powerful models.
They're talking about this working with the iPhone Pro up in terms of smartphones as well as all the M1 laptops. So it's limiting the devices or work on. So for things like your HomePod won't be able to do some of this stuff and it didn't seem like they would be handing that off to the cloud in a way that would make it more capable. So I think there's some questions about really what the utility is. Obviously, it's a big part of their branding to say that they're very privacy and security focused and it is a problem with generative AI that you're handing your data off to God knows who and use some of these things. So it makes sense to emphasize that. I don't know really how useful that is. I mean, it's also something that other people haven't really shown that much focus on trying to integrate the two, but I think it'll be interesting to see how that really, if that really makes it way more capable, if that works seamlessly because you don't want to be waiting for ages as it tries to talk to the cloud.
Lauren Goode: Will, I'm picturing when you're saying that you had these very controlled demos in a room and that everything seemed to be happening on device, I'm guessing that they were just handing all the other queries off to Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompas behind the scenes who were just, I don't know, pulling on different punch cards, math cards to run this. That's their private cloud.
Will Knight: So it's just humans.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's just a bunch of humans, but they're wearing all-white jumpsuits. This is very Apple.
Michael Calore: The Mechanical Turk.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, exactly.
Will Knight: It could be. I didn't ask that.
Michael Calore: I think … Lauren, you wrote a story about the fact that you have to have the latest phone, right? iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or the new iPhones that are going to be coming out this fall are the only ones that are going to get these features when the features come out. They're going to come out in beta on iOS 18 and then they'll roll into iOS 18 with an update probably later in the year, mostly 2025 is what we're looking at for all of these. So there will be a bunch of people out there who have the new phone or the best phone from last year, and they'll be able to run these, but if you have an iPhone 15 or an iPhone 14, you can't run it and people feel like it's a bad practice for Apple to do that. It's like cheating people out, encouraging people to upgrade to the latest hardware.
Now, normally, I would agree with you because I'm a very cynical person and I see companies using this as an opportunity to get people to go out and spend money on the best smartphones they can buy, which they don't need. A cheap phone is great. But I do think that historically Apple has so heavily prioritized the best user experience. They want it to feel seamless and super fast and amazing every time you use it. And maybe on an iPhone 15 or on an iPhone 14, it's a little slow, a little sluggish, and not as impressive. So they're limiting it. They're putting a gate on it so that you don't have that bad experience.
Lauren Goode: I just wish Apple would tell us. I mean, I asked Will, you and I were chatting about it yesterday, and when you were on the ground, you had the chance to ask. I don't know if you ever got a response, but I would just like a clear explanation as to why it is limited to the best devices with the fastest chips. Because otherwise, it does just seem like it's something of a product differentiation strategy that they're going to compel people to upgrade to the iPhone 15 Pro in the coming months or then in September, the iPhone 16 model. Some of the analysts I spoke to said like this could potentially supercharge the iPhone sales cycle. iPhone sales have been in a slump for a while. And so maybe this is part of a ploy to drive phone sales, but actually that probably wouldn't happen for a while still. It probably wouldn't be a gangbusters thing in September because it's still a relatively unproven AI experience and a lot of people aren't going to care about it.
There are going to be just as many consumers, I think, who say a midrange phone or an older phone is just fine. I don't need the Genmoji. I don't need Siri summarizing my 8,700 notifications. I don't need this just yet. And then eventually, it could drive adoption of newer hardware as it becomes more widespread. But just having an understanding exactly of why it needs to be the A17 Pro chip and M1 or M2 Ultra and beyond would be great. Maybe we'll get some documentation on that eventually.
Will Knight: Yeah, I didn't get a clear answer for that. I talked to Brenda Stolyar, our colleague, who heard that it was to do with having a certain amount of RAM on the device, which is further confusing. Yeah, I don't know that it makes that much sense where they've drawn the line. Also, I would have thought the idea of this private compute cloud was that you could hand stuff off if you had an older device. So, yeah, it's …
Michael Calore: Yeah, that would make sense.
