Everybody wants to talk to their pet. Or to try to get them to listen, anyway. So it’s no wonder that some startups think the way to break through the communication barrier between you and your pooch is with a nice big helping of technology. Welcome to a world with AI-enabled dog and cat collars that try to interpret a pet’s needs and then share those wishes with their human. The only problem with these devices is that the pet won’t actually be a part of the conversation, as the collar is just guessing at what the pet is thinking—but still doing all the talking anyway. It’s less like the audio collar worn by the dog from the movie Up, and more like shouting at a chatbot strapped to your dog’s neck. Meanwhile, your dog or cat might just be trying to figure out where that new voice is coming from.
Later in the show, we talk about all the weird new ways AI gadgets are bouncing around in our lives, and whether any of them are helping us have better conversations.
Also, this week marks the final episode of the Gadget Lab podcast—at least in its current form. We’ll be back soon with a fresh reboot of the show. Lauren and Michael will return as hosts, but we’ll have a third cohost at the table, a new podcast title, and a new angle on our coverage.
Show Notes
Stay tuned to this feed for the updated version of this show, out October 31! Read Boone’s stories about the talking pet collars and the AI-powered Friend necklace. Read Lauren’s story about the challenges of AI hardware. Keep an eye on all the ways AI is weaving into our lives. For all your gadget needs, follow WIRED’s onslaught of gear coverage.
Recommendations
Boone recommends the rain. Lauren recommends taking walks. Mike recommends KEXP’s YouTube channel, where the Seattle radio station posts videos of musical acts playing in its studio.
Boone Ashworth can be found on social media but honestly, since he’s going to remain a full-time reporter at WIRED, just email him story tips: [email protected]. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @[email protected]. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show was produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music was by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: For years and years now, we’ve been calling the show Gadget Lab.
Lauren Goode: Mm-hmm.
Michael Calore: But I have a serious question for you.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: When was the last time that you thought about gadgets, or when was the last time you bought something that you would consider a gadget?
Lauren Goode: I haven’t bought new hardware in a really long time. That is not entirely true because I recently bought little lavalier mics to use for videos. But in terms of day-to-day hardware, not in a really long time. I don’t think of our tech lives as gadgets anymore. I really think about software a lot.
Michael Calore: I tend to agree. I mean, I buy a lot of music gear but those aren’t necessarily gadgets. And also, I think the word gadget doesn’t really serve what we do because we write about consumer technology and consumer products, so we write about things like tennis shoes and bug spray and sunscreen.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. There was this era where a gadget was a tool. It was utility. But now, it’s just we are soaked in tech.
Michael Calore: OK. Yes. And I feel like it’s a good opportunity to change things up.
Lauren Goode: What do you mean?
Michael Calore: I mean, not only change the way that we think about gadgets or what the future of consumer products might be, but I think we should actually change up the Gadget Lab.
Lauren Goode: Ooh, I see what you’re getting at here. If that’s where the future is headed, then that’s where we’re headed.
Michael Calore: That’s right. I tend to agree.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. So is this one of those some personal news moments when people in media are about to make an announcement and they tweet out some personal news?
Michael Calore: Yes, it is. But we should still go out with a gadget bang.
Lauren Goode: That sounds weird. Let’s do it.
Michael Calore: Yes, please. Let’s do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. WIRED’s director of consumer tech and culture.
Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer on the business desk at WIRED.
Michael Calore: We are also joined this week by WIRED staff writer Boone Ashworth. If his name is familiar to you, it’s because you listened to this show till the very end every week, and you hear his name because he’s also the producer of this show, so thank you for that. Hello, Boone.
Boone Ashworth: Hi. Now, you hear my voice.
Michael Calore: Once again, welcome back to the show.
Boone Ashworth: Thank you.
Michael Calore: Boone, we have brought you on the show for two reasons. One is because you wrote a story this week for WIRED about the future of gadgets and AI-powered hardware. One of those devices is, bizarrely enough, a pet collar that lets people have spoken conversations with their dog or cat, and it sort of works. So we’re going to talk about that, and we’re also going to talk about the pendants, the pins, and the pocketable assistance that tech companies are making these days and where all of that is headed.
But the second reason we brought you on the show this week is because as we mentioned, you are this show’s producer. You’ve been behind the mixing desk here at WIRED in the studio for about five years now, and this is the last of this show, the Gadget Lab. We are going to hit pause on Gadget Lab and reboot this show after what? 662, 63 episodes?
Boone Ashworth: 62. This is 62? Yeah.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: 662.
Michael Calore: 662.
Lauren Goode: And Mike, you’ve been here for all of them?
Michael Calore: Not all of them, no.
Lauren Goode: Most of them.
Michael Calore: Yeah, I came in episode 20 or so.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: I’ve been here since 2018. And Boone, you basically made the hero’s journey of becoming our producer during a pandemic.
Boone Ashworth: Oh, yeah. That was fun. Yeah, you guys remember that?
Michael Calore: We should note that we’re not really going away. We do have a new show coming out, and Lauren and I are going to continue to be the hosts of that show, and we are going to be joined by a third voice. So we’ll have three people sitting around the table every week. The show is going to be in this feed. So if you listen to this show, then you don’t have to do anything. You’re just going to get a trailer for the new show coming up next week. And then the week after that, at the end of October, you will get the first episode of our new show and it covers similar ground and it features two people who you know really well.
Lauren Goode: Who are those two people?
Michael Calore: That’s you and me.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK. Michael tried to get rid of me but I would not go far.
Michael Calore: I would never ever.
Boone Ashworth: Is that why you’re handcuffed to the table?
Lauren Goode: No.
Michael Calore: But Boone, you are graduating. You are being unshackled from the mixing desk in this studio, and you’re going to be writing full time for WIRED.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. The show, I assume, is going to sound pretty similar and have the same people on it. They’ll just have a different ghost haunting the room over in the corner with it on the mixing tape.
