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iOS 17 at WWDC: Everything Apple Is Adding to Your iPhone

The iPhone software adds new features to the Phone app, FaceTime calls and iMessage chats.

Apple’s debut of iOS 17 is going to change to how you call, text and glance at information on your iPhone. iOS 17 will bring updates to FaceTime, Messages and the phone app to make your iPhone feel more intuitive and personal, the company revealed Monday during its Worldwide Developers Conference

Last year’s software update, iOS 16 introduced the ability to edit or «unsend» messages you send via iMessage, Apple Pay Later, a major overhaul to the lock screen, revamped notifications and Live Activities. These additions didn’t all come out at once and were actually scattered over the course of smaller iOS software updates throughout the year.

We can expect the same for iOS 17, which will likely be released just before the rumored iPhone 15 goes on sale.

Contact Posters

Three iPhones, each showing a different Contact Poster Three iPhones, each showing a different Contact Poster

Contact Posters aim to make your contact cards more compelling.

Apple

Last year we got customizable lock screens in iOS 16. This year, iOS 17 has a similar change for your iPhone’s contact cards, to make them look more eye-catching. Contact Posters are beautiful treatments for contact photos and emoji paired with slick-looking fonts that show up when you get calls and for other services on your phone where you communicate and share.

You can customize your Contact Poster similar to how you personalize your lock screen. Pick a photo, font and color and that’s it.

AirDrop gets easier to use

iOS 17 brings an overhaul to AirDrop. You just need to bring your iPhone close to someone else’s to share a Contact Poster, photos, videos or kick off a shared activity using Share Play. Of course, being Apple, there’s a word for sharing your Contact Poster with someone new: NameDrop. What’s nice, is that you can choose what contact info is shared. NameDrop works between iPhones or with an Apple Watch, too. It reminds me of «bumping» a contact in the early days of the iPhone.

Standby turns your iPhone into an Amazon Echo Show

An iPhone with its Standby screen active An iPhone with its Standby screen active

iOS 17 adds an attractive screen that shows photos, widgets and info when your iPhone is charging.

Apple

One of the biggest additions in iOS 17 is for when your iPhone isn’t in your hand. When your iPhone is on its side while MagSafe charging, you get a new full screen experience with glanceable information. The feature is called Standby and mimics what many smart home devices can do, such as the Amazon Echo Show.

The new screen shows the time, photos, widgets and Live Activities; nearly all of which can be personalized. It’s a bit of a cross between the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display and nightstand mode on the Apple Watch.

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Watch this: WWDC 2023: Here Are All the Major iOS 17 Features

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When you swipe to the side on the Standby screen, you can look at your favorite photos or moments. iOS 17 will also automatically shuffle images to find the one that take the best advantage of the screen.

Standby can also show glanceable widgets. For example, you can see the weather, your Apple Home smart controls or your favorite third-party widget. With support for live activities, you can also see the score of sporting events or the status of a food delivery. 

One of the more curious features is that Standby can remember your preferred view «setup» for each place you charge via MagSafe.

The new Journal app

The icon for the new Journal app in iOS 17 The icon for the new Journal app in iOS 17

iOS 17 brings a new Apple app called Journal that creates personalized suggestions to inspire writing. These suggestions are curated from information on your iPhone, like photos, location, music and workouts.

Journal gives you the option to select a moment, like «morning visit, Ocean Beach,» and start writing. You can also schedule notifications to remind you to write and get new prompts. You can flag important moments so that you can reflect on them later.

Live Voicemail

And iPhone with a Live Voicemail transcription And iPhone with a Live Voicemail transcription

Live Voicemail lets you preview a transcription in real time as a voicemail is being recorded.

Apple

Another new talent iOS 17 has involves your voicemail. When someone calls you and leaves a message, you’ll see a live transcription in real time as they speak. The new service is called Live Voicemail and it kind of feels like the days of answering machines, when my dad would screen a call. For Live Voicemail, you’ll see the voicemail right on your screen so you can decide whether to step out and take the call. The feature is powered by your iPhone’s neural engine in order to preserve your privacy. Live Voicemail seems identical to Call Screen on Google Pixel phones which isn’t a bad thing.

FaceTime messages

iOS 17 will let you record a video message in FaceTime. It’s a heavily requested feature that will ensure you can document and share important moments, even if someone misses your call.

Messages Check In

iOS 17 comes with a new location-sharing tool called Check In.