Will Knight: … a bit confusing.
Lauren Goode: Right.
Will Knight: Well, the features that they've shown don't seem to be the very, very most cutting-edge AI models, and you can run some pretty similarly capable stuff in my experience on older hardware. Well, they maybe just want to sell more iPhones, I guess.
Lauren Goode: So it sounds like what's different here is that Apple's Intelligence "is integrated into their devices, they haven't launched a separate chatbot or search engine." They're saying it's much more private because a lot of the processing is going to happen on device, and then if not, they're going to offload it to their super special private Apple cloud. And Apple hasn't revealed any massive LLM or something like that that would be comparable to what you'd see with ChatGPT and Gemini and with … What are the others now? Bard, I guess. No, Bard is being-
Michael Calore: The Bard is Gemini.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Is that correct, Will?
Will Knight: Right, yeah.
Lauren Goode: In cloud, yeah.
Will Knight: Yeah, they haven't shown off something like that. Also, interestingly, the demo they did, I asked about the copyright of some of the data they were using and it sounded, at least for the image-generating stuff, that they weren't using conventional copyrighted material. They were using stuff they were compensating artists for, this is what they were claiming, and had had their own artists generate stuff. I mean, I think that will limit what you can produce much more and perhaps means you don't need such a large model, but I think their approach to copyright and training might be interesting as well.
Lauren Goode: Oh, that's interesting. I'm glad that they're paying artists. I mean, they do have to worry about their bottom line and whether or not they're going to go broke, but that's good to know.
All right, let's take a quick break and then we come back, we're going to talk about how Apple AI is similar to other AI products that we've talked about a lot on this show. And then maybe cover some of the other announcements that came out of WWDC. More after the break.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: OK. So we've already talked about how Apple is trying to distinguish itself from other AI-focused tech companies with the big reveal of Apple Intelligence, but we're also wondering what are the ways in which Apple AI just seems like the same old, same old, just a lot of the stuff we've already been doing on our phones. And Will, we also wanted to ask you about some of the other announcements that came out of WWDC quickly.
OK. So first, what are some of the ways in which you saw Apple Intelligence and thought, "Yep, we could already do that?"
Will Knight: Well, I think everything they showed is already something you could do with ChatGPT or another tool if you … Some of the features integrated into email or notes are similar to what Google has shown off in its Docs and Gmail. Even the … The thing that got the biggest cheer, which I was surprised about, was bringing the calculator to the iPad, weirdly.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, this was wild. I actually couldn't believe it as I was watching the livestream. I thought it was a sound effect when you're watching an old sitcom and they've got the clapping. I was like, "Is this an inserted round of cheers from the crowd?" And the calculator.
Will Knight: I'm not lying. A guy right next to me said, "Oh my god," as that was announced, which was pretty impressive. Then they showed writing out equations and drawing a little chart and the ability to interpret that give you an answer, turn that into a real chart, is pretty slick and impressive. And that involves a multimodal model, a model that can use images and read handwriting as well as past language. But that's quite similar to what both OpenAI and Google showed off at their developer events or whatever events recently. So I don't think any of it was beyond what other people have shown. I mean, far from it, it seemed pretty table stakes. And I mean, I do think, though, partly that is probably quite deliberate in that they're trying to avoid the gaffes that seem to come with using this stuff. They're trying to limit it. Apple's not … Or probably doesn't want to be associated with the controversies that happen often with generative AI. So I think they're trying to limit it somewhat in that way.
Michael Calore: Another thing that feels like table stakes is Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI. There's ChatGPT built right into the user experience now. So particularly like with a Siri query or a typed query, if you're asking it a question that it can't answer, it says, "Would you like to ask ChatGPT this question?" And then you tap yes. And then it goes off and asks ChatGPT that question. So a couple of things. First of all, that's clunky and weird that they built a step into it. I understand why they did that because they want to make it very, very clear that you're no longer using an Apple product. You are now going to use somebody else's product. So if the experience sucks, you can't blame Apple. But also, they hinted that they're going to have other models available at some point. So it's possible that just like you get to pick a browser, you will get to pick an agent, a user agent that you send your requests off to.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. And the avatar looks like Sam Altman who was there, by the way. And he'll go down in history as one of the most poly-AI-morous people out there because now he's working with both Microsoft and Apple. I mean, we should do a whole other podcast on Sam Altman, but what a coup.
