Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and today we have a podcast on the heels of Apple's worldwide developers conference announcements yesterday, trying to talk about some of the announcements and more broadly some of the tech trends that they signify. And hosting that conversation and to kick things off, we have Kyle Russell moderating.

So yesterday, Apple showed off a bunch of new developments with regards to their several

different operating systems, iOS on your phone and iPad, MacOS renamed from OS 10 on the

desktop and laptop computers they make and watchOS.

And kind of looking across the spectrum of software they talked about, there were a couple of big

themes that we saw. There's kind of this platformication of all of the apps that Apple makes

available on iOS. There was also a lot of focus on AI, whether it was identifying faces of people

you know in photos you take from your photo library or suggesting which emoji to use in

conversation when you're just chatting with your friends. And there was another thing that was

kind of related to how they bring software and interface elements between their platforms, which

was this kind of widgetification of different interface elements where parts of the lock screen

look like parts of widgets that you use within apps, look like suggestions that Siri brings up. And it's kind of making the interface work in multiple contexts

while also making it all still feel familiar, no matter kind of what angle you're approaching

a task from. So to jump into kind of all three of those things, I'm joined by Frank and Benedict,

experts on AI and mobile, respectively.

So, Benedict, what did you think of this kind of platformification of Apple's apps?

Frankly, it sounded a lot like what Facebook and Google have been showing off, taking apps

that people use every day and introducing ways for developers to kind of become part of that

experience. Yeah, I think there's a

bunch of different ways to think about this. I mean, one of them, and I think first of all,

one should remind people that, you know, actually most iOS users use Apple Maps, and almost all

iOS users use iMessage a lot. And so, you know, just because everyone in the Valley is using Google Maps,

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