Lauren Goode: It is still going to be a tech show because we are WIRED after all, and we cover the present day. We cover the future. But I think it’s going to be a lot of episodes that are about topics that are just really fascinating to people right now in the tech world. So it’s going to have a slightly different angle. But yeah, Michael and I’ll still be here.
Michael Calore: Yep, we’ll still be here.
Lauren Goode: Still be here every week. We’ll still be hanging out outside of the podcast studio too talking junk, basically recording podcasts without making a podcast.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. And that we’re going to have this new person who I’m very excited about.
Michael Calore: Me too.
Lauren Goode: We’re going to round it out.
Michael Calore: Our third cohost.
Lauren Goode: Stay subscribed to this feed.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: Don’t go anywhere.
Boone Ashworth: Definitely.
Michael Calore: It’s the tease. It’s definitely stay subscribed. Boone, I realize now that you have engineered and produced over half the episodes that we’ve done.
Boone Ashworth: A couple of hundred, maybe 300.
Michael Calore: Because if there’s 663, it wasn’t every week we were doing it when we first started, or however many episodes we had. When we started, it wasn’t every week. It was like every other week, and we really ramped up shortly before you became our producer and started doing it every week.
Lauren Goode: I don’t think that’s true.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: I was here every week.
Michael Calore: Yeah. But the first few hundred episodes were … The first 200 or so episodes were kind of haphazard.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK.
Michael Calore: It wasn’t until we had David Pierce as the cohost where he was like, “We need to do it every week.” And I was like, “Oh, fine.”
Lauren Goode: Right. And then Nick Thompson came to me and was like, “Would you please replace David Pierce?” I’m just kidding. David left, and then Nick came to me and they said, “You can cohost the Gadget Lab.”
Michael Calore: Anyway. It has been a long journey, and you’ve been here for roughly half of it.
Boone Ashworth: I started on episode 407, so whatever the math on that is.
Michael Calore: The math on that is half.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, sure.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. This is one of those moments where, by the way, when I said earlier that media people tweet out things like some personal news, then announce a new job. We are really, this is very inside baseball right now. We’re like, “The people must care about how much we’ve put into this podcast.”
Michael Calore: But we should actually … Let’s, OK.
Lauren Goode: Let’s do an episode.
Boone Ashworth: Do a show.
Michael Calore: Let’s do our show.
Lauren Goode: Let’s do it.
Michael Calore: Let’s do our regular show. Last one, let’s go out with a bang, a gadget bang.
Lauren Goode: I feel we got to stop saying that.
Michael Calore: Our last trip around … OK, how about this? For our last trip around the sun, on here on this-
Boone Ashworth: I’m not going to die.
Michael Calore: On the good ship Gadget Lab.
Boone Ashworth: You’re not killing me. I’m going to live. I’m just not going to be in the room anymore.
Lauren Goode: Boone’s thinking, “Thank God.”
Boone Ashworth: I’m not terminal. Jesus.
Michael Calore: We will miss you. We will miss you. So we have you here on the microphone, so we have to talk about the stuff that you report on. One of your beats here at WIRED is AI-powered hardware gadgets, and you have had a very busy year.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, weird how that works out.
Michael Calore: A lot of things have been coming out that you’ve been writing about. So the latest one is this collar for your dog or your cat. Please tell us all about it. What’s it called? Who makes it? What does it do? How does it work?
Boone Ashworth: All right. So the collar is made by a new company called Personifi AI. Personifi is spelled … It ends in an I, so it’s spelled wrong because that’s what any good startup does. It spells the name wrong or a word wrong. And the collar itself is their first product. So their mission, they say, is to personify everything. I don’t know if that means animals, inanimate objects if they’re making Pixar characters, whatever. But the first product is this pet collar. It’s for dogs and cats, and it’s called Shazam. I don’t know why it’s called Shazam. They said because it has this magic feel to it. It means you can do something instantly. There are also several things that are already named Shazam that you have probably heard of.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, bold move to take a name that Apple has acquired.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, they told me that when people search Shazam, it comes up in the search results, so might as well pick a name that people already know about.
Michael Calore: Sure.
Boone Ashworth: All right.
Lauren Goode: Fair enough.
Michael Calore: They could have just called it WIRED.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So the idea is it’s a collar that has some back-end AI sensibilities on it. Mostly, it’s got a microphone on it and a speaker, and so it listens to you and can talk back. They have a bunch of different characters that you can put on the collar. So you pick a character for your pet, put the collar on, and then when you have conversations about anything, the pet theoretically will answer back to you.
Lauren Goode: Wait. Wait, like answer back vocally?
Boone Ashworth: Yes.
Lauren Goode: OK. And then it translates that into words.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah. Have you seen any movie or show where the animals talk like Homeward Bound or Sabrina the Teenage Witch and you’ve got Salem the Cat. The thing that they’re trying to replicate is like, “Here’s this talking animal.” So the way they do that is by putting a chatbot on the collar.
Michael Calore: It’s not ChatGPT or Alexa. It’s not like an AI chatbot. The answers are not being thought up in the moment.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, I believe they’re getting there. They’re trying to get into the synthesized voice thing. So it would be like if you’re having … You hear about all these different AI chatbots whether they’re romantic partners or friends or whatever else that are dynamic in the moment. This isn’t there yet because the company has told me like, “How many things are your dog actually going to say? How many things can they talk about?”
Lauren Goode: Feed me.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, exactly.
Lauren Goode: Feed me.
