Gadgets & Gizmos: The Ig Nobel Prizes, AI's new language and treadmills for chickens

I was going to start with iOS 27, which is the latest update to the iPhone operating system.

And it runs on every iPhone except from the iPhone 15 Pro Plus, so not on yours, obviously.

No, not on mine, no.

I thought mine was quite a new one when I bought it, but...

Obviously not.

But it's got Siri AI, Apple intelligence, as they hijacked the term to call it, which they've been advertising for about three years now and erroneously because it didn't exist until now.

And now it does.

And so Siri, which is the Apple's... chat thing now behaves much, much better.

It's not a replacement for ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever you use, although you can use it as that or it's a little bit sluggish.

But what it does do is when you first install it, it catalogues everything on your phone, your email, your photos, your messages, your calendar.

And that can take several days, literally several days to do.

But then it ties everything together.

So when I said to it yesterday, what time do I need to leave to get to the theatre tonight? It looked at my calendar, saw the name of the theatre, checked out where the theatre was, looked for transport information and told me what time I needed to leave to get there.

That's very impressive.

Although, as you know, because we spoke off air, I'd forgotten I was even supposed to be going out to a gig tonight.

So that wouldn't have helped because I wouldn't have even been able to ask a question.

OK.

I can also say

to it things like, what was the name of that TV show that Simon recommended? And as long as you recommended it on the Messages app or by email, it'll be able to find it.

WhatsApp and the like haven't yet tied into it, but I'm sure they will.

And presumably we should never ever recommend anything through ordinary conversation anymore because it won't know.

No, it won't know.

Unless Zoom does a transcript and presumably it can search that.

Yes.

Okay.