Apple/GIF by Arielle Burton/CNET

Apple is expanding and simplifying its location sharing via Messages. The new feature, called Check In, is for letting a loved one know you made it to your destination safely. Whether you’re walking home after dark or going for an early morning run, you can start a Check In with a family member or friend and as soon as you arrive home, it will automatically let your friend know. But if something unexpected happens, it can recognize that you’re not near your destination and check in with you. If you don’t respond, Check In can automatically share your current location, the route you took, your iPhone’s battery level and cell service status; all of which is end-to-end encrypted.

Messages get a handful of fixes and additions

A message thread showing an audio recording and its transcription A message thread showing an audio recording and its transcription

The Messages app will get transcriptions for audio messages in iOS 17.

Apple

The tried-and-true Messages app gets a handful of updates, including a visual overhaul of your iMessage apps which will no longer live above your keyboard and instead be accessible via a plus sign on the bottom left.

Searching through your Messages becomes a lot easier on iOS 17 with the addition of filters. When you start a search in the Messages app, you will be able to add terms to narrow the results.

Another welcome addition is transcription for audio messages. If you’re someone who has friends or family members who send you audio messages, you’ll be able to read a transcription of the recording right in the Messages app.

There’s also a new «catch up arrow» in Messages. It sits in the top right of your conversation and lets you jump to the first message you haven’t read. This could be a killer feature for managing group chats. Apple also made inline replies faster. In iOS 17, you’ll be able to just swipe to reply on any message bubble.

Apple fixes ‘ducking’ autocorrect

Autocorrect will become more intelligent and can fix more grammatical mistakes. Reverting words back to what you typed is easier. And apparently, autocorrect will learn and let you use curse words. Duck, yeah!

An iPhone with the Stickers drawer in Messages open An iPhone with the Stickers drawer in Messages open

Messages adds a bunch of Sticker features.

Apple

iMessage stickers get a new drawer to bring all the stickers you’ve used into one place. And now emoji are stickers. You can peel and stick an emoji sticker to a message bubble, rotate and resize it. Last year in iOS 16, Apple introduced the ability to lift a subject from the background of a photo as part of Visual Lookup. With iOS 17, you can turn a photo’s subject into a sticker in Messages. 

The Stickers drawer also has a Live Stickers tab that lets you create a Sticker animation (aka a GIF) from a Live Photo. Stickers can be accessed system wide in things like Tapback, Markup and third-party apps; basically anywhere you can access emoji.

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Watch this: Apple Reveals iOS 17

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But wait, there are more iOS 17 features

As is typical with WWDC, there are a lot more additions and improvements to iOS 17 than Apple showed during the keynote. Some notable highlights include:

  • Triggering Siri by just saying, «Siri» instead of «Hey, Siri»
  • Download offline maps in the Maps app
  • New profiles for Safari and your passwords
  • Auto retrieval of one-time verification codes from the Mail app
  • Interactive widgets (which was featured in-depth during the iPadOS portion)

iOS 17 will be out in full this fall and work on the iPhone XS, XR and newer, including the 2020 iPhone SE.

Technologies

Gen AI Chatbots Are Starting to Remember You. Should You Let Them?

An AI model’s long memory can offer a better experience — or a worse one. Good thing you can turn it off.

Until recently, generative AI chatbots didn’t have the best memories: You tell it something and, when you come back later, you start again with a blank slate. Not anymore. 

OpenAI started testing a stronger memory in ChatGPT last year and rolled out improvements this month. Grok, the flagship tool of Elon Musk’s xAI, also just got a better memory.

It took significant improvements in math and technology to get here but the real-world benefits seem pretty simple: You can get more consistent and personalized results without having to repeat yourself.

«If it’s able to incorporate every chat I’ve had before, it does not need me to provide all that information the next time,» said Shashank Srivastava, assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Those longer memories can help with solving some frustrations with chatbots but they also pose some new challenges. As with when you talk to a person, what you said yesterday might influence your interactions today.

Here’s a look at how the bots came to have better memories and what it means for you.

Improving an AI model’s memory

For starters, it isn’t quite a «memory.» Mostly, these tools work by incorporating past conversations alongside your latest query. «In effect, it’s as simple as if you just took all your past conversations and combined them into one large prompt,» said Aditya Grover, assistant professor of computer science at UCLA.

Those large prompts are now possible because the latest AI models have significantly larger «context windows» than their predecessors. The context window is, essentially, how much text a model can consider at once, measured in tokens. A token might be a word or part of a word (OpenAI offers one token as three-quarters of a word as a rule of thumb). 

Early large language models had context windows of 4,000 or 8,000 tokens — a few thousand words. A few years ago, if you asked ChatGPT something, it could consider roughly as much text as is in this recent CNET cover story on smart thermostats. Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash now has a context window of a million tokens. That’s a bit longer than Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace. Those improvements are driven by some technical advances in how LLMs work, creating faster ways to generate connections between words, Srivastava said. 

