Tech News Weekly 382 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch is here. We talk about a Waymo getting stuck in a Chick-fil-A drive-thru. Then we head back into the early web as we talk about Dig and our early experiences there, before another story of the week about Apple and its fumbled Siri launch. Then Jennifer Patterson-Tui of the Verge stops by to tell us about Bali, that's Samsung's upcoming home robot. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly episode 382, with Amanda Silberling and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, April 10th 2025: Anticipating Samsung's Home Robot. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined on this episode on the second Thursday of the month by TechCrunch's own Amanda Silberling. Welcome back, Amanda.

0:01:13 - Amanda Silberling
Hello, happy second Thursday of the month.

0:01:16 - Mikah Sargent
Happy second Thursday of the month to you. Perhaps we should have like a special observance on these, the second Thursdays a little lighting of incense or something.

0:01:26 - Amanda Silberling
The observance is listening to this podcast.

0:01:28 - Mikah Sargent
There, there you go. That is the observance Observe our podcast. For people who are observing for the first time welcome, we're happy to have you. For those who are returning, thank you for being here again. This is the part of the show where we share our stories of the week, the stories that are of interest to us, that we think you all should know about. So, without further ado, why don't you kick things off, Amanda?

0:01:56 - Amanda Silberling
All right. So if anyone's been following the news this week, it's been a little distressing. So I thought let's do a silly one. Let's do a silly one, let's do a silly one so I want to talk about a story that happened this week in which a waymo robo taxi got stuck in a chick-fil-a drive-thru in santa monica, california okay.

0:02:20 - Mikah Sargent
So first and foremost, just to clarify someone asked the Waymo to go to a drive-thru.

0:02:30 - Amanda Silberling
It seems that there wasn't any passengers in it, but the Waymos still drive around even when there's not passengers, because they have to get to places to pick up the next passengers. But maybe the concept of drive-thru is just like not really hitting the Waymo. So it got stuck in a Chick-fil-A drive-thru and it caused a traffic jam and one person that was interviewed by the local radio station there was, like I've been in the drive-thru line for 30 minutes and like at what point? Like do people wait 30 minutes for Chick-fil-A drive-thru?

0:03:07 - Mikah Sargent
I was about to say that, that seems, and it was 9.30 PM when it happened. So this is like a late night. I didn't even know Chick-fil-A was open that late. I thought you had to get home to you know, do your evening prayers, and so I'm surprised that Chick-fil-A is still open at30 pm. But so it kicked off at 9.30 pm and then you're just waiting and waiting, and waiting. I would love to know what everybody in line was ordering. Maybe there's something there that's just like super. It's too good, we can't pass up on it. But I don't know. Chick-fil-a doesn't give like Taco Bell or one of those. That's sort of the in and out. That's like that late night stop because you've just been out with friends or whatever. Hmm, interesting.

0:03:47 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, chick-fil-a is giving very. We don't open on Sundays.

0:03:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, exactly. So I'm surprised that it's open so late and I am surprised that people are waiting as long as they are. But hey, if you're hungry, you're hungry, hungry Again. This is so odd to me because I would love to know the series of events that led up to this car getting stuck there. Was it its programming to also capture a building and so it saw oh, here's a building that I have yet yet to capture, or we only have so much data on it, so we're gonna go this way and and do this and do this. Or are we starting to train our autonomous vehicles on being able to drive through drive-thrus because eventually, you would want to be able to do that?

0:04:40 - Amanda Silberling
right, you want to beckon one to go get your taco bell I mean, I guess like, eventually I don't know Like could, instead of like people delivering food, do you just like get a Waymo to bring you food? That feels like kind of a waste, but can you just have them chuck it into the.

0:04:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the Waymo drives up, the window rolls down, you chuck it into the Waymo and then it drives to you and you get your food. Yeah, it's not a bad idea, and they could turn up the heat really high in the car because there's no human inside, so it'd keep the food hot, so true.

0:05:09 - Amanda Silberling
So true, I think we can like glean some things about how this works based on other issues that Waymos have had recently. In the last year there was a Waymo that got stuck in a roundabout loop where it just kept going around the roundabout, never exited the roundabout, just went round and round and round, and then there was in a parking lot of Waymos. They all started honking at each other in the early morning, which I'm sure the people living in that neighborhood were definitely thrilled with and, uh, definitely felt really great about Waymo after that, and there was also an incident where a Waymo stalled in front of Kamala Harris's motorcade. So yeah, I don't know, maybe the Waymos have a political agenda and they're like stop.