Boone Ashworth: They’ve got 8,000 voice lines for each character, I guess. Because they’ve gone through and been like, “OK, what are the different parameters that if the dog needs food now or wants to go on a walk or it’s lightning and thunder and they’re scared or there’s fireworks and they want to say something about that or whatever?” So they’ve gone through and try to predict everything and then essentially had voice actors record the lines for it. So it’s more like an NPC in a video game. It has dynamic lines than it is a chatbot making things up on the fly. But they’re hoping to get there and they’re hoping to get to the point where you can sit with your dog on the couch and something will happen on the football game you’re watching and the dog will be able to comment on the score or whatever. So that’s not there yet.
Lauren Goode: Are these reactions from the pet supposed to be representative of what they’re actually feeling at the time because of some data processing that’s happening, or is it just like we’re just going to assign phrases at random and you’re going to feel like you’re talking to your dog?
Boone Ashworth: Yes. It’s supposed to be what the pet is actually feeling. It can feel random sometimes. They account for a lot of environmental factors. So this started out as a project because the CEO of the company, his dog got bit by a rattlesnake and had to go to the hospital. It was in the hospital for 10 days. It was a whole thing. The problem was he didn’t know that the dog had been bitten by a rattlesnake for a while, and so the idea was, OK if the dog gets bit by a rattlesnake and the collar would be able to detect that by hearing the rattle and recognizing that sound, detecting the dog’s movements and reaction to the strike or something like that, then it could send you an alert saying, “Your dog has been bit by a rattlesnake.” And you could know sooner. You get a text on your app or something like that.
There are certain environmental things that it picks up. It will pick up the sound of a dog eating food and it can kind of build routines so it knows if the dog eats at a certain time in the morning. If you forget to feed it and it doesn’t hear that sound that day, then it might trigger the collar to be like, “Hey, feed me,” or whatever. So that’s the idea.
Michael Calore: OK. So it’s creating the illusion of communication and the illusion of a connected partnership.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah. Because the thing to remember here is the pet has no idea what’s going on. I don’t want to speak for them because I can’t read dog’s brains. But nobody can. From the pet’s perspective, it’s just going to be another voice that it hears coming out of this collar on its neck. So it’s trying to communicate what it’s saying, what it thinks that it wants it to say, but it can never really know because it’s not reading brain waves. It’s not like trying to be a pet mind reader. It’s just trying to communicate what it takes its best guess at is happening in the moment.
Michael Calore: We should do this for small children too.
Boone Ashworth: Oh, there you go or adults that you find hard to talk to.
Lauren Goode: How much does this cost?
Boone Ashworth: It costs $595.
Lauren Goode: What?
Boone Ashworth: … for dogs. $495 for cats.
Lauren Goode: Why do we think it’s less for cats?
Boone Ashworth: I think because just the form factor is smaller. Although, I—
Lauren Goode: Have they seen my cat?
Boone Ashworth: I make an argument in the story that I would think that the cat one would be more expensive because cats are a lot more complex than dogs are. I talked to a cat behavioral specialist about this for this story. And he said, “If you put this collar on a cat that can vocalize what the cat’s saying.” Realistically, all that collar would be saying is, “Get this fucking thing off me all of the time.” Because cats are a little more picky than dogs are and a little bit more complicated in their behavior than dogs are, and so trying to think that you’re able to know what they’re saying and output that in a way that the human can talk to is a little bit strange, I think.
Lauren Goode: I did—
Michael Calore: Dogs are simple goobers.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah, right.
Lauren Goode: And dogs are like, “I love you. I love you so much.” Stick, ball. My cat honestly would just be like, “Feed me more food. Feed me. Feed me.” I have the cat that our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, when she visited my home back in, I don’t know, whenever I had a bunch of WIRED people over. She walked in and she said, “My, that cat is well nourished.” It’s such a nice way to describe him. But what can I say? He’s big-boned. I love a chubby ginger. But no, Boone, how much faith do you have in this company as a startup with this being their first hardware product? How much should people invest four to $500 in this thing, which also comes with a service built-in?
Boone Ashworth: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Will it last?
Boone Ashworth: Which the service by the way is another $295 a year.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK.
Boone Ashworth: The first year’s free. But if you want the brain boost features they call it that has all of the sentience in it that can analyze your emotional state and give your pet a personality, then that is the extra fee. I think that there are things in this collar that make a lot of sense to me. I am not a pet owner currently, but I have been my whole life. I understand the safety uses of it. Rattlesnake detection sounds great. Kidnap detection if somebody comes by and steals your dog, and then it geo locate and knows that it goes away or whatever. I think there are certain things that this would help with. I don’t know … I personally would not want to put a chatbot on my dog or my cat. And the reason is that I think there’s no way to really match.
Because they have a bunch of prerendered characters that you make, and you have to pick one of those and put it on the pet. And I think whenever I’ve had a pet, I feel like it has its own distinct personality. And I would feel like putting something else on top of that would be putting a layer between the pet’s real personality and me. And I don’t think that’s actually an effective way to communicate with your pet. I think this is all for the human, and it’s all for the human to feel like they’re interacting with the pet, but I would argue that if you really want to interact and bond with your pet, you would do it on their terms, and you would do it by communicating with the pet the way it understands, not kind of forcing it to speak your language or pretend to speak your language.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, that’s a great point. Because with other AI-filled products, whether it’s something like an Alexa or whether you’re talking about this bizarre Humane Pin that we did an episode on.
Michael Calore: Oh, sure.
Lauren Goode: … a few months ago. You’re not talking about a relationship between living thing and living thing. You’re talking about humans and technology and the relationship we have with that device, and does it make our lives better? And this, there’s another living thing on the other end of the equation that we can’t typically communicate with anyway, and we have to infer a lot. So I didn’t really think about that almost from an ethical perspective, really.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah. It kind of feels like an ethics thing to me because I think just like with any sort of chatbot, what if it gets something wrong? What if it communicates how your pet is feeling in a way that it’s not feeling? What if it just gives you a different sense that your dog has a different personality than it really does? I think there are better ways to communicate with your pet, and maybe that’s not speaking your native language to it because it’s an animal, and it’s not going to understand that.