Michael Calore: You came up with a name.
Lauren Goode: Poly-AI-morous. That was really bad, wasn't it?
Michael Calore: No, it was brilliant. It was brilliant AI and—
Lauren Goode: Yeah. But Mike, to your point, it's like, "Oh, then the alternative option here, ChatGPT," which we could all use on our phones anyway.
Will Knight: Yeah, it seems to me like it's more about pleasing or appeasing investors and regulators doing that. They're trying to show—
Michael Calore: How so?
Will Knight: Well, people want to think Apple is at the cutting edge. So they're trying to show that they are by making that available. And then I guess they're running into trouble around having Google as the default search that they're talking about having different AI models available to people. But the demos that they've given, I wonder if the way that they've set it up is it makes ChatGPT that much less useful. They're showing these things like you take a picture of ... I mean, I don't really know how people use ChatGPT that much, but take a picture of some vegetables and then ask what to make for dinner. I mean, do people really do that? It seems you have to be slightly mad to do that, I would say.
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's a funny hedge, it seems.
Lauren Goode: Will, were there any announcements not related to Apple Intelligence that you heard firsthand at the event and you thought, "That sounds pretty nifty. I'm into that?"
Will Knight: I like the real-time translate on your watch, on the Apple Watch, weirdly.
Lauren Goode: Are you an Apple Watch wearer?
Will Knight: I do have an Apple Watch, but I've also traveled a bunch and I tried to use … In China, they used to sell these things that would … They used deep learning models to recognize your speech, but then this was pre-large language models, so try and translate things, but you'd say something to somebody and then play it and they'd be like, "What are you talking about?" And then they'd say something back and it would get even more garbled. And it was … But in principle, it seemed like a cool idea. And I think if you try the latest ChatGPT and said, "Tell it to translate," I think they're pretty impressive. And so I thought that could be quite useful. Obviously, the calculator was a huge deal for me.
Lauren Goode: Oh my god.
Will Knight: There were a lot of … My first WWDC and I was amazed at how many gasps there were in the crowd when they announced a new little widget or icon or something. Seemed pretty crazy.
Lauren Goode: So the NIPS Conference isn't like that?
Will Knight: The which conference?
Lauren Goode: The NIPS Conference. NIPS.
Will Knight: NeurIPS.
Lauren Goode: NeurIPS, oops. It used to be called NIPS, wasn't it?
Will Knight: They used to, be called that, they had to change it.
Lauren Goode: And it changed.
Will Knight: Yes.
Lauren Goode: Tell us about how NeurIPS compares.
Will Knight: NeurIPS is a little more—
Michael Calore: You might want to retake that.
Lauren Goode: It's OK. Leave it in. So you're saying it's different from the NeurIPS Conference.
Will Knight: It's a bit different from that, yeah. NeurIPS is the premier AI conference, which has become ridiculous because there's so much AI research happening and it's all very, very in the weeds focused on the latest models and capabilities and training data and all this stuff. So, yes, very different to that for me. It was fun to be there. I was amazed that they basically pulled you all together and then just play a video at you. It seems ridiculous. Like something from Silicon Valley.
Lauren Goode: I mean, you flew across the country for that, Will.
Will Knight: Yeah. I did wonder what was going on.
Lauren Goode: What about messaging? We should talk about messaging because I think that's one of the biggest announcements.