0:06:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and also here's an annoying thing that always bothers me when a local news station has a video about a thing, they love to include all of the information in the video but not all of the information in the article that accompanies the video. According to our own Burke in the chat, who's been able to see a little bit more, the passenger of the Waymo got out of the Waymo before it came to the drive-thru but there wasn't enough space for the car to turn out and away from the drive-thru lane and ended up getting stuck in it. So again, that must have been an on and popping 9.30 PM Chick-fil-A period where there were because I've driven past an in and out where the drive through lane has now exited onto the street or has you know, sort of overflowed onto the street. So I guess I could see the Waymo getting stuck in that way. But yeah, you've talked about some of the other times when Waymo vehicles have gotten stuck and I think that you know it's particularly concerning in the case of a presidential candidate. But overall, in the same way that it's human learning lessons, I think it's also non-human learning lessons and you can take from this some bit of knowledge I will share. A shame of mine. That was very important for me to learn and also involved fast food In Missouri, where I'm from, and I think it works this way in a lot of places.

But when you turn 15, unless you live on a farm, in which case you can be younger.

But when you turn 15 and you live in the city, you can get the car, but you have to have a full licensed person, 21 or older, with you, and the idea is that that's how you kind of get your your driving lessons.

Um, you're not required to take any sort of driver's ed or anything like that. And so I'm 15 and I'm driving 15, and I'm driving our family van and we are going to Wendy's and we get to the drive-thru and I'm going forward into the drive-thru, we do the little, okay, here we're ordering, we're talking into the speaker, but now it comes time to turn the van and go around the corner to the window. Well, I overturned the steering wheel so that the van was facing the building instead. So if we're looking at it, it's facing the building instead of facing head on to go through the line. At which point my anxiety climbs through the roof and I decide there's no possible way I can fix this. If I continue to drive, I will drive into the wendy's wendy's and everyone will die like into the atrium when I used to have like the sunrooms I'm like it's over.

Now this is over. So my mom, who was in the passenger seat because because, again, I'm 15, is going no, Mikah, just turn the steering wheel. It's fine, just turn this. No, I can't, it's not happening, I'm going to kill everybody. So, she or no, I have to get out of. I just like, I completely nope out, I say there's no way I'm doing this. I, even before we've like agreed on it, I put the car in the van and park and I get out of the driver's seat and she has to then climb over the middle console into the driver's seat and I get into the passenger seat so that she can correct the steering wheel and she's like showing me it's not that difficult.

Just turn the steering wheel back this way. So listen, what I'm saying is I have empathy for this way. I've been in this situation. It's very confusing, it's frightening when you've got a bunch of hungry people behind you and in front of you, when you've got people in the vehicle Well, in this case I guess there weren't any people in the vehicle watching. But yeah, low performance anxiety is to be understood.

0:10:22 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, you know AIs, they're just like us this is not tech related, but real quick. I did also strangely have a Wendy's involved driving learning situation. Wow.

0:10:33 - Mikah Sargent
Tell me.

0:10:35 - Amanda Silberling
My dad was similarly like showing me how to drive when I had my permit and would like sit in the car with me and around the same time, through work or something, he ended up with this coupon book of $1 Wendy's Frosties. So, yes, the one, yes, yeah. So I was allowed to get a Frosty if I parked well. And to this day, if I'm ever at home and we see someone who parked badly my dad's like they don't get a Frosty.

0:11:03 - Mikah Sargent
That's amazing. I love that. So I think, again, we're going to continue to see this. We're going to see more driverless vehicles I don't think that's slowing down at all and we'll have more funny stories like this that hit the hit the waves for sure. All right, I do believe it is time for us to take a little break here before we come back with my story of the week.

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All right, we are back from the break, and I wanted to talk about a bit of web nostalgia, because not too terribly long ago I think it was back in March, yes, so about just a little bit over a month ago Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian announced that they were acquiring Digg and Alexis Ohanian announced that they were acquiring Dig. Dig, of course, was one of the first kind of online news aggregators that took off and gave people the. It was a la Reddit in the sense of kind of knowing what was going on on the web. Well, with these two acquiring the product, there has been ongoing work to bring it back and, as of this morning, as we record the show, on Thursday, April 10th, Digg kicked off what's called its early access community. So this is kind of a little community gathering spot where people are getting to see early looks at what the product will be getting, to provide some feedback on the design, that kind of thing.

It's $5 to join and the group says this isn't about trying to make an amount of money, it's about keeping the bots out.

So more than a dollar to make it expensive for a bot system. But in fact all of those proceeds are going to go to a nonprofit that the community will kind of join together to decide. And anyway, when you do this, if you sign up for this, you get your username for Digg, with whatever username you sign up with, and you also get a special badge being one of the groundbreakers. But I'm not really talking about this specifically Digg itself itself, but instead I thought it'd be an opportunity for us to kind of take a look back at our early web experiences, because Digg was there kind of at the, I think, at the point where the web I can remember being a lot of fun, and so I wanted to talk to you and ask you, kind of looking back, what do you remember were some of the apps or services that you used that hold a special place in your heart or just were you know. It's fun to reminisce on from time to time.