Lauren Goode: What do you think, Mike? Should it still be put on kids?
Michael Calore: No, I don’t.
Lauren Goode: I really thought you were going to lean into that.
Michael Calore: No, I don’t. I think it’s a fun magic trick. It sounds like a fun magic trick.
Boone Ashworth: Sure.
Michael Calore: But I think beyond that, it’s not ready.
Lauren Goode: What do you think Petra would say?
Michael Calore: It depends on which personality I assigned to her really and what the pre-recorded lines are. I think if she wanted to tell me anything, she would tell me, “Squeeze me,” because that’s what I want to do every time I see her. This is my cat by the way that Lauren is asking me about.
Boone Ashworth: That’s what you think your cat wants you to say. But you don’t know, right? You can try but you are not sure that she’s saying, “Squeeze me.” Maybe she’s saying, “Leave me alone.”
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Do we actually want to talk to our gadgets in general? Let’s put aside the pet collar for a second but whether it’s Siri on your phone or it’s the or HomePod or Google Hub or whatever they call it now. Google Home?
Michael Calore: It’s called the Nest Home Hub.
Lauren Goode: The Nest Home. Oh, Google. Oh, Google. I’m really going to miss doing a podcast about your naming conventions. But yeah, I mean, do we want to talk to them beyond very specific use cases?
Michael Calore: That is a very good question, and I think we should get into that in the second half.
Lauren Goode: Because we still have one more segment to go on Gadget Lab.
Michael Calore: We do. So everybody sit, stay, and we’ll be right back.
Lauren Goode: I see what you did there.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK. So as Lauren just mentioned, this Shazam collar is part of a trend of devices that you wear or something in your household wears that you can talk to. You can have interactions with it. It’s powered by AI. At least part of it is, or maybe all of it is. We have seen a lot of these things this year. We have talked a lot about them on this show, so let’s try to identify some of the common themes between them. Where should we start? What are the most notable ones from this year that we should talk about?
Boone Ashworth: Well, I can talk about the ones that I’ve written about, which are this Shazam collar. I just wrote another story. You don’t talk to it, but is an inward-facing pair of smart glasses that tries to read your emotions and tries to understand how you’re feeling. The obvious use case beyond that is looking at other people’s emotions, trying to understand how they’re feeling. I wrote about the Friend smart necklace, which you wear around your neck, and the entire idea of it is that it’s just a pal that will send you texts based on everything that’s happening in your environment and listening to everything around you.
I think a lot of these devices, it seems like what people are really looking for is some kind of connection that it seems the companies feel like we’re missing, and either that’s with your pet, that’s with each other, that’s just the basic idea of having a friend in your life. But I think there’s a real sort of loneliness or disconnection that companies are trying to either find a market for or trying to fix. I don’t know which is the accurate way to phrase that, but I think that’s kind of what they’re looking at, is they’re trying to make the case that you are not communicating. You are not sharing your emotions. You are not experiencing interactions with other people or animals the way that you should be. Here’s how we can optimize that. So I think that is only going to continue. I don’t know if it’s going to keep continuing in this sort of wearable state because we’re in this post-Humane, post-Rabbit r1 era where those two things-
Lauren Goode: Already.
Boone Ashworth: Yes. Yeah. Well, those two things came out did terrible. But all of the companies that were already making the same kind of products were so far along in the development that they’ve got to release them now. So they’re coming out now. They’re going to be coming out for another year or so. We’ll see if any of them actually stick. But right now, I think, at least as the social element of it goes, there’s a real kind of emphasis on how do we talk to each other.
Michael Calore: Yeah, you’re talking about the Humane AI Pin?
Boone Ashworth: Yes.
Michael Calore: And the Rabbit r1 sort of pocketable AI assistant, neither of which were big hits.
Lauren Goode: No. And Humane raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding and backing, and had the pedigree of Apple engineers-
Michael Calore: Sure.
Lauren Goode: … and product managers, and still just wasn’t … I think they tried to do too much.
Michael Calore: Yeah. The big criticism was, “Shouldn’t this just be an app?”
Lauren Goode: Well, that’s a good question. How much of this should just be an app? How much of this is just going to be an app?
Michael Calore: I’m going to say all of it should just be an app. You have a phone that you spend a thousand dollars on, and your phone is great. It does so much. It has a camera. It has a microphone. You have control over when those things are on and off, and it’s powered by software, so it just kind of runs all the time. You get a new phone, the same thing runs on the new phone the way it ran on the old phone, maybe a little bit faster. Phones are great, and everybody’s trying to make this new thing happen, but we already have everything that we need in our pockets.
Lauren Goode: Do we want to talk to them? And I’ll just say, let’s put aside for a moment that some people have to talk to their technology because that is the primary way that they communicate. Maybe they’re low vision. They’re unable to type for whatever reason that the voice technology has developed to that point that people can do that. It’s assistive. But for people who were pretty comfortable with typing, do we want to talk to this… I don’t know. I think about the Google Home Hub Nest Hub Home thing.
Michael Calore: It’s the Nest Home Hub.
Lauren Goode: Yep, that thing. I think about when I’ve had in my bedroom for three years now, and I think I ask it the weather, and then I ask it to play soothing ocean sounds at night, and that’s about it. That’s it. And when I have to use Siri in the car, I’m like, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. So I really have to use to use this thing.” It used to be that I would use Siri to do voice-to-text. Now, I just leave a voice note. So do we want to talk to these gadgets? And do we think even if they do become “companions” where the assistants are able to offer a little bit more, is that really what we’re looking for from our devices?