Other techniques can also boost a model’s memory and ability to answer a question. One is retrieval-augmented generation, in which the model can run a search or otherwise pull up documents as needed to answer a question, without always keeping all of that information in the context window. Instead of having a massive amount of information available at all times, it just needs to know how to find the right resource, like a researcher perusing a library’s card catalog.

Read more: AI Essentials: 27 Ways to Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts

Why context matters for a chatbot

The more an LLM knows about you from its past interactions with you, the better suited to your needs its answers will be. That’s the goal of having a chatbot that can remember your old conversations. 

For example, if you ask an LLM with no memory of you what the weather is, it’ll probably follow up first by asking where you are. One that can remember past conversations, however, might know that you often ask it for advice about restaurants or other things in San Francisco, for example, and assume that’s your location. «It’s more user-friendly if the system knows more about you,» Grover said.

A chatbot with a longer memory can provide you with more specific answers. If you ask it to suggest a gift for a family member’s birthday and tell it some details about that family member, it won’t need as much context when you ask again next year. «That would mean smoother conversations because you don’t need to repeat yourself,» Srivatsava said.

A long memory, however, can have its downsides.

You can (and maybe should) tell AI to forget

Having a chatbot recommend a gift poses a conundrum that’s all too common in human memories: You told your aunt you liked airplanes when you were 12 years old, and decades later you still get airplane-themed gifts from her. An LLM that remembers things about you could bias itself too much toward something you told it before.

«There’s definitely that possibility that you can lose your control and that this personalization could haunt you,» Srivastava said. «Instead of getting an unbiased, fresh perspective, its judgment might always be colored by previous interactions.»

LLMs typically allow you to tell them to forget certain things or to exclude some conversations from their memory. 

You may also deal with things you don’t want an AI model to remember. If you have private or sensitive information you’re communicating with an LLM (and you should think twice about doing so at all), you probably want to turn off the memory function for those interactions. 

Read the guidance on the tool you’re using to be sure you know what it’s remembering, how to turn it on and off and how to delete items from its memory. 

Grover said this is an area where gen AI developers should be transparent and offer clear commands in the user interface. «I think they need to be providing more controls that are visible to the user, when to turn it on, when to turn it off,» he said. «Give a sense of urgency for the user base so they don’t get locked into defaults that are hard to find.»

How to turn off gen AI memory features

Here’s how to manage memory features in some common gen AI tools.

ChatGPT

OpenAI has a couple types of memory in its models. One is called «reference saved memories» and it stores details that you specifically ask ChatGPT to save, like your name or dietary preferences. Another, «reference chat history,» remembers information from past conversations (but not everything). 

To turn off either of these features, you can go to Settings and Personalization and toggle the items off. 

You can ask ChatGPT what it remembers about you and ask it to forget something it has remembered. To completely delete this information, you can delete the saved memories in Settings and the chat where you saved that information.

Gemini

Google’s Gemini model can remember things you’ve discussed or summarize past conversations. 

To modify or delete these memories, or to turn off the feature entirely, you can go into your Gemini Apps Activity menu.

Grok

Elon Musk’s xAI announced memory features in Grok this month and they’re turned on by default. 

You can turn them off under Settings and Data Controls. The specific setting is different between Grok.com, where it’s «Personalize Grok with your conversation history,» and on the Android and iOS apps, where it’s «Personalize with memories.» 

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Technologies

It’s OK if You Didn’t Preorder a Switch 2

Commentary: As good as the new console looks, it’s also fine to wait.

FOMO for new tech is hard. And new game consoles are exciting. I get it, and I’ve contributed to that coverage excitement too. The Nintendo Switch 2 finally became available to preorder in the US this week, and as expected, it looks sold out for now. That’ll change over time, but it’s unclear when, or how, and it’s equally unclear what the constant tariff fluctuations might do to future game console pricing. 

That said, having played on the Switch 2 recently at an event, may I help ease your FOMO somewhat by saying you’re probably OK waiting on it?

I felt this way after my full-day Switch 2 experience, and I’ll reiterate it now: As good as the upgrades the Switch 2 has, and as fun as the new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong games seem to be — and the GameCube gaming library also seems like a blast of retro fun — the Switch 2 is very much an iterative upgrade for now. The very best games on the Switch 2, and its most unique exclusives, are likely still to come.

Nintendo has clearly designed the Switch 2, at least for the moment, to exist as a bridge to the current Switch, with many upcoming games intended to work on the original Switch too. Much more than the debut of the first Switch, the Switch 2 is designed to be a system you could wait to upgrade to. In that sense, it’s following the path of the current gen of Xbox Series X and S and PlayStation 5 consoles.