Michael Calore: I would love to talk about messaging. First of all, the fact that you can satellite message for non-emergency situations, I think, is very cool. There's not a lot of detail about how this is going to work and a lot of people have tons of questions about this, but basically, if you don't have a data connection and you want to send a text or receive a text, you can just open a satellite connection and send a text or receive a text. Apple has been providing two years of free satellite messaging for emergency situations with iPhones. We do not know whether or not that is going to be extended to non-emergency situations. Probably not. Might require a plan. Maybe you can get pay as you go, but people want to know, can I use it … Is it just for the wilderness? Is it just for places where there is no connection or can I use it at places where the Wi-Fi sucks or where the reception sucks? Like at a concert when there's 60,000 people, you often can't send a text message because all of the tubes are so clogged.
Lauren Goode: Or on a plane.
Michael Calore: Or on an airplane. Can I use it there? All kinds of questions about that. So people are very excited. They want to know everything about satellite messaging. I think they're probably not going to get what they want.
Lauren Goode: Well, it's going to cost money, I think.
Michael Calore: Yes. And …
Lauren Goode: That's my guess.
Michael Calore: … I'd be shocked if they let you use it on airplanes.
Lauren Goode: Well, airplanes, I think it would be the most useful just for 2FA.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: Have you ever had that experience where this happens a lot? I go to log in to my Condé email when I'm on a plane and I get … Mike's shaking his head.
Michael Calore: No.
Lauren Goode: And I'm not logged in, so I'm like, "OK, I got to log in," and then I have to authenticate and I'm waiting for the 2FA code and I can't get it because it comes via SMS.
Michael Calore: Yeah, no.
Lauren Goode: Why are you saying no? It's not happened to you?
Michael Calore: No, I don't work on airplanes. Airplanes are me time.
Lauren Goode: Who are you? What have you done with Michael?
Michael Calore: I'm a person who does not work on air … I've never worked on an airplane.
Lauren Goode: What do you do on airplanes?
Michael Calore: I read, I sleep, I listen to podcasts, I stare out the window.
Lauren Goode: Watch B movies.
Michael Calore: Yeah, no, I watch excellent movies.
Lauren Goode: Do you cry?
Michael Calore: Sometimes.
Lauren Goode: Just in general or from the movies?
Michael Calore: From the Apple Vision Pro putting pressure on my face.
Lauren Goode: Touche. Well, sometimes I work … All right. Sometimes I don't want to work and I just want to spend the time clearing out my inbox.
Michael Calore: Yeah, that's still work.
Lauren Goode: It is, but it's mindless work. It's just like batch select, mark as spam, delete.
Michael Calore: That's what Uber rides are for.
Lauren Goode: No, I get nauseous in the back of an Uber when I do that. Anyway. I really hope this satellite messaging works on planes, but you know people are going to abuse that, right? Let's say there's … Not abuse it, that's not the right word, but …
Michael Calore: Oh, sure.
Lauren Goode: … what is deemed essential will be different for different people.
Michael Calore: Oh, yes.
Lauren Goode: Someone's in a massive fight with their spouse and they're like, "I got a text right now," or something like that, versus, "I need to make an emergency call."
Michael Calore: I'm sure all of us have been in a situation where we either send or receive a text right before they tell us that we have to go into airplane mode and then we spend the entire rest of the airplane ride with our brains spinning. Imagine if that was a thing of the past. Imagine if you didn't have to worry about that anymore. You could just—
Lauren Goode: It's too soon.
Michael Calore: You could just send a text message.
Lauren Goode: Genmoji.
Michael Calore: Genmoji, not interested. We should talk about RCS.
Lauren Goode: Oh, we should. We should talk about it for approximately four seconds because that's how long Apple spent talking about it on stage, despite the fact that it's one of the things people are most interested in, RCS being rich communication service, which is, a … I'm having word retrieval issues right now. What's the … not a platform. It's a …
Michael Calore: Protocol.
Lauren Goode: … standard … It's a protocol. Thank you very much. It's a protocol. This reminds me of the episode we did with Will a few weeks back. It's a protocol that is supposed to bridge the gaps that exist between iPhone blue bubble text messaging and Android text messaging. By the way, most people around the world have an Android phone and rely on other messaging apps to message each other. Anyway. But iMessage has this lock, this grip on iPhone users, because it uses Apple's data network and then all the messages that you can send from iPhone to iPhone, you have all these cool features, but those don't translate to your green bubble friends on Android. RCS was supposed to level the playing field for that. It's a standard or a protocol that Google was very much behind. They had gotten the wireless carriers on board.