0:16:56 - Amanda Silberling
Unfortunately, I think the first social internet experience I had was the Club Penguin forums on miniclip.com. Unfortunately, disney bought Club Penguin and shut it down and that is when, as a child, I was radicalized against big corporations. I never really used Dig Like it existed when I was old enough to be on the internet, but I feel like I remember it being kind of already like the hype had worn down. I'm in my late 20s for context.

Um, I feel like there were a lot of these kinds of like link aggregator things that linked into tumblr, but it was kind of clunky if it was like shared via stumbled upon or dig, or like we heart it or like those sorts of websites, um, which I don't know. I mean, I guess in a way I do like the idea of a return to these sort of more human based platforms of like your friend being like hey, look at this cool video I saw, instead of the TikTok algorithm. Being like guess what? You just woke up and we're about to tell you that the phillies are having a hello kitty giveaway, which I did learn this morning when I woke up I mean that's kind of cool too.

Honestly, I kind of want, I want to go, but this you know I wasn't looking for that, but I I did get advertised to without even being advertised to, and I might go to that Phillies game to get the Hello Kitty giveaway.

0:18:32 - Mikah Sargent
So for me there were a couple of early sites. Certainly, tumblr was a big, big site at the time, but I can remember StumbleUpon, which you mentioned being one of my favorite things to do for the day. I would open up my browser, I would just click that StumbleUpon button over and over again and find a bunch of cool stuff, and I just had bookmark after bookmark after bookmark of these different websites that had cool stuff online and I would add things to StumbleUpon to stumble upon. I remember connecting to Digg and trying to use Digg but, as was your experience, it had started to go that way of not being in the hype cycle anymore, and so I was almost kind of it was a sort of FOMO play of wait. Let me see if I can, you know, be part of this before it's gone. But there was also a site at the time that was big for me called Daily Booth, and that one still sticks out to me because it was an early social media site that truly connected you to the world, because there was a photo stream that everyone who visited the site could see, and so, as people posted photos wherever they were in the world, it would pop up on this photo stream and so you would take a daily photo. Well, you didn't have to, but that was the idea daily booth and post it there and then people could comment on it Excuse me and then people could comment on it, people could like your photo. And it was at the time a very gratifying experience, right, because you ended up talking to people all over and I made some friends through that site. Actually, it was kind of upsetting when it went away. It went away a long time after I stopped using it. But I think about that and how much a site like that would not work in the modern web where, yes, we have, you know, anybody can technically find my Instagram right and see the latest photo that I post. But it's not the same as this, like one stream that everybody gets to go to and you're just seeing boop, boop, boop photos just loading over and over again of people all around the world, and it felt at the time also very positive. I never experienced any bullying on the site or anything like that and, yeah, there was some level of wholesomeness to it. I'm sure there were lots of bad things that happened on the site.

I wonder if it is lost in today's modern web, and I don't know. It's hard to sort of pinpoint what precisely that is, what precisely that is. Do we all have too much power now versus before, where it was kind of like there wasn't enough of a backbone to the web, where you could just have so much instant access to everything and ability to upload dozens of things at once? I don't know, I don't know what it was, but there's something about that early web that felt more mystical and magical. Maybe and now the mystery is gone it's just a thing we all have. Maybe that plays a role in it where at one point there the magic has, has, has gone away to a certain extent, as it has become just this tool that we all have and use, has become just this tool that we all have and use. Do you find yourself yearning for the days of AOL, instant Messenger and how that felt? I mean, like Neopets, club Penguin I was also a Club Penguin-er.

I played RuneScape, my siblings and I played Maple Story and there that was just a delightful time. And I wonder, I mean, maybe that's still happening in the the Mindscape and Roblox communities. Maybe they still feel that there.

0:22:59 - Amanda Silberling
I don't know yeah, I think that it might be that there's just so many people now that it feels like in. I would guess I was not on the internet at the time, but, like in the nineties, it was almost like the people that were on the internet were already a self-selecting group of people that were like I know how to log into my server and like run, dial up and whatever. And then now it's like your grandma's on facebook, but also I think it's just that there are fewer places to go. Now it feels like where, if you're talking about like making a friend on the internet, it's probably happening on like x or blue sky, or like youtube, instagram, whatever like, and it's all like they're all controlled by a very small number of companies. And then again it's like oh boy, like dig, but it's like no, I mean, this is coming from like the people that have built the internet as we know it, in a sense, like alexis ohanian created Reddit, right.

