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Apple will turn its Siri assistant into a full-fledged chatbot by next year. The company is working on a personal AI device to compete with the one OpenAI is building with Jony Ive. And Apple is putting control over its AI strategy into new hands within the company. So say a flurry of new reports, all advancing the larger story that Apple is doing what it can to get itself back in the AI race. And its doing it in a way that may allow it, in classic Apple fashion, to lead from behind. That is, it may hang back and benefit from the hard lessons learned by others marketing a new technology, then arrive fashionably late with a more polished product. Apple and Google announced on January 12 that the (notoriously slow) Siri assistant will be powered, at least in part, by Gemini models developed by Googles DeepMind division. Apple has in the past voiced concern about the privacy implications of sending user data to AI models outside its own infrastructure. Apple has said it plans to run its AI models either within a secure Apple cloud, or, even better, on chips inside Apple devices. Bringing in Gemini But that may be changing. Bloombergs Mark Gurman reports that Apple is now in talks with Google to run the Gemini models powering Siri and Apple Intelligence features within the Google Cloud. Previous reports said Apple could be paying Google as much as $1 billion per year for access to the Gemini models. The new Siri is expected to show up with iOS 26.4 in March or April, the report states. The assistant will reportedly gain a better contextual understanding of the user by accessing some types of personal data stored on the users device. It may also have an awareness of what the user is viewing or working on on their screen, as well as better internet search. These are the same Apple Intelligence” features the company promised to deliver in 2024, but later postponed, explaining that it wasnt happy with the performance and reliability of the AI. Then, in 2027, another upgrade will make Siri feel more like a real chatbot, meaning that users will be able to have extended back-and-forth exchanges with the assistant (including via their voice), as is common with OpenAIs ChatGPT and Googles Gemini chatbots. Apple also plans to integrate the smarter Siri deeper into the operating system, which could make it a more functional intermediary between the user and the capabilities of the device. The Information reports that Apple is also in the early stages of developing a small personal AI deviceabout the size of an AirTagthat can clip to a lapel and contains two cameras, three microphones, a little speaker, a battery, and inductive charging tech. (A patent search yielded no Apple designs fitting this description.) OpenAI attracted a lot of attention last year after announcing that it was developing a personal AI device in collaboration with Apples former design guru Jony Ive. Its worth noting, however, that other companies have tried selling such a product, notably Humane (founded by some ex-Applers), and none have found much success. A new AI leader inside Apple The Google Gemini deal and the AI device reports come in the wake of a pretty major power shift at Apple regarding the companys AI strategy. Apple struggled for years to build its own AI models under the leadership of ex-Google AI chief John Giannandrea (while balancing its historical concern for data privacy), and failed to deliver models that performed like those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Now Apple has reportedly put its consumer AI problems in the lap of software chief Craig Fedherighi, who is known for his tall hair and utilitarian (and somewhat skeptical) views on the new technology. Fedherighi has viewed AI as an enabling technology that should work behind the scenes to make phone features work better. Hes also expressed concern over the predictability and reliability of the technology. Fedherighi is taking the reins at a pivotal moment. Apple is in a tough spot with AI. It fears the appearance of falling further behind OpenAI (and the punishment it might take from Wall Street), but its also traditionally hesitant to rush into an emerging technology that isnt yet totally proven and reliable (AI chatbots still make mistakes and consumers dont fully trust them). Apple is most comfortable taking a mature technology (like cell phones) and reinventing it for the mainstream with simplicity, utility, and artful design. So partnering with Google, talking about plans for new Gemini-powered features in the future, and preparing a personal AI device might be just the right moves for Apple right now. The deal with Google buys Apple time while its own researchers find ways to balance the twin needs of data privacy and high-performing models. (It might also shift some of the responsibility onto Google if the new Siri doesnt work as promised.) Being late has worked out before Theres precedent for this. Apple relied on Intel processors in its computers while it built up the expertise and experience to make its own. Apple used Intel processors in its Mac computers for 15 years, before switching its lineup to Apple-designed chips. But planning the features of future Macs was difficult because it all depended on Intels roadmap for releasing new chips. Apple became acutely aware of the