You can build up your Switch library now and be Switch 2-ready when you eventually upgrade

The Switch 2 plays all the Switch games, which wasn’t the case with the Switch and previous Wii U and 3DS hardware. That means you could skip the Switch 2 now if you needed to, play games on the Switch, and then move your library over whenever. Switch 2 versions of games cost more (ranging from $10 to $20 more), but you can just buy the Switch 2 game upgrades later for a similar price — or play the versions you’ve already got minus the enhanced graphics and game extras.

The Switch 2’s current upgrades are good, but not shockingly good

After playing several of the Switch 2 Edition versions of Switch games for a bit, I noticed better frame rates and graphics resolution, but I honestly didn’t find it to be that much different. I’d prefer playing the enhanced Switch 2 editions, but the experience reminded me a bit of the PS5 Pro versus PS5 versions of games when I first played on the console with Sony last year.

If you have a big TV, you’ll likely appreciate the difference. The bigger Switch 2 screen shows off games in higher-res 1080p with HDR, but you could play on the older Switch and be fine. I’m playing on a Switch OLED again, and after the Switch 2 experience, I don’t have massive I-wish-this-were-a-Switch-2-envy. 

I’m sure this will change as games are developed to take better advantage of the amped-up Nvidia-powered Switch 2 GPU, and when more exclusives arrive. It’s similar to how I felt about the Meta Quest 3, which has better graphics than Quest 2 but didn’t feel like an absolute must-get until a year into its release.

You can still play upcoming Nintendo games on OG Switch

While Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza are Switch 2 exclusives, Metroid Prime 4 Beyond and Pokemon Legends Z-A also play on the Switch. It’s unclear how well these games will play on the Switch versus Switch 2, but you can get a good dose of New Nintendo this year on the older hardware and upgrade the hardware upgrade later. Think of it as a bit of a FOMO buffer.

Looking at Nintendo’s game history, the company often supported its previous consoles for a good couple of years after the new hardware’s release. I’d expect that after 2026 the Switch 2 will start to become the go-to platform for most big game, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a handful of key Nintendo games still supporting original Switch for another year at least.

There’s no ‘whole new experience’ you’ll miss other than Game Chat, that camera and the mouse 

The original Switch was an eye-opener because it was a portable, full game console that could dock with your TV and turn into a shareable console with modular controllers. It was different from anything Nintendo had made before. The Switch 2 is mostly the same proposition, just nicer.

You won’t feel the same regret for missing out on a whole new way to play this time, since it’s a continuation of the same idea. There are two new features you might envy: audio or video Game Chat among friends and the new Joy-Cons working like mice in some supported games. But Game Chat works only with other Switch 2 owners and needs a Switch Online subscription. The mouse functions are fun at times, but could also end up as just a gimmick. For now, the Switch 2 hasn’t pulled that many wild new functions out of its hat, but that could change, knowing Nintendo. There are also some fun camera-connected party game modes for Mario Party Jamboree if you happen to connect a camera, but no other games even have new camera-based features yet.

It’s fine to wait, but tariffs are still a question mark

I’m saying this well before I’ve had a chance to review the Switch 2, and for sure, it looks like the best Nintendo console in a long while and worth upgrading to. But take some comfort that missing out on getting one early this time isn’t quite as big a deal as it was in 2017, even if you’re feeling the pull of regret. 

The only wild card remains the question of the effect tariffs will have on future console pricing. Will it fluctuate? I hope not, but the prices of Nintendo’s Switch 2 accessories have already gone up as a result of Trump’s chaotic tariff policies, and it’s unclear if that might happen again. The state of pricing and consumer electronics is still in an unknown zone, but in the meantime, you can still have a lot of fun on the Switch you already have, now and even in the near future.

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Technologies

Apple to Shift All US iPhone Assembly to India Amid Tariff Turmoil, Report Says

The manufacturing move aims to address massive US tariffs against China that could spur higher prices on the company’s biggest-selling product.

Apple could be sourcing its entire line of iPhones for the US market — about 60 million devices a year — from assembly facilities in India by the end of 2026, according to a report from the Financial Times

The planned move comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration imposing tariffs against China of up to 145%, although some products such as mobile phones and computers have been exempted for the time being. Apple has long centered its iPhone production in China, making it vulnerable to any trade war between the two countries and spurring speculation that tariffs could mean price increases for the company’s biggest-selling product. 

By moving third-party assembly of US iPhones to India, Apple could avoid the most significant cost pressure of a trade war, though India itself faces new tariffs as well.

The company had already begun shipping iPhones made in India, adding to its product reserves, before new tariffs became active.

A representative for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.   

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