CES Spokesperson Allison Fried tells us about the growing tech trends at CES. Also why Apple is not selling your conversations to advertisers, and NotebookLM launches a news podcast.
o give you a complete look at the news coming out of CES, I’ll be doing these shorter briefings each morning, followed by our regular DTNS discussions in a separate episode later in the day.
Today we’ll hear from CES Spokesperson Allison Fried on the biggest trends from the industry side of the show, and your emails.
I’m Tom Merritt. Let’s start with what you need to know with the big story.
BIG STORY
Apple says Siri isn’t sending your conversations to advertisers
The Verge
Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M - Ars Technica
Last week, Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit over the fact that some conversations captured by Siri were accidental and led to Apple employees hearing sensitive topics. That was the extent of the allegations, not that Apple did anything else with those conversations. Apple admitted no fault in the settlement. That didn’t stop some people from jumping to conclusions of course.
So Wednesday, Apple felt compelled to issue a statement that it did not sell your conversations to advertisers. The company said, "Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose." It also reminded folks that it “does not retain audio recordings of Siri interactions unless users explicitly opt in to help improve Siri, and even then, the recordings are used solely for that purpose. Users can easily opt out at any time.”
So why do you get an ad for Olive Garden moments after you mention Olive Garden out loud for the first time in years? The short version is there are plenty of other ways to predict what you're interested in without listening to you. That includes capturing on-screen interactions, locations and much more. Ads are constantly missing guesses but you don’t notice those, you only notice the good ones. If you were to spend the day noting everything you said, you’d find close to 0% trigger an ad. And if you spend the day noting what ads you get, you’d find that a very small percentage were related to anything you said out loud. Ad targeting is just very very good because advertisers get a lot of information about you.
Apple might be working on a new ‘Invites’ app
In less creepy Apple news, 9to5 Mac noticed some indications in iOS 18.3 beta 2 code that Apple might be working on an Invites app for organizing parties and other events. Get ready to be Sherlocked, Partiful.
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There’s more we need to know today. Let’s get to the briefs.
BRIEFS
Google ‘Daily Listen’ is a personalized podcast based on Discover
Google has launched a new experiment in Search Labs called "Daily Listen" that creates a 5-minute audio "show" about stories and topics you're interested in. The show would appear in the carousel underneath the Search bar at the top of the Google app on both Android and iOS. When you click in, a scrolling transcript appears where podcast cover art usually would. Controls include play, pause, 10-second rewind, next story, playback speed, and mute. Links to the stories discussed in the episode appear below the controls.
VLC player demos real-time AI subtitling for videos
VideoLAN is showing off its real-time captioning in the open-source VLC Media Player. It can not only show you what's being said but translate it too. VLC plans to support more than 100 languages. The captioning and translation are all done locally without sending data to the cloud.
Microsoft’s Xbox Developer Direct returns on January 23rd with a ‘brand new game’
The Verge
Microsoft teases ‘major’ Surface business announcement for January 30th - The Verge
Microsoft has a couple of events coming up. Xbox Developer Direct is coming on January 23rd at 1 PM Eastern on Twitch and YouTube. The teaser includes an unannounced “brand new game.” Last year that game was Bethesda’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. And on LinkedIn, Microsoft is teasing “a major announcement from Surface for Business” during its AI tour in New York City on January 30th. The best bet is Lunar Lake-powered upgrades.
Political content on Instagram and Threads ramped up
Instagram and Threads is changing how it displays political content from accounts you don't follow. Previously you could have it on or off and it defaulted to off. Starting in the US this week, that changes to three settings: less, standard or more, with standard as the default. So no option to turn off unsolicited political posts entirely.
Microsoft’s Small Language Model Phi-4 is Now Available for Free
Microsoft posted its small language model, Phi-4, on Hugging Face for you to download and use for free. Phi-4 is comparable to Meta's Llama 3.3 70B, China's DeepSeek-V3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini, and outperformed larger models like Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o in math competition questions.
Those are the essentials for today. Let’s dive a little deeper into the ongoing stories and follow up.
IN DEPTH
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is put on by a non-profit trade group called the Consumer Technology Association or CTA. I’m always grateful for how helpful they are for a small operation like ours, giving us access to the floor, a space to record in, and one of the highlights is getting to sit down with someone from the CTA to talk about the trends from their side of the show. This year once again I got to talk to the absolutely delightful CES Spokesperson Allison Fried.
PROMO
Did you know that DTNS also has a live show? You probably do since most of you have also been getting that in your feed this week. If you want to get a feed of just the live show’s audio, look for DTNS Live in your podcaster of choice, become a patron at patreon.com/dtns or just head to dailytechnewsshow.com/subscribe.
HELPING EACH OTHER UNDERSTAND
We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today Craig, David, and Kevin weigh in on the new format of our CES coverage this week.
Craig: Love that I can get more than just the headlines beyond DTH for a nice formatted amount of time and THEN have a longer discussion format within the normal show… this was just amazing.
David: This new format you all are giving to the ad-supported listeners sucks. It’s too long and is not enjoyable.
Kevin: I just wanted to share how much I’ve enjoyed the way the crew approached covering CES this year. Separating the briefings from the main show has been fantastic! In the past, squeezing everything into a single episode often made it feel rushed—like the Micro Machines guy trying to speed through to fit everything in. This new format has been such a great change. It gives both segments room to breathe and allows for more thoughtful discussion. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind at all if this became the standard approach for DTNS/GDI in the future.
Thanks to Allison Fried for contributing to today’s show. Thanks to Craig, David, and Kevin for the emails. And thank YOU for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons at patreon.com/dtns. DTNS has a live version called DTNS Live on YouTube and Twitch. Find details on that and more at dailytechnewsshow.com. Talk to you tomorrow.
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