Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal is an expert at coming up with clever and inventive new angles for her Apple product reviews. For this year’s iPhone 16 launch, Joanna tried something entirely new by creating “Joannabot,” which she describes as a “generative-AI buddy who never tires of answering your iPhone 16 questions—especially whether it’s worth an upgrade.”
Joanna and the WSJ team fed the generative AI bot a decade of her iPhone review excerpts, iPhone specs from Apple, and her notes after a week of testing the iPhone 16. The result? An interactive chatbot – powered by Google’s Gemini Flash large language model – that can answer all of your questions about the iPhone 16, feature comparison, make upgrade suggestions, and more.
Why a bot? Well, with iPhones, it’s starting to feel very “Groundhog Day”—similar, year after year. Plus, you might be looking for something my review didn’t address. Joannabot is more open-ended. And since Apple is now all about AI, why not embrace it?
I’m excited for you to chat with Joannabot. Just remember this is an experiment. We told it to stay focused on iPhones, but like all generative-AI assistants, it can get things wrong, or make things up. If you want the real me, feel free to scroll down and peruse my iPhone 16 test notes for yourself.
You can head to The Wall Street Journal website to try out Joannabot for yourself. Alternatively, you can read all of her iPhone 16 review notes for yourself. You can also read the notes via Apple News+ as well.
- iPhone 16 Pro reviews: Incredible battery life, camera quality boost, Camera Control quirks
- iPhone 16 review roundup: This year, the base models are almost an iPhone Pro
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