And so then last year, at some point, Apple said, "Fine, we'll support RCS." This was largely seen as a response to some of the regulation that's happening in the EU around tech companies and to pressure here in the States on Apple to be more fair about the whole messaging thing, but they just glossed over it. They're like, "Oh, and by the way, RCS support. OK, let's move on."
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: And then there was … It was a little icon on a page of all the things that the new iOS is going to have.
Michael Calore: Yeah. I'm not holding out hope that Apple's implementation is going to be excellent. I am ready to be surprised by that. I'm being open-minded about it. The big thing is that it's secure end-to-end encrypted conversations between devices. But the other thing is that if you're on an Android phone and you're talking to a bunch of people with iPhones, group texts don't work, videos come in as crunchy, little pixelated shit storms. They don't look like real actual videos. It's very annoying. And if they can just fix some of those minor annoyances that make the two platforms more interoperable, then everybody will be OK. There will be world peace and we can all move on with our lives.
Lauren Goode: That's just the bare minimum. Plus, secure.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: That's it.
Michael Calore: I think people don't care. People have been trading security for features for eons. And I think that as long as they can just make it work, it doesn't have to … I mean, if it's RCS, it will be secure, but I don't think that people are that concerned about security. I think they're more concerned about—
Lauren Goode: Do you think they're just journalist nerds who care about it?
Michael Calore: I just want to see your cat photo.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, or something else.
Michael Calore: Or I just don't want to be left out.
Lauren Goode: Right. Right. Or I don't want to be the person who's on the group thread who's accused of making everything worse because I'm the person on Android.
Michael Calore: Yeah, because it's not my fault, it's Apple's fault. I'm sorry I'm making this personal.
Lauren Goode: No, I think that's OK.
Michael Calore: Speaking of personalized experiences.
Lauren Goode: I think this is very fair. Will, do you have group chats where there's some ... You must because you're from the UK. Our producer's telling us that we are definitely out of time, but now I need to know the answer, Will, because you're from the UK. And presumably, you have lots of friends over there. And so do you have group chats where people are on Android?
Will Knight: They tend to be on WhatsApp, honestly.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: See, that's exactly it.
Michael Calore: There you go.
Will Knight: WhatsApp is so popular in England. Yeah.
Michael Calore: Yep.
Lauren Goode: And you could do all those fun things in WhatsApp, too. You can record voice notes and do tap backs and emoji and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Will Knight: Just wait until you get the first Genmoji and then you'll be rushing to update your hardware.
Lauren Goode: I know. I have an iPhone 15. That's the thing about not really reviewing phones anymore, which I did for a decade of my life, is that I feel not at all compelled to get the newest phone anymore.
Michael Calore: You have to buy them like a plebian. Oh, you're saying you’re OK with it.
Lauren Goode: Just myself. Yeah. I'm OK. And so I have the 15, I don't have the Pros, so I'm going to have to figure that out. I do think I'm going to be a little bit … I don't know about Genmoji as much as tapbacks. I'm convinced people these days have entire relationships through tapbacks and that's OK. I'm OK with that.
Will Knight: Can you use a Genmoji in your tapback phone? Can you—
Lauren Goode: I think you can.
Will Knight: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: I think you can. I think you can, right?
Will Knight: That's the dream.
Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah.
Will Knight: That's the generative dream.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, that's the … Well, I'm glad we've established that, Will. Papers upon papers about the advances of artificial intelligence and we have arrived at Genmoji as a tapback is the dream. It's what we've always wanted. Will, thank you so much for this. Stick around. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to do our recommendations.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: All right. Will, as our guest of honor, what is your recommendation this week?