Which I don't know, I mean even Reddit is still sort of a bit strange compared to the rest of social media where, like a friend once told me that they would rather someone find out their social security number than their Reddit username, because Reddit feels so like personal and private and like you're going on there and you're like hello, I'm having this weird health issue. Someone please help me. And then the next day you're like hello, I'm going to write my like five page fan theory about severance.

0:24:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, you do kind of um you, you bury yourself. For well, some people do anyway, I, I, I'm I'm rarely on Reddit, but I get that idea of sort of burying yourself.

0:24:57 - Amanda Silberling
I had a dark time in 2019. So pre-pandemic, I'm very proud of this. But I had my kombucha making phase before the pandemic and got a lot of information on r slash kombucha, had some pretty good posts on r slash kombucha, ultimately found that having a like weird bacteria tea thing in your home is more trouble than it's worth I.

0:25:24 - Mikah Sargent
You know, it's almost as if this sentence explains itself, but yeah but, I don't know. I mean people would give like phys ratings oh my god. And people have weird bacteria bread things in their house too.

So oh yeah, you know, it is what it is phys ratings. Okay, let me tell you something. The other day I had some kombucha on tap at a uh portland um gluten-free Japanese bakery Incredible, thank you. Unfortunately, what wasn't incredible was the fizz rating on the kombucha that I had. I don't know what the scale is one to 10 fizzies. I would give it a two on the fizzy scale. Oh no, that's so sad. I was very sad. I was very sad because I was very sad, because I love a ginger booch and I'll have it of any kind of brand. Slap down a ginger booch and I will drink it, probably Specifically non-alcoholic versions, and yeah. So I was like, oh, this is gonna be so refreshing. And I drank it and I was like this is nearly flat. That's so sad. I wanted it to burn my throat and it didn't.

0:26:36 - Amanda Silberling
That is very sad, because you're supposed to put it for like the final step. You put it in those little like flip top bottles where it carbonates it, because it's so like intensely kept in there, and then when you open it you have to like burp it before so that it doesn't explode everywhere.

0:26:52 - Leo Laporte
Burp it.

0:26:53 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, you have to burp your kombucha and you know, maybe the internet was a mistake. I learned to burp my kombucha on the internet.

0:27:04 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, dear Amanda Silberling, it is always a pleasure to chat with you about internet culture and everything in between on the show. Of course folks can head over to techcrunchcom to and everything in between on the show. Of course folks can head over to techcrunchcom to check out the work you're doing, but where else should they go to keep up with what you've got out there?

0:27:19 - Amanda Silberling
Social media wise, I'm mostly on blue sky these days. I am at Amandaomglol, which is just a URL I happen to own and now have a use for, a URL I happen to own and now have a use for, and I have an internet culture podcast called Wow, if True, and I think that it is good, but I'm biased because I make it.

0:27:39 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I am not biased and it is good, so everyone go listen to it. Thank you, Amanda, and we will see you again for our next observance of the second Thursday of the month.

0:27:50 - Amanda Silberling
Yep, we could bring our kombucha and cheers over the camera. There we go.

0:27:54 - Mikah Sargent
That's what we do Only after we've burped it. Yes, all right. Goodbye, bye-bye, all righty, let's take a quick break so I can tell you about Zscaler, who is bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Zscaler is the leader in cloud security.

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All right, we are back from the break and that means it is time for another story of the week. This is huge, a fantastic piece over at the information that I encourage everyone to go check out because it gives a little bit more insight into the goings on at Apple in the wake of the AI debacle. So we know that Apple originally announced that it was going to be bringing some very powerful AI tools to market and in fact, had some pretty interesting marketing involving AI and sort of hyping up this ability for Siri to be able to be proactive and have access to even more information about you, to be able to go in and know what your calendar looks like, know what apps you're using, know what's on your screen and provide feedback and answers based on what you say and what you're doing. Well, as much as that was hyped and marketed and tied into Apple Plus Intelligence, what we saw from Apple was a certain amount of the Apple Intelligence features coming to market, a certain amount of the Apple intelligence features coming to market, like the writing tools that help you to summarize an article or give you the ability to rewrite something, or the image tools like Image Playground that helps you create honestly lackluster images of different varieties, or the arguably really cool and fun emoji creation tool, which lets you it's a language well, it's not a large language model, but it's a generative AI model trained specifically on emoji so that you can been what Apple said was going to be the case, and that has led to a huge shift at the Apple company, the Cupertino company. So I want to talk a little bit about. Of course, everyone needs to go read this piece from Wayne Ma, so I'm not going to summarize the whole thing, but I want to talk a little bit about it because I think it's going to give us some insight into where things are going as we go forward and as more news breaks and as WWDC hits, which is right around the corner.