Boone Ashworth: It’s fun for a bit. I mean, look, I tend to not talk to my devices. If I have anything that’s Alexa-enabled, I just turn it off because I don’t … It’s …
Michael Calore: You don’t want microphones in your house?
Boone Ashworth: Yeah.
Michael Calore: What’s wrong with you?
Boone Ashworth: And also, just honestly, it’s easier for me to just pull out my phone and type the thing in that I need to type in instead of asking a thing. But I say that, and then I walk out of here to go home and I see people walking around on the street just holding their phone out, talking to the phone to dictate texts or whatever else. I’ve had somebody stay with me at my house recently who communicated almost exclusively by voice chatting to send texts. So yeah, people use it. I just don’t know how much you need to have it respond back to you. If I’m going to talk to it, I want it to do a thing. I don’t need it to return attention to me.
Lauren Goode: Because you’re a safe, secure person.
Boone Ashworth: I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t go that far.
Michael Calore: I think there’s a big bridge between where we are now and what the promises of generative AI are in this space because if you think about the things that they often sell you as use cases when they’re talking about AI assistants or voice-controlled gadgets it’s, “We’ll call you a car. We’ll order you a pizza. We’ll book your plane ticket.” But you say, “OK, Jeeves. Order me an Uber.” And then there’s all these things that happen in the process of ordering an Uber or a Lyft or a Waymo or whatever that are important for you as a human being to take in as you’re doing it. The price, the wait time, where it’s going to pick you up, how long it’s going to take when it’s going to drop you off. And those are things that I want to know about. When there’s a car coming, I want to know those things. I want to be an active participant in those decisions. So I’m not comfortable asking a chatbot to do that for me.
But the whole point of the device is like, “Oh, yeah, you pull it out and you just say, ‘Order me a car,’ and then a car shows up.” And it’s like, “Yeah, but that’s not really what I want.” It’s the same thing with booking me a ticket. It’s going to pick the flight that leaves at 6:30 in the morning and has a layover in Salt Lake or something, and I don’t want that.
Lauren Goode: Who wants a layover in Salt Lake? Really.
Michael Calore: The good people of Utah.
Boone Ashworth: Shout out to Salt Lake.
Lauren Goode: I missed a flight once in Salt Lake and had to stay over in an airport hotel. That’s a whole other podcast. This goes back to what I’ve written before in WIRED. I hate to do it, like I said. But this idea and-
Michael Calore: She’s holding her hands on her hips right now.
Lauren Goode: Yep. I have a Wonder Woman stance at the moment, and this is not a pun on the name Personifi, but it’s this idea that the internet has promised us personalized experience, but it is not yet personal which I think is true.
And I will say that I love the experimentation of all of this. Mike, you and I have been covering tech for a long time. And when I think back to the last era of the web and hardware, I think about how upstarts like Dropcam, which became Nest, which became a part of Google, but as we have discussed, persists as a name in some form. Dropcam was able to be a success. When I think about Eero, that was an upstart that ended up being tremendously successful, sold to Amazon. Even something like Pebble, which was not financially successful, and ended up selling to Fitbit, which sold to Google.
There was a lot of really cool experimentation going on, and there were hardware entrepreneurs who were able to set a roadmap for future development of products in those categories, which was pretty cool, and it doesn’t feel that way anymore. It feels like you have to be an incumbent, an Apple, Google, Amazon, in order to, or even Snap, which has been experimenting with Spectacles. And then, of course, there’s the whole Meta conversation. It just feels like you have to have billions of dollars in your war chest.
Michael Calore: Sure.
Lauren Goode: And have an R&D lab in order to make anything that feels like it could potentially have impact.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah. I got to say, I’m all for the weird shit. I think I might sound a little down on it or think that it’s strange or whatever, but keep doing it. Maybe we’re not going to wear your wearable. Maybe it’s going to end up being an app, but why not try new stuff? See where it goes. Something’s probably going to stick, and then maybe that’ll be the thing. Is it going to be the dog collar? I don’t know about that, but keep trying stuff.
Michael Calore: I do think smart glasses have an edge here.
Boone Ashworth: Oh, yeah.
Michael Calore: I mean, partly because of what Lauren says. Meta is making them, right?
Boone Ashworth: Yes.
Michael Calore: One of the biggest tech companies in the world is behind them.
Lauren Goode: And they’re willing to spend $4 to $5 billion per quarter on them.
Michael Calore: But also, as a nonawkward hands-free experience goes, it’s pretty good. Yeah?
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: It’s definitely worth your attention regardless of how you feel about Meta or how you feel about Ray-Ban Wayfarers, if you care about hardware, then smart glasses should be interesting to you.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Boone Ashworth: Also-
Lauren Goode: I think we’re experiencing this moment too, where when we talk about hardware in the tech industry at large, we’re shifting our attention back to things like infrastructure. I think there was this focus on edge devices for about a decade or so, which are the devices at the edge of the cloud that we’re using our laptops and our … What are they called? Smartphones. Right. Personal devices. Now, it’s like what GPUs can companies get their hands on?
Michael Calore: Sure.
Lauren Goode: Where are they building data centers? Who’s making advancements in batteries?
Michael Calore: Which AI engine are you partnering with to power all the interactions? Or are you building your own?
Lauren Goode: There’s a conversation about utilities. That feels like it’s going to be the big “hardware conversation” for the next decade of tech. And on the edge, all the personal devices, there’s going to be a lot of experimentation, but it’s going to be really, really hard to make a mark there. So a question for you both. What is a software experience right now that would drive you to upgrade your personal devices? What would it have to do for you to be like, “Yeah, I’m going to get the new iPhone or the new smart speaker”?
Boone Ashworth: Fold my clothes. Do my laundry.
Lauren Goode: Is that a software?
