hi bud buds,
last week was wwdc 2025! per usual, apple announced a ton of new features across their ecosystem. this year, many of them involved ai — unsurprisingly.
tbh, nothing felt truly game changing, but there were some gems i expect to be very popular. my favorite: live translation for phone calls and facetimes! for calls, your words will be translated in real time and spoken out loud via an ai voice. for facetimes, live translations will appear as captions. these features feel like a beautiful way to help people connect more easily 🙂
looking ahead, i can see this feature pairing beautifully with airpods. imagine enabling “translation mode,” where any foreign language spoken around you plays back as english in your ears. i can see this transforming how we:
navigate a foreign city
provide healthcare to underserved populations
improve customer service (and maybe accelerate labor offshoring 👀)
make immigrating to a new country a little less painful
it really feels like we’re only scratching the surface of what hardware <> llms can do; excited to see all that changes for us as consumers over the coming years.
love, dj
last week’s product releases
at wwdc 2025, apple announced…
ios 26, including live translation for phone calls and facetimes, and polls in group texts
visual intelligence, accessed by pressing the same buttons you use to take a screenshot. example use cases:
if you open a social media app and see a gray jacket, you can use visual intelligence to do an image search for the jacket in google search
quickly adding an event to your calendar, by extracting the date, time, and location and pre-populating them in a calendar entry
vision os 26. including:
improved personas - an ai avatar to represent you on video calls
spacial widgets - for example, you could place a clock on a certain wall, and customize the size / color
“look to scroll” - use only your eyes to explore apps / websites
liquid glass, an operating system design overhaul with translucent, light-refracting elements
an ai workout buddy for apple watch, which will analyze data from your workouts to identify insights and provide you with encouragement
ai-generated app store tags to improve app discovery
travel features for apple wallet, including digital passports for tsa checkpoints, and boarding passes with terminal maps
ai in xcode, letting devs use ai for code suggestions and error handling
studio-quality audio recording + camera remote for airpods, enabling better audio recording and remote-triggered photos
commute suggestions and memory of visited places for apple maps
a new games app that centralizes gameplay, leaderboards, and social play. preinstalled across devices.
cool!
openai released advanced voice, adding natural intonation and expressiveness to chatgpt’s voice mode, plus real-time language translation
the browser company launched dia, an ai-native browser with chatbot-based navigation and file summarization. as an arc user, i’m excited to try this!
tesla announced its robotaxi service will start offering public rides june 22nd in austin, texas. curious to see how they compare versus waymo (i frickin love waymo)
instagram announced grid rearrangement, letting users customize post order for the first time. excited to see the creative ways people will use this :)
google is testing voice summaries of search results
mildly interesting
snap announced specs, lightweight ar glasses with ai assistant support. every mega tech company seems to be racing to re-launch ar glasses — but i still don’t see any real shift in consumer demand
google rolled out android 16 to pixel phones, including ai photo editing suggestions
snapchat announced new tools for content creators, including a timeline editor for editing videos directly on the platform
snapchat launched lens+, a $9/month tier with exclusive lenses and ar effects
meta rolled out a threads dm inbox, decoupling dms from instagram
llm news
mistral launched magistral, its first family of reasoning models for step-by-step problem solving
openai released o3-pro, a high-end reasoning model for math, physics, and code
apple released the foundation models framework, enabling devs to use on-device ai models for offline tasks
that’s it for this week.
bye bye, i love you all. see you next week!
love, dj