According to the information and according to other reporting from other organizations like Bloomberg, the messy mix up at the company has a lot to do with how the company felt it could solve this AI. Not a problem, I mean, it felt it could bring this AI solution to market. There was one group within the Siri AI organization that felt that the way to do it was to create a small language model and a large language model, and they actually called them according to the piece Minnie Mouse and Mighty Mouse, to the piece Minnie Mouse and Mighty Mouse, and that, minnie Mouse, the small language model would exist on your phone and not require any access to any server or anything like that, that it would be able to do a lot of the processing right there on device. It would handle those simple tasks. It would be a bit like the way that you already have the ability to have Siri create an alarm for you, but instead of doing it the old way of using Siri, it would require this new small language model. Then Mighty Mouse the large language model would, of course, be in the server. That'd be for the more complex tasks. That'd be for the stuff like looking at your calendar and then suggesting, hey, do you need an Uber? And ordering that Uber for you for that meeting that you need to get to. Well, unfortunately, that is not what some of the people working on this tool thought was the right way to do it.

The other leaders decided that it should go somewhere else. The company should solve it another way, that they should build one large language model that would do everything. But the problem with that is a large language model does not fit on an iPhone while still saving space for you to do the rest of the stuff that you want to do on your iPhone. So it needs and it also requires a whole heck of a lot of processing and therefore needs to be in the cloud. It needs to be on a server. Well, that runs contrary to the company's focus and desire to be the personal data privacy company, and when that's the case, you are left with the question of how in the world are you going to pull it off when you have that situation of a company that, up to this point, has said look, user privacy is paramount, it is at the forefront, of course, privacy is paramount, it is at the forefront, of course. We saw Apple try to solve this problem by coming to market with the AI privacy method of having kind of these private cloud computing servers, and there have been some solutions there, but it all needed to line up at the same time with what they were trying to do for Siri's new way of existing, this more powerful Siri that has more knowledge about you and can act on what you're doing.

So, in attempting to bring this to market in small ways, leading up to what would eventually be the Bella Ramsey Siri, we've seen already some fumbles because things that Siri used to be able to do, siri sometimes is not able to do. Where it used to be easy to ask Siri for something regarding a historical context, now it may provide an answer, or it may say you want to ask ChatGPT Because I don't really have that knowledge and it was something that, up to that point, it could answer. I've seen people who've asked it to set a timer and instead of setting a timer, it decides to do something else, like do a search for timers. It's very frustrating and people are perplexed about it. It's very frustrating and people are perplexed about it.

We saw a lot of blowback from many a tech publication specifically focused on Apple, including Daring Fireball itself, and with that came kind of questions about what was going on internally. Well, then we heard that people within the company got together and had these, what my high school European history teacher would call come to Jesus moments, where you are sat down and we're having a serious conversation and we're going to get things worked out with you know, some harsh words involved and some very frightening outcomes. And that led to a shift in the company Because instead of Siri and this new version of Siri being under John Gianandrea, the AI chief, and GianAndrea's team, it got shifted over to Air Force One himself, craig Federighi, along with Mike Rockwell, who worked on Vision Pro. So all of that would be the new way of working with Siri in its new AI version. And there's been kind of ongoing tumult and questions about what exactly we're going to get when it comes to Siri going forward and what the company is even going to be able to announce in the next year and, I think, more importantly, how it is going to respond to the fact that up to this point, it has announced this technology and hasn't made it possible, has not made it available to us. You know it all boils down to these kind of internal power struggles at the company and which group was going to kind of take charge?

Because for the longest time, siri kind of was a background technology. After its announcement, when it first kicked off. Then you had Siri just being what it was for so long. It was for so long. So then the AI group comes forth, which, by the way, according to the information, got renamed aimless uh, as opposed to a. The AI group became the aimless group and that it did not do a good job of bringing to fruition the stuff that was promised fruition, the stuff that was promised. So right now there's so much kind of disagreement about what would make a good and more powerful Siri, with the AI team feeling like chatbots are not of use, that there's a disagreement about small and large language models and if there would be an internal LLM powering these features versus an external LLM powering these features, along with, according to the report, the software team, the team under Craig Federighi creating its own LLM set of features that in some cases did better than what the AI group itself had created. So now we have to figure out, going forward, what this is going to look like, and that's the big question. I am very much looking forward to June when we get to see what Apple has created for us, for the operating systems, for the rest of the year and into next year, and what kind of messaging is put out there about the current state of Siri and Siri AI and Apple intelligence as a whole. So again, we'll link it in the show notes Go check out that information article how Apple fumbled Siri's AI makeover to get the full scoop and skinny on what's going on there. All right, we're going to take another break before we come back with our final portion of the show, an interview with a familiar face, very excited about this, as we talk about some technology that I would love to have at my home.