Boone Ashworth: They have that. They have a laundry bot. Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Does it still exist?
Boone Ashworth: Oh, I don’t know.
Lauren Goode: I feel like we see that at CES and then—
Michael Calore: We did for a year.
Boone Ashworth: Do my dishes. These simple, boring tasks, I guess is what I want it to do. I’m tired of things making music and making art or whatever. I don’t know. Make me a sandwich?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, there’s this meme that floats around the internet. That’s something like, “I want AI to do those things for me so I can spend my time making art. I don’t want AI to make art, so it frees me up to do laundry or dishes.” I’m paraphrasing, but it sounds like that’s what you’re saying.
Boone Ashworth: Kind of. Yeah, that’s not exactly software, right? I’m trying to think of an actual software upgrade that would make me be into it. Maybe one that can answer all of my emails and tell people, “Not right now.”
Lauren Goode: That’s fair.
Boone Ashworth: In a polite way because I can’t seem to do that.
Michael Calore: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, email management.
Michael Calore: That’s a good one.
Lauren Goode: Inbox zero.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah. Just inbox zero me.
Lauren Goode: How would they spell it?
Boone Ashworth: Inbox zero.
Lauren Goode: I-N-B. Oh, that’s a good one.
Boone Ashworth: I-N-B-X Zero.
Lauren Goode: Mike, what about you?
Michael Calore: I’m still obsessed with phones, so I would say if you consider the pain points in a phone, it’s the camera and the battery. Those are the things that when they improve enough, you feel compelled to upgrade, and both of those things are… Basically, how good they are is dictated by software now. Battery, less so. Camera more so. But the technology is so good in batteries and it’s so good with optical and sensor design that it’s the software that makes the experience of using a camera or it’s the software that makes the experience of how long the battery lasts good.
That if you had a phone that had those software advancements in them that made those things that much better, then that’s I think the only reason that I would want to upgrade, which is kind of a cop-out because every phone that comes out has a little bit better battery life and a little bit better camera, but that’s because that’s why. That’s what they’re doing. They’re just tweaking the software, and they’re getting slightly better components every single time. So I guess my real answer is, I don’t know. I can’t think of something that my phone doesn’t already do.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, there’s no generative AI chatbot that supposedly offers human reasoning that would compel you to upgrade your phone.
Michael Calore: No. Because I have Gemini on my phone. I have a Pixel phone, and Gemini just comes with it, and it’s fine. It’s like a better Google Assistant which was better than the Google Assistant that came before. So yeah, it’s fine. I really don’t feel like any of these things are life-changing enough to say like, “Oh, well, I have to go and get that.”
Lauren Goode: Fair enough.
Michael Calore: What do you think?
Lauren Goode: I agree with you. Well, I agree with Boone actually, that something that might compel me to upgrade would be inbox and calendar management. I feel very strongly about that.
Michael Calore: Yes. Yes. You have a lot of autoresponders to tell people when you are overwhelmed by your email, and it’s going to be a long time before you write back, which I admire.
Lauren Goode: Boone wrote back to my autoresponder the other day. What did you say?
Boone Ashworth: I’ve done that a couple of times.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Because it said something right now that’s like, “I’ll only be responding to the most critical emails at this time.”
Boone Ashworth: Oh, yeah. I said that I’ll only be responding to the most critical auto responses.
Michael Calore: Also, Lauren, I admire that you leave it on all the time now.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, why not?
Boone Ashworth: Why not?
Lauren Goode: Because truly, the people who I need to respond to I respond right away. I respond to Katie and Brian right away. I am like, “I’m on it.” But yes. OK, so that, inbox management, calendar management. But I would say, in the vein of what you’re saying, Mike like, “I’m pretty happy with this.” AI being used to do stuff around our health and personal care, I’ve been wearing the Apple Watch, the new one for the past few weeks. Anyone who listens to the show knows that I’m a Garmin fan. I’ve had the same Garmin watch for a very long time, but a new Apple Watch came out. There were some new swimming features and Apple sent me one as a loaner, and I was like, “Cool, I’m going to try this out.”
Sleep tracking. It’s gotten a lot better. Told me this morning that 11 of the past 14 days I’ve had pretty good sleep.
Boone Ashworth: Jealous.
Lauren Goode: I’m opting into the sleep … And now, I’m not a good sleeper so this is fantastic. I’m opting in now to the sleep apnea tracking, which supposedly after 30 days, it’s going to tell me that. The activity tracking has gotten more granular. It does cycle tracking. It’s really good. It’s really good. And then occasionally, I do use the voice assistant to do stuff on it, and it’s fine like you said.
Michael Calore: Is it all powered by Apple Intelligence?
Lauren Goode: Yes. No, not yet, because I don’t … I don’t know when that’s coming to Watch. That’s a good question. And I also don’t have the iPhone 16 Pro that has all of that stuff.
Michael Calore: Well, you need to upgrade.
Lauren Goode: Clearly. Well, yeah. But do I? But do I? That is the question. And if I do, I’ll just be shoveling more money towards an incumbent in this space.
Michael Calore: I can tell you that if you do buy the new iPhone, you’ll probably enjoy the new camera a little bit more than you enjoyed the last camera.
Lauren Goode: Oh, yeah. Are you basing that in 15 years of priors?
Boone Ashworth: Oh, this is what the whole episode was building to. This was all spon con the entire time.
Michael Calore: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And we’ll be right back after this message from Tim Cook. No, but we should wrap up and take a break and come back, and do our last recommendation segment ever.
Lauren Goode: Oh my gosh.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: So you’re telling me our new show won’t have a recommendation segment?
Michael Calore: TBD, but probably not.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Boone Ashworth: It sounds like you guys have to figured it out.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK. Welcome back. Here we are, last segment, last episode. Boone, our esteemed producer and guest this week. Please give us your recommendation.