Will Knight: OK. I'm going to recommend this software framework called AutoGen, which is relatively straightforward to use. It's from Microsoft and it lets several AI models or personas of a language model work together to solve a task. It's interesting because there's been a bunch of papers that have came out at research conferences and so on showing that when models work together, sometimes they can solve things that one model can't on its own, and sometimes they can be much more reliable. And this is quite fun because you can create different personas in the models and watch them go back and forth and argue with each other, which I find entertaining, even if no one else does.
Michael Calore: Apocalyptic.
Will Knight: Yeah, a little bit.
Michael Calore: So it's like teamwork. Teamwork makes the dream work.
Will Knight: Yes. Right. That's the idea. I mean, it's interesting because, to some degree, it's really just about, rather than this being humans that are working together. And actually, what it's really doing in a way is providing a clever way to refine the prompt that goes into a model. So it's not clear if you really need to have different models working together as teams or whether you really just need a much better way to interrogate these models, which is what that enables. But it's fun … I think it's really interesting that people are experimenting with these different tools. Maybe the future of Apple Intelligence is a lot of different series arguing over what to recommend for dinner or working together or something like that.
Lauren Goode: Agents. “Agents.”
Will Knight: Right.
Lauren Goode: And how can someone find AutoGen?
Will Knight: I'd recommend googling AutoGen because I can't remember—
Lauren Goode: How do you spell that?
Will Knight: A-U-T-O-G-E-N. And you'll find the GitHub page where you can download and play with it.
Michael Calore: Ooh, tarballs.
Lauren Goode: Fun.
Michael Calore: Great.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Will Knight: Absolutely.
Lauren Goode: And it's free, Will?
Will Knight: It's free, yeah.
Lauren Goode: It's on GitHub. Yeah.
Will Knight: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: OK. Thanks for that. Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I would like to recommend the Klean Kanteen Rise Food Box.
Lauren Goode: That just sounds like you went to a word generator and spit up a bunch of words.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: OK. Tell the people what this is.
Michael Calore: So Klean Kanteen, that's Klean Kanteen with a K and a K. They make water bottles.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: They make other things, too, like travel mugs and shot glasses or whatever.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, the Kardashians are behind it, right? It's a K, all the Ks.
Michael Calore: I have no idea.
Lauren Goode: I'm just kidding. I made that up.
Michael Calore: OK.
Lauren Goode: It is the K thing. OK, please continue.
Michael Calore: All right. So they make these food boxes that are basically like bento boxes, they're lunch boxes, and you pack them with food and you take them to work. We have returned to the office here at WIRED. I'm sure many people listening have returned to the office and maybe the catering system that you had before Covid is no longer around and you need to bring your lunch. What I'm saying is they're very useful for people who need to eat food during the work day. They're metal, which is very nice. They're also microwave safe. You can put them in the microwave to heat up your lunch. You have to take the lid off. The lid is not microwave safe. But my favorite thing about them is that they have this really powerful rubber seal. It's like a silicone ring around the lid that seals and then tabs that fold down and hold it down.
Now, I ride my bike to and from work, so I'm always carrying my lunch in my bicycle bag. There's all kinds of problems with spilling if I use all of the different food boxes that I've had over the years. This one does not spill. And that's why I'm recommending it. The seal on it is excellent. It feels flimsy and you're like, "I don't really know," but I've been using it for months now and not one spill. So I'm amazed. My bag, for the first time in my life, does not smell like kimchi. It just smells like a regular cycling bag. So, yeah, the Klean Kanteen Rise Food Box. I should note that Klean Kanteen made food boxes before this one that do not have the excellent seal on them. Those are also good, but I have—
Lauren Goode: But you don't want to ride your bike with them.
Michael Calore: Those have … I've encountered spills with those.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: The new version, the one that's out this year, 2024, that's the good one.
Lauren Goode: How much does that cost approximately?
Michael Calore: I have the one that's the medium size and I think it was $35.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: Which sounds like a lot.
Lauren Goode: It's worth it.
Michael Calore: But totally worth it.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. That's a great recommendation.