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All right, we are back from the break and though I am sad to say that she won't be joining us next week, I am excited to say that joining us today for our interview is Jennifer Patterson, tui of the Verge. Welcome, Jen.

0:46:07 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Hi, happy to be here. Sorry not to be here next week, but I'm making up for it today.

0:46:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yes indeed, and I know that you have very important things to take care of. So we completely understand. So I am pretty excited because oftentimes when something feels a little bit I don't know wonky and fun is debuted, announced, teased at CES or one of those other big trade shows, it means that it's not ever going to be a reality. But you are here to tell us that Samsung has a product it's actually bringing to market. What is it and what do we need to know?

0:46:55 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Well, they say it's coming this summer and it is exciting. I'm excited because I love robots and this is Samsung's okay, samsung's Bawley or Barley robot. I say Bawley, but you know, and when they say it on stage, you know there's lots of different accents, so I'm not sure we really know the pronunciation. But barley robot, which was first demoed at CES in 2020. And it was one of the first sort of home robots we saw. So this was before Amazon's Astro, but Samsung. So they debuted it in 2020, nothing for ages, we didn't hear anything about it. And then at CES in 2024, it was back and had a new design with some wheels and more features and a projector. And now it was shown at 2025 CES and they said then it's coming this year. And we all said, oh yes, it is really.

Oh, yes, it is, but now, according to a post on their Samsung newsroom, they are going to ship this summer, which is still not an actual ship date, but you know it's a window, so all the way through the end of August we might expect to see it. No pricing yet and I'm guessing not cheap is going to be somewhere around the price point. So it's a home robot and it can roll around. It can answer questions.

It's kind of like a smart speaker on wheels to be fair but the big news today or this week is that they are actually adding Gemini multimodal capabilities to it, which supposedly will make it smarter and easier to interact with, as well as Samsung's own large language models. It's interesting that they are doing this partnership with Google here, but it is. It's a fun little guy. I've always been excited about this idea of a little ball rolling around my house. It doesn't hit. One key feature for me of robots, though, is actually being obviously useful.

0:49:06 - Mikah Sargent
Ah yeah, it's not also a vacuum, for example, it's not also a vacuum.

0:49:11 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
No, it doesn't have arms. It can't carry things around for you. The way Samsung is positioning it is basically as a digital assistant that's physically in your home. It has a projector, has a speaker and a microphone, and so if you ask it a question, instead of having, say, a smart display with a screen question, instead of having, say, a smart display with a screen, it can just project on a nearby wall or on the floor and show you what answers to your questions. In this little demo video that they put up yesterday, it showed a cartoon character lady asking, saying I want a new hairstyle, and it presented five or six different options of new hairstyles. Apparently, some of its other capabilities and these are enhanced by the multimodal element of Gemini is being able to help you choose what to wear. It can judge your sartorial style and tell you whether you should perhaps change your outfit.

0:50:05 - Mikah Sargent
Ooh, amazon, tried that before and it did not work out for them. Yes, the look, amazon.

0:50:10 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
And then they were also. We saw it demoed at CES this year and they were showing that being able to, you could hold up two bottles of wine and it would choose. It would say, oh, this bottle will go better with the fish dinner that you're preparing.

0:50:23 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, your little sommelier.

0:50:24 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, there, it is A little sommelier. Yes, and that was before they meant they launched Gemini, but they gave us very few details at CES. So it's possible that that was the feature that they were preparing to bring to the robot, but it, yeah, it. I just it's fun, it's cute and that's what all these little robots have been like, but they all have failed to date because they just don't have a very clear purpose or a real reason to have them in your home.

The biggest one here that from my perspective and this is why I say it's like a smart display is it does connect to your smart home through smart things, which is Samsung's smart home platform, so you can tell it to open the shades or turn on the lights, and it seems from some of their demos to have some sort of autonomy. So I remember originally when they demoed it, they showed the dog knocking over a bowl of food while no one was in the home and it saw that and it sent the Samsung robot vacuum to clean up the mess and then played some like soothing tunes to calm the dog down, you know. So sort of proactive. Oh, that's kind of sweet, yeah, so I mean we will see.

0:51:32 - Mikah Sargent
You know what A little friend for my dogs while I'm away is actually not a bad idea, and then it could play little like if you had a cat, it could use that projector to put a little dot all over the house?

0:51:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, and it could be interactive, because the other thing they showed was that projecting buttons on the floor and you can select a button and press buttons with your feet.

0:51:54 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, okay, that's kind of cool.

0:51:57 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Lots of cool ideas. Just again, what's the killer use case here? Right? I don't know that there is one, but it's cute.

0:52:05 - Mikah Sargent
I also. Why do they all assume we have ranch style homes?