Boone Ashworth: I realized I had to give a recommendation while I was coming in today.
Michael Calore: Oh, because the producer didn’t email you to tell you that you need to come up with a recommendation.
Boone Ashworth: No, I just forgot that that was a thing that you do on this show. And I think I would like to recommend rain because it came in on a car ride and it was raining a little bit in San Francisco for the first time that it has rained in a little while, and I remembered that I just like rain. I think rain gets a bad rep, and I think that it’s time to give Rain a little bit of a rebrand. People always get sad when it’s cloudy and rainy, but it’s actually kind of nice. A little bit of rain, not a bunch of rain. We’ve had some trouble with a bunch of rain in places, so I want to be cognizant of that. So I’m just talking like a little drizzle. Don’t get too worked up about it. Just use it as an opportunity to take a second, grab a coat, hold out your umbrella, maybe hold out your umbrella for somebody else and enjoy your day. Enjoy …
Michael Calore: Even if it’s raining.
Michael Calore: Enjoy the petrichor.
Boone Ashworth: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: And Boone, you’re coming from a place too where you have experienced wildfires in a very negative way.
Boone Ashworth: It’s true. Yeah. Yeah. And I also live in the foggy area of San Francisco where it’s wet and drizzly all the time, and I still enjoy a good rain.
Michael Calore: That’s a great last recommendation.
Lauren Goode: I know. I’m really glad that we finally were able to top Gilad’s recommendation of sliced lemons-
Michael Calore: Sliced lemons.
Lauren Goode: … with Boone’s rain.
Boone Ashworth: I was going to come in and recommend a show or a gadget. And I was like, You know what? No, just enjoy the weather. Don’t be … You don’t want to be a weatherist. Enjoy all of it.
Michael Calore: Well, don’t worry. I got you covered. I’m recommending a show and/or a gadget.
Boone Ashworth: OK, do it.
Michael Calore: Well, wait. Before I do mine, we have to get to Lauren’s first because I’m the host, I get to go last.
Lauren Goode: Similarly, my recommendation is … I was trying to come up with something really meaningful and I came up a little short. So the first one is I would say go for walks. We’re such dorks.
Boone Ashworth: In the rain. In the rain. Yeah.
Lauren Goode: In the rain. And don’t experience the walk through your phone’s screen. If you are physically able to if you have a safe place to walk around, then just walk. Walk as much as possible. Walk in the mornings. Walk with a friend. Walk after dinner. That’s supposedly very good for you. Put your phone in airplane mode if you can. Download that podcast in advance so you can listen to it on your walk. Which brings me to my second recommendation, which is stay subscribed to this feed because you’re going to be able to listen to our new podcast. We’re going to have a trailer next week in the feed, as Mike mentioned, and then the following week, we’re going to have our launch episode. It’s called HBO’s Silicon Valley. Just kidding. It’s not called that, but it’s something like that.
Michael Calore: It’s called Alveoto.
Lauren Goode: It’s all happening. So yeah, go for a nice walk. Take a breather. It’s really good for your physical and mental health if you can manage it, and listen to our new show. I’d be thrilled if you did.
Michael Calore: Maybe ask Siri to hold your calls.
Lauren Goode: Sure. She would be like, “I’m sorry, there’s no one in your phone named Paul.”
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: Mike, what’s your recommendation?
Michael Calore: Well, I’m not going to do something like poetic and existential like you guys just did. I’m going to recommend a YouTube channel.
Lauren Goode: Sorry, I just …
Michael Calore: It’s a YouTube channel. It’s very good. It’s from KEXP. It’s KEXP’s YouTube channel. So KEXP is a radio station.
Lauren Goode: K-E-X-P. How do you pronounce that? It sounds like a startup.
Michael Calore: You pronounce it K-E-X-P. It’s a radio station. Those are the call letters. Jeez. It’s short for experience.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK.
Michael Calore: They’re based in Seattle and they are now also based in the Bay Area. So it’s like turning into a West Coast media powerhouse. When bands tour and they swing through Seattle, they get sometimes invited to do a live session in the KEXP studio. And KEXP broadcasts these live performances on the air. And then a few weeks after the fact, they put out video of the live performances. And it has turned into one of my favorite ways to discover new indie rock and hip hop and world musical artists, the KEXP video channel feed on YouTube.
Some examples of bands who have recently appeared on the KEXP YouTube channel, since you’re both looking at me like you’re asking me. Quivers, Angelica Garcia, a band called Lo Moon L-O Moon. A band called Jjuu Jjuu, J-J-U-U J-J-U-U, all one word, all caps. Las Nubes, Shannon & the Clams, the East Bay Zone, J.R.C.J, ML Buch. I know one of these bands, which is Shannon & the Clams. The rest of these bands I’ve never heard of, and I’m going to watch all these videos and one of them is going to be awesome.
Lauren Goode: How do you have time for this?
Michael Calore: What? For watching three-minute Live performances on YouTube?
Lauren Goode: But a whole list of them of obscure bands that go beyond even the obscure bands that you already know about.
Michael Calore: I’ll sit down for 45 minutes on a Sunday night and just blow through a bunch of them and just watch them. And if it’s something that catches my interest, then I’ll sit there and enjoy it.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: It’s almost like going for a walk in the rain, isn’t it?
Michael Calore: It’s exactly like going for a walk in the rain.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. I mean, you said that your recommendation wasn’t going to be poetic or existential, and I think it actually is quite a bit.
Michael Calore: OK, great.
Lauren Goode: It’s a good one.
Michael Calore: Thank you. I’m so glad you’re pleased.
Lauren Goode: How are you feeling about that being your last recommendation?
Michael Calore: I feel fine about it. How do you feel about that being my last recommendation?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it’s the end of the show and I feel fine.
