Granola, an AI notetaker valued at $1.5 billion, captures meeting audio on users' devices and creates summaries while refusing to give employers access to employee transcripts. The company is researching automatic deletion of verbatim transcripts after a period and prototyping AI agents to access meeting context as corporate knowledge bases. CEO Chris Pedregal states that refusing to create surveillance backdoors for bosses is fundamental to the company's design philosophy.
Avi Schiffmann's AI wearable Friend, designed to combat loneliness, released a second version this week featuring a built-in speaker and voice personality. The new model costs $249, up from the original $99 price at launch two years ago. The product still lacks clear utility beyond conversation, and most AI wearables have struggled to achieve mainstream adoption following comparable failures like Humane's AI Pin.
Apple's CEO Tim Cook indicated during an earnings call that the company plans to offer paid upgrades for increased AI usage limits through iCloud Plus. Apple will launch its Siri AI improvements with iOS 27 this fall, including a new standalone app with a ChatGPT-like interface. The move suggests Apple expects heavy demand for its AI features and aims to monetize usage beyond its standard tier.
Friend relaunched its AI pendant with a new speaker feature that allows voice interaction with the AI assistant. The new version costs twice the price of the original pendant, which the company had promoted through a costly NYC subway advertising campaign. Users can now have spoken conversations with the pendant instead of only receiving text messages.
AWS launched Startup Advisor, an AI-powered assistant that provides architecture, security, cost, and scalability guidance for startups building on AWS. The tool is free for AWS Activate members and available both on the web and as an IDE extension, using data from the startup's AWS Activate application and website to provide context-aware recommendations. Startups can now receive curated guidance without starting from scratch, with proactive alerts to optimize costs and security throughout their development lifecycle.
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