speed and efficiency gains to be had from designing custom chips that could be deeply integrated with its Mac operating system. Those improvements were first realised in the companys first M-series Macs in late 2020. Apple also relied entirely on Qualcomm cellular modem chips for the iPhone before it was able to build its own. The first Apple-designed modem, the C1, shipped inside the iPhone 16e in 2025. While Qualcomm says it will continue to supply modems for iPhones in 2026, Apples intent is to build its own modem into the integrated silicon system-on-a-chip processor that powers iPhones, which could yield faster and more reliable cellular connections. However, in other cases, like internet search, Apple has been content to rely on Google as a partner. Who knows, Apple may believe generative AI will become a commodity in the future (models are indeed getting more efficient and cheaper to access), something it would rather buy than build. he news of an Apple AI device doesnt hurt either. It shows an Apple that still has the appetite to mold emergent technologies into its own image and bring them to the mainstream, even without Ives. Apples relationship with generative AI is seen as rocky and mainly unsuccessful so far. That narrative may have seeped through the shell of Apples spaceship in Cupertino and caused a rush to ship a technology that wasnt quite baked. The hype around generative AI is so thick now that were quick to judge any technology company that isnt betting the farm on it. But its part of Apples culture to take the long view on new technology waves (notice that it didnt change the company name when the metaverse was having its moment). Its hesitation, intentional or not, may give it more time to judge the real scale of the AI revolution, and more time to understand what it all should mean to Apple and its customers.
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For decades, people with disabilities have relied on service dogs to help them perform daily tasks like opening doors, turning on lights, or alerting caregivers to emergencies. By some estimates, there are 500,000 service dogs in the U.S., but little attention has been paid to the fact that these dogs have been trained to interact with interfaces that are made for humans. A team of researchers from the United Kingdom wants to change that by designing accessible products for, and with dogs. The Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Laboratory in the UK was founded in 2011 to help promote the art and science of designing animal-centered systems. Led by Clara Mancini, a professor of animal-computer interaction, the lab studies how animals interact with technology and develops interactive systems designed to improve their wellbeing and support their relationships with humans. [Video: The Open University] The team’s first commercially available product is a specifically-designed button that service dogs can press to help turn on corresponding appliances at home, like a lamp, a kettle, or a fan. The Dogosophy Button took more than ten years to develop and was tested with about 20 dogs from UK charity Dogs for Good. It gives dogs more control over certain aspects of their home, which can make training them easier and further strengthen the bond between a human and their dog. It’s also taught the team a few lessons about how to design for humans. “I am now a better human designer,” says Luisa Ruge, an industrial designer who worked with Mancini and led the design of the button. For now, the Dogosophy Button is only available for purchase in the UK (for about $130). [Photo: The Open University] The challenges of designing for animals Anyone who’s ever designed a product for a human client knows the process relies on a perfect storm of variables like gender, age, background, and personal preferences. But these designers also have one advantage they likely take for granted: they can ask their client what they think at every step of the way. Getting feedback from a dog is much harder and requires an understanding of animal behavior. “Theres a lot of iteration,” says Ruge, “and a huge ethical and reflective component because I can’t be a dog, I don’t [feel] what they feel.” Ruge began her career as an industrial designer, but as she moved up the corporate ladder, she realized she was fascinated with animals. Her interest led her to train as a service dog trainer at Bergin College of Canine Studies in California. “One of the ways to bond is we had to be tied to our dog with a carabiner and leash for 8 days, 24/7,” she recalls. Later, she attended a conference on human behavior change for animal welfare, where she met Mancini and became interested in her lab. Ruge immediately enrolled in a PhD at The Open University, and spent the next three years writing a thesis on designing for the animal user experience and proving out her dog-centered methodology. Ruge followed the five human factors model, a method that helps designers understand the end user’s behavior by breaking down the UX into five factors. The typical list includes physical, cognitive, social, cultural, and emotional factors, but Ruge added a sixthsensoryand then later, a seventh: consent. To understand the exact characteristics and abilities she had to design for, she focused on Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, as these are