Michael Calore: Well, thank you. Lauren, what's your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is the Lunya washable silk sleep mask.
Michael Calore: Ooh.
Lauren Goode: Ooh. Sorry to sound like an infomercial. I should hold it up and you go, “Ooh, tell me more.”
Michael Calore: Say more.
Lauren Goode: You were actually a part of this thread when I got the Lunya. Do you remember this?
Michael Calore: I do.
Lauren Goode: Ooh. First, I'll tell you about the mask, which is, if you use a sleep mask or you're thinking about using a sleep mask, you can look up all kinds of different options. And I'm telling you, this one is probably the best. I mean, I haven't tried that many, but it's soft, it's pillowy, it's not too tight on your face. It's silk, so it's smooth. It's washable. It is just honestly one of the most comfortable sleep masks I've ever used. It has been game-changing for me. I was not really a sleep mask person before, but recently, I had a birthday and I was having a small birthday dinner and I brought this up to a group of friends who were all on a group chat, which was, yep, it turned green because Mike's on a Pixel. So at this dinner, I was saying to friends, "Have any of you used a sleep mask? And if so, what's your pick?" And everyone's, "Oh, sure, yeah, we use sleep masks." And I was thinking, "OK, well, I'm going to go home and I'm going to buy one for myself for my birthday."
I was very tired. I was not drunk, I was just tired. And I passed out while I was googling sleep masks. And the next day, I got a notification saying, "Your Lunya shipment is on the way." So I thought, "Wow, I was really out of it." And I ordered a sleep mask for myself. Congratulations to me. And I wrote to you guys on the thread and I was like, "You guys, I am such a dope. I was falling asleep last night and I ordered this Lunya thing." When it arrived, of course, I opened the box and there was a note from one of my dear friends on there saying, "Happy birthday. You said you wanted a sleep mask." So actually, what had happened is that someone on the group thread had ordered it for me and I just thought I … I don't know. I was like a drunk wine mom without the wine.
Michael Calore: And then they let you believe that you had sleep ordered it.
Lauren Goode: Yes, which was the best part. That was actually the best part of the surprise was that for days, she just let me think that I did that.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. So love my Lunya. I highly recommend if you're looking for a sleep mask. I think that model, I think it's expensive. It's like 50 bucks.
Michael Calore: Oh wow.
Lauren Goode: Expensive for a sleep mask.
Michael Calore: This person really cares about you.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, but there are versions that are closer to 35, I think. So I don't know, it's a tossup between the Klean Kanteen and the Lunya sleep mask. What matters more, a good night's sleep or spill-free Kanteen?
Michael Calore: Hot lunch.
Lauren Goode: Hot lunch, baby. This all sound like euphemisms right now. OK, let's wrap up the show. Boone is dying. Our producer, poor Boone. Thank you, Will, for joining us and for tolerating us. This was really fun.
Will Knight: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can leave us a review. All I ask of you is that even if you don't like the show, you can write that, but give us five stars anyway because that helps our rating. But if you have other feedback, you can also find all of us on social media. We're very responsive there. Just check the show notes and we'll put our handles in. The show is produced by the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now and we'll be back next week.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
Will Knight: There was a … I did come across an app that promises to translate your speech into cat.
Lauren Goode: Into cat?
Will Knight: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Is it just meow, meow, meow, meow?
Will Knight: You have to pay for it. I haven't paid for it. Can I still recommend it?
Michael Calore: Yes.
Boone Ashworth: Is it CatGPT?
Lauren Goode: Is it CatGPT?
Will Knight: It's not called Cat … I have to find out what it's called now. I've downloaded it, but I was like, "Oh, god, I've got to pay?"
Lauren Goode: I'll do it for free. Send me your prompt. What's your question, Mike? I'm CatGPT, send me your question.
Michael Calore: Oh, can I say a command?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, sure.
Michael Calore: All right. Go back to sleep.
Lauren Goode: Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. There you go.
Will Knight: That wasn't … That was something quite different.
