Good morning! We’ve set a New Things world record: Wednesday’s feature video is actually out before lunch. Please alert Guinness.
More below on a very 2026 problem: Companies want us talking to AI bots. Humanity would prefer not to hear it. So now there’s tech that can hear whispers and conceal our voices.
Especially timely after this week’s AirPods-with-cameras leak and Apple’s increasingly obvious plans to turn AirPods into an AI device.
Then, Reddit gets a video feed, OpenAI slows down and self-driving trucks hit California streets. Plus, a LOLz involving pee, data centers and a joke I’m way too proud of: GP(ee)U.
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I believe all “Her” references are officially trite, except for the one I’m about to make. In the 2013 movie, Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Theodore, walks around the city talking to Samantha, his AI companion, through a tiny earpiece. He chats with her on the train, at the park and in lots of other places with other people around.
The movie got a lot right about our AI future. But it missed one important thing: Everyone around Theodore would have wanted him to shut the hell up.
That’s the problem Silicon Valley now wants to solve. Voice is quickly becoming the way tech companies want us to interact with AI. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me last month that the goal is for speaking to replace typing, adding that this will eventually become “by far the vast majority of what we do.” Already, apps like Wispr Flow have surged in popularity.
This week’s feature video explores the increasingly weird technology being invented so we can talk (or whisper) to technology—without making everyone around us hate us. Here’s what I found.
Fun fact: During the Civil War, Confederate chemist Jonathan Harrelson figured out how to extract potassium nitrate from human urine to make gunpowder. Read more about the history of urine and gunpowder here.
This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.
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