the most common breeds for service dogs. Her research led to various correlations that informed the design of the button. For example: since both breeds have long tails, the button should not feature sensors that might accidentaly be activated by it. Since both breeds are predisposed to hip dysplasia and joint problems, the button should also not be designed in a way that requires jumping to activate. And since all dogs see the world in hues of yellow, blue, and brown, the button should be made in one of these colors so it is easy to perceive. [Video: The Open University] When Ruge first got involved, the prototype Mancini had developed was square in shape, and looked a bit like the standard metallic button that people with wheelchairs can press to open a door. Nowafter about 20 iterations and five prototypesthe button is round, convex, and blue. It is textured to prevent a dog’s wet snout from sliding on it, and its push depth is such that a more timid dog shouldn’t have to press hard to activate it. Ruge had to test some of her designs the hard way. The first prototype she ever made took days to develop and the dogs destroyed it “in two seconds,” she recalls with a laugh. But dogs don’t know that a prototype should be handled with care. To them, a work-in-progress product looks no different than a finished product. Animal design as a discipline Designing for dogs humbled Ruge’s assumptions. “It lets you know you’re never 100% right,” she says, adding that the only way to confirm her theories was through extensive testing and observation. It also made her a better designer for humans, because she learned to better spot her biases and assumptions. “Sometimes, I’m assuming you feel a handle like I do, and you don’t,” she says. In the end, though, animal design is where Ruge’s passion lies. Since earning her PhD, she has moved back to her native Colombia and started a design consultancy called Ph-auna (pronounced fauna) where she focuses on animal centeed innovation. She hosts a podcast called Pomodogo, guiding humans to better connect with their dogs, and is now working on an app that gamifies dog training and inspires humans to be better caretakers. “There’s an immense opportunity for animal design to be its own design discipline,” she says. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Dogosophy Button is available to individual customers willing to buy it, but the team is hoping to broaden its scope beyond the home. Mancini, who spearheaded the button project, says they first installed an earlier version of the button to operate the motorized door of a restaurants accessible toilet, but the restaurant ended up shuttering. Then, they tried installing it at a local shopping mall, but the plan fell through due to budget constraints. Still, she plans to continue developing new versions and adapt them for the characteristics of other species too. “It is my interest to try and install the buttons in public buildings,” she says. “I would love for whole cities to be more accessible for dogs and other urban animals.”
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On my phone, there are already videos of the next moon landing. In one, an astronaut springs off the rung of a ladder, strung out from the lander, before slowly plopping to the surface. He is, alas, still getting accustomed to the weaker gravity. In another, the crew collects a samplea classic lunar expedition activitywhile another person lazily minds the rover. A third video shows an astronaut affixing the American flag to the ground, because this act of patriotism is even better the second time around. The blue oceans of Earth are visible, in the background, and a radio calls out: Artemis crew is on the surface. America is going back to the moon, and NASA is in the final weeks of preparing for the Artemis II mission, which will have astronauts conduct a lunar flyby for the first time in decades. If all goes well, during the next endeavor, Artemis III, theyll finally land on the lunar surface, marking an extraordinary and historical and in some sense, nostalgic, accomplishment. The aforementioned videos are not advance copies, or some vision of the future, though. They were generated with OpenAIs video generation model and are extremely fake. Still, this kind of content is a reminder that the upcoming Artemis missions promise a major epistemic test for the deniers of the original moon landing. This a small but passionate and enduring community who doubt the Apollo moon landing for a host of reasons, including that (they allege) the government lied or (they believe) it is simply physically impossible for humans to go the moon. Now, when NASA returns to the lunar surface, these people will be confronted with far more evidence than from the last time around. The space agency operation will be broadcast, live, and including camera technology and social media platforms that just werent around in the 1960s. But theres also a bigger challenge before us. NASA will be launching its moon return effort in a period of major distrust in American scientific and government institutions, and, amid the proliferation of generative AI, declining confidence in the veracity of digital content. Most observers will be able to sort through the real NASA imagery, and anything fake that might show up. Still, there tends to be a small number of people