Boone Ashworth: I’ll edit it out. Don’t worry.
Michael Calore: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Lauren Goode: We have to give Boone a lot of credit because in all this time, not only has he produced our show during a pandemic, kept us on track every week, put up with our antics here in the studio, dealt with all of the technical complexities of remote guests. But during this time, he has so many recordings of our voices, and he has yet to use and abuse them to create AI versions of ourselves saying terrible things, which he still has the power to do. So that’s why we’re being so nice to him today.
Boone Ashworth: I’m just going to generate my own podcast with both of you in it that I can listen to on my own view, my own private Gadget Lab. That’s very creepy now that I think about it.
Michael Calore: Extremely. Extremely.
Boone Ashworth: Don’t do that. You should definitely … This is the point where I’d be telling you to wrap up the show. But I am not going to do that. And instead, I’m going to give two more recommendations, which are Lauren Goode and Michael Calore.
Michael Calore: Oh, no.
Boone Ashworth: Because working with you guys and being involved in this podcast for this long has been magnificent. You are some of the smartest and kindest people that I’ve ever known, which there’s not always the overlap of those personality traits, and so I’m going to miss being here in the studio with you guys every week. But I’m glad that we still get to be in the same office. I get to have you in my life and get to listen to you on this show in the future because it’s going to be great, and I am excited to hear what comes next. So thank you guys for everything.
Michael Calore: Nice. I really appreciate it.
Lauren Goode: That’s so sweet.
Michael Calore: Thank you, Boone for everything. Thank you for your many years helming the good ship Gadget Lab.
Boone Ashworth: And because I have one more opportunity to embarrass you, I have assembled a very short blooper reel of some stuff that has occurred on Gadget Lab.
Lauren Goode: Oh, no.
Boone Ashworth: That has not aired.
Lauren Goode: I spoke too soon.
Boone Ashworth: But I have put together in a frenzy early this morning.
Michael Calore: Oh, no.
Boone Ashworth: To play for you now.
Michael Calore: Oh, no.
Boone Ashworth: And they can tell me to cut this out, but what are you going to do? Kick me off the show?
Lauren Goode: Wielding his power.
Boone Ashworth: Anyway, this is it.
[Audio plays, a collection of snippets from Gadget Lab’s past, the Gadget Lab theme playing underneath.]
Lauren Goode: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone.
Michael Calore: All right. Hi, Boone. How you doing? It’s 11:21 PM. Wednesday, January 4. I’m feeling groovy.
Lauren Goode: OK. Perfect. Segue.
Michael Calore: Three, two, one.
Lauren Goode: Three, two, one.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Michael. I’m going to call you Mike. I just sounded like your mom.
Michael Calore: Not at all.
Lauren Goode: OK. OK.
Michael Calore: Good, you’re getting all this.
Lauren Goode: Unfortunately, I had yogurt this morning, which was not a good idea.
Michael Calore: Oh, yeah because now, you’re all dairied up. Those vocal cords are all dairied up.
Lauren Goode: Oh, am I starting? Three, two, one.
Michael Calore: There’s a lot about it. Boone, I’m still very loud.
Boone Ashworth: Uh-huh.
Lauren Goode: Anyway, let’s do this.
Michael Calore: And publish. Guess what? Total fucking easy.
Lauren Goode: People with scrotums. Is it scrotums or scroti?
Michael Calore: I think it’s scrotums.
Lauren Goode: Thank you.
Boone Ashworth: It’s a murder.
Lauren Goode: It’s a murder of balls! You can cut that out.
Michael Calore: Good night.
Amanda Hoover: Hungover is spelled a little wrong.
Michael Calore: Yeah, without the E.
Amanda Hoover: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: How can you spell hungover wrong?
Michael Calore: Without the E.
Lauren Goode: From a branding perspective. Hungovr.
Michael Calore: There was one where it was just like the show ended and I went, “Nut cheeses.” And then there was five—
Lauren Goode: She missed that.
Michael Calore: … seconds of silence, and then it heard me again saying, “Nut cheeses.”
Lauren Goode: You made that up.
Michael Calore: No, I didn’t make it up.
Boone Ashworth: That is very strange.
Lauren Goode: There’s your outtake, Boone. Amazing. That was really fun.
Michael Calore: Hell, yeah.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
[Playback ends.]
Michael Calore: Oh, that is so sweet. Thank you.
Lauren Goode: Why was I talking about … I’m not even going to say the word again because he’s …
Boone Ashworth: Oh, we had a whole show about that.
Lauren Goode: Oh, with Zak Jason.
Boone Ashworth: Zak Jason came on. Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Oh my goodness.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Ball spray. That was a good one.
Lauren Goode: And nut cheeses.
Boone Ashworth: Go back to the archives folks. There’s some good shit in there.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Wow. How many times did I drop an F-bomb and then was like, “Boone, cut that out.” That’s probably a fair amount.
Boone Ashworth: Oh, I would never cut that out.
Michael Calore: What episode number is this? 662. I would say you did that 662 times.
Well, that’s amazing. Thank you.
Lauren Goode: Thank you, Boone. We really appreciate you.
Boone Ashworth: Oh, did somebody’s thing go off right as you were saying that?
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: Slack.
Michael Calore:: Yeah, because we’re going long.
Lauren Goode: Oh, yeah.
Boone Ashworth: Beautiful. OK.
Lauren Goode: We have another tape thing.
Boone Ashworth: All right.
Michael Calore: Bye. Well, that is our show. Thank you, Boone, for being our guest. And thank you Boone, our producer.
Boone Ashworth: Thank you, guys.
Michael Calore: If you have feedback, you can find all of us on social media. Just check the show notes. We will be back in two weeks with a whole new show.
Lauren Goode: We’ll be back.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Nut cheeses.