0:52:09 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
I know I have stairs everywhere. I'm not sure how it's going to get anywhere. Useful Stairs all over the place.

0:52:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I'm going to have to carry my Bollie, I guess, bury my Bali, I guess to to make things happen is maybe part of the idea here that as you move throughout the home, if you don't have multiple smart speakers, then this will be right there to help you. Then I'm also worried, like what is Samsung's sort of liability if you get tripped up over this thing?

You know what I mean, if it's like falling right behind you and you don't see it, and then you trip over it. That's not something we've had to deal with up to this point. I guess if you tripped over your own smart vacuum, that's not the company's responsibility, and I do that a lot. Well, you've probably got 15 running around in there at any given time.

0:53:19 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, I think and that is sort of the pitch is that it follows you around and, like the other thing they showed in their video was a man getting ready for work and Bali reminding him that he's late and that you know he should get going. The traffic's getting worse, he needs to go sooner. So it's sort of you know a constant I guess the idea is a constant companion. It's moving with you. It's always reminding you of what you need. It might get really annoying, but it also I mean, I know what you're saying about. Already voice control is already useful without needing something that's following you around. And that was the issue I found with the Amazon Astro robot. It was like it couldn't really do much more than a smart display could and it kind of took up a lot of space. But I think the proactive element when you're not home is interesting and that was what Amazon was trying to push with Astro as like a home security robot.

But it being able to take care of things for you when you're not there, because it can see everywhere around your house and it can go and check on things for you. Like you could maybe phone in and say did I leave the back door open balling? It can go check for you, Sort of like that's what Amazon's flying indoor drone camera was all about too, Like it could keep an eye on things for you when you're not home. And robot vacuums right now can already do this. Many of them have video cameras in them and voice assistants, and some of them even have features where you can say go check on my pet and it will just roam around and look for your dog. So there's already some of these capabilities out there, but robot vacuums can also vacuum your floor, so they have more use.

Absolutely your floor so they have you know, more use. Absolutely. Do you want to get this? Would you get one in your? Would you have a?

0:55:04 - Mikah Sargent
ballie in your home? I would love to answer that question. We do need to take one tiny little break and we'll come back. We'll answer that question and then I have a question for you, sort of a pie in the sky kind of kind of deal.

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All right, we are back from the break. Jennifer Patterson, two-way of the verge, is here and we are talking about Samsung's Bali. Jen asked me if I would have a Bali in my home and I got to tell you before I talked to you. I was very bombastic about Bali, but you have brought a good point up, which is that it in itself isn't all that useful, and that kind of breaks my heart a little bit. I think that you're right.

I would want this to do a little bit more on its own, such that it would deserve probably the high price that it's going to cost and its charging dock or whatever space inside of my home and I don't know if in its current form it does that, especially because I don't live in a ranch style home Like, maybe if it could follow me to all floors and was literally became like my little buddy. That's kind of cool because I could talk to it and be like hey, can you add this to my my calendar? Hey, I don't want to forget this, so can you do that? Or even you know, if you're having a conversation with somebody and it reminds you, you know, you promised that you were going to do this. Did you remember that? No, you're right, bollie, I forgot. Thank you so much, but yeah, it can't follow me everywhere, so I don't know.

0:58:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, and those features are things that we've been promised things like Alexa Plus and other and we already have some capabilities there without needing a robot in the home for it, and I mean I just don't feel like the use cases they've shared so far really sell Bally. I do think cute robot is hard to get. You know, cute robot is hard to say no to, though, so I just would like to see I mean, I don't need a robot to tell me which bottle of wine to choose or what clothes to put on.

0:58:51 - Mikah Sargent
In fact, I don't want a robot to tell me what clothes to put on. I'd be a little bit like okay, now you're leaving my house, Thank you Right.

0:58:59 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
If that's all they could really come up with as a selling point.

0:59:02 - Mikah Sargent
I was a little disappointed and that's why I want to ask you is if you could tell me what you are, the creator now of the Bali that gets the JPT seal of approval. By the way, one of our listeners, hopefully, can make us see we have great artists in our club, so maybe someone will make the JPT seal of approval. But I would love to know if you could have right now a robot in your home that is more than just a vacuum. It can be a vacuum too, but more than just a vacuum, and it's still reasonably possible to have this. What does the JPT approved home robot look like and what functions does it have?

0:59:50 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Well, so I've said on this show numerous times that I'm not a huge fan of the idea of a humanoid robot in the house. I'm not a huge fan of the idea of a humanoid robot in the house. I do think that single purpose robots are probably more useful and more affordable. But in like an ideal world where we are able to create something that's like a companion-like robot that also is effective in the home robot that also is effective in the home, I don't think we need a robot that is also going to sort of necessarily be your vacuum cleaner or do other menial tasks that other robots already do. That robot could sort of be like an orchestrator.