who doubt these kinds of milestones, especially when a U.S. federal agency is involved. Adding AI to the conspiracy theory cocktail When the moon landing first came in, AI wasn’t a thing. The sophistication of [the landing] didn’t necessarily make us question it, says David Jolley, a professor at the University of Nottingham who studies conspiracy theories. But now, with the power of AI and the power of images that you can create, it certainly offers that different reality if you want to interpret it in that way. Its the trust in those sources that we need to kind of really create. Of course, if you haven’t got trust in our gatekeepers and you don’t trust scientists, well, suddenly you are going to lean into: well, this, is this real? Is this just AI? he continues. The upcoming Artemis missions arent yet a major topic among lunar landing deniers. But there are hints it will attract more attention from conspiracy theorists. During the last Artemis mission, which was unmanned, Reuters had to push back on online posts suggesting the expedition proved that Apollo 11 didnt actually happen. (Skeptics suggested longer Artemis I mission timelines, a product of a change in route, actually cast doubt on the original Apollo timeline). Other online skeptics have already suggested that, with Artemis, NASA is yet again faking a space endeavor. Some people in internet conspiracy communities suggest the upcoming moon missions will be entirely CGI (computer-generated imagery). Generative AI stands to introduce even more confusion, says Ben Colman, the CEO of Reality Defenders, a deep fake detection platform. Generating a believable image of a (fake) moon landing is now something any consumer can do. Any astute physicist will be able to tell you if these videos get star placement or physics wrong, as they are likely to do, he says, but even that is getting better with each model iteration. Conspiracy theories are sticky There are, of course, many reasons why people say they deny reality of the first lunar expeditions. They are canonical, misinterpreted references, like Van Allen belts, a zone of energetic charged particles that surrounds the planet (critics say the belts are too radioactive for manned vehicles to traverse) and the suspicious flag-in-the-wind (theres no wind on the moon!). All of these pointsand the many other points deniers bring uphave been thoroughly debunked. Still, this small community of self-appointed detectives are insistent. Even decades after the missions ended, people are still combing through NASAs videos and images, mining for signs of alternations or other surreptitious editing. To them, an expected shimmer reveals a film operation just beyond the view of the camera. A movement that might not look right is a hint that the world has been duped. Open source intelligence (OSINT) becomes the rabbit hole. Some allege we didn’t go to the moon, perhaps because we were trying to trick the Soviets into thinking that we had superior technology than they did, explains Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who also studies conspiratorial beliefs. Some people think we did go but it wasn’t televised. And that footage that we saw was made later in a sound studio. Some people think Stanley Kubrick was in charge of filming the faked Moon Landing footage. For its part, NASA is preparing to point to evidence, should any deepfake allegations come their way. Agency spokesperson Lauren Low tells Fast Company: We expect AI experts will be looking closely at all our images and will be able to verify they are real images taken by real astronauts as part of the Artemis II test flight around the Moon. Moreover, Low added, there will be many ways for people to watch the lunar flyby themselves, including live broadcasts, two 24/7 YouTube streams, a new conference, and views from Orion cameras. In other words, the reality of Artemis will be very hard to deny. Research suggests that conspiracy theories are entertaining, and even serve peoples core psychological needs, like a desire to understand the world or a way of dealing with uncertainty. Finding other people, including on social media, pushing these theories can help normalize them, and make someone feel like theyre part of a broader community. Some people simply dont trust institutions, and evidence that something did, indeed, happen only raises further questions, and suspicions that it didnt. To an extent, politics matters, too; people outside the United States are more likely to deny the moon landing, polls show. In the end, says Uscinski, we should prepare for people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking, or prone to mistrusting institutions, to take a skeptical view of any big news event. This may happen again when the Artemis missions finally launch. “The good news is that belief in conspiracy theories isnt likely to get worse,” he explains. “The bad news is that this conspiratorial thinking has always been this pervasive. People are very good at waving away evidence that tells them things they don’t want to hear, and they’re very good at believing things, either without evidence or with really shitty evidence when it tells them what they do want to believe about the world, Uscinski adds. You don’t need AI or sophisticated technology to provide a justification.
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