Body-worn cameras, or “body cams,” are cameras attached to a person.
Body cams have become ubiquitous in US law enforcement, with all police departments serving populations of more than 1 million implementing them by 2020. Nationwide, 79% of officers work in departments that use body cams. And in 2022, US President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed an executive order in 2022 mandating them for federal officers in specific roles.
They’re so common now that it’s easy to forget how new they are. Police departments started testing them in earnest only around 2005.
Ten years ago, just a tiny minority of police wore body cams. But a series of high-profile incidences of abusive police officers in the mid-2010s triggered political pressure for police to use body cams. That’s why they are now standard equipment for police officers.
Studies measuring their efficacy