Like I said earlier, the Bawley. When they first demoed it, samsung showed it telling the robot vacuum, go and vacuum. So I kind of like that idea of it being like able to look after my home using artificial intelligence, being kind of like the brain of my home, so that my robot doesn't have to necessarily be super smart. I mean, my vacuum doesn't have to be super smart, but the Bawley can orchestrate everything, but what it really needs is an arm.

1:00:59 - Mikah Sargent
It needs to be able to.

1:01:01 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
That's what takes it from being a smart display to being actually a useful element to actually add into your home, because adding a rolling robot into your home can cause some chaos and I think if it had some kind of way of manipulating actual devices in your home, like you know, press buttons for you, pick things up, you know tidy up. So it is. I guess it is a Rosie the robot is what I would want ultimately, but I don't want a full on humanoid Android walking around my home. That just that feels too sci-fi and also just too. We don't need that. I think we have other elements in our house that in the smart home that you know, we have motorized shades, we have the robot vacuum, but but having if it, if it had an arm, maybe two, because one would look really creepy If I had two little appendages um, I think that would.

Yeah, two little chicken arms, t-rex yeah, two little chicken arms. And you know also to your point, it probably needs a way to get up and downstairs if it's going to be useful in like 50% of people's homes. Yeah, it's just. I think, the key here that what is interesting is that it does have the generative AI powers, which is not something we've seen in a home robot before. It is what we're beginning to see coming to smart speakers and smart assistants, but that is gonna be interesting to see how smart it can be and how easy it can be to interact with it too.

Because if I can say, barley, go into the living room and shove the robot because it got stuck on the chair leg, actually get it, use natural conversation and have it do what I need, that could be useful, but right now it just doesn't feel. It feels very gimmicky still Cute, but gimmicky, yep, I agree. And when it first came out, it didn't have wheels and everyone was like, how is it rolling? And it was so cool that it just rolled around. It's kind of like a marble you know whoa?

1:03:02 - Mikah Sargent
okay, so it didn't have wheels, but it still moved. I thought you were saying it didn't have wheels and it didn't move, the?

1:03:06 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
original one they demoed. So sorry it didn't come out, but they demoed at cs 2020.

1:03:11 - Leo Laporte
Just rolled oh, that'd be so.

1:03:13 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
It was much more bb8 yeah now they've added two front wheels and a little rear wheel thing, and it just is not as cute.

1:03:21 - Mikah Sargent
It's not ball-y anymore. It's like no Cylindry.

1:03:25 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yes, it's like if you're going to add appendages, stick an arm in there too. There you go.

1:03:31 - Mikah Sargent
There. That is the way for sure, Jennifer, it is always a pleasure to have you on the show. We will miss you next week, but thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Of course, folks head over to thevergecom to check out the work that you're doing. You're a very prolific writer. There's always stuff to check out there. Where else can people go if they want to keep up to date with what you've got?

1:03:54 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
So I'm on Blue Sky and I'm on Threads. Threads is at Smart Home, mama and Blue Sky. I'm JP2E and also on X, but yeah, those are my kind of main social media channels. And then, yeah, thevergecom. I'm here every month.

1:04:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, every Thursday. Thank you so much for being here and we'll see you again soon. Bye-bye, bye, all righty folks, we have reached the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you would like to get all of our shows ad-free just the content, none of the ads can I invite you to join the club? I'm very excited to say that we have our annual plan back, so now you can join our monthly plan or our annual plan and, of course, we like to kick things off with a two week free trial of Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. So head there, join the fun. You'll get access to not just at free content but also access to the members only discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club members and those of us here at twit, and access to the twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show, plus special club to events get published there. It is a really good time. Plus that huge, like I said, that back catalog of content is just really nice to get with the Twit+ bonus feed. Uh, if you would like to follow me online, I'm at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network, or you can add to chihuahua.coffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.offee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out Hands on Mac and iOS Today, later today, and also check out on Sundays, hands on Tech. We just published, or rather recorded, the next round of episodes, so you'll see those hitting your feeds.

Thanks so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you to John Ashley and Burke for their work on this show and thank you to those of you who tune in every week. We do appreciate it. I've heard that there's been even more of you. Some growth for Tech News Weekly, so we'd love to hear that. Keep telling your friends, keep telling your family and, if I could ask if you haven't done it or if you haven't it's been a while head into Apple Podcasts and make sure you've got that five star rating on the show. That really does help. You don't even need to leave a review, just the five star rating is enough and it means a lot. It actually does impact advertising and so it is wonderful whenever we can show them how well the show is rated. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you again. Bye-bye.

1:06:43 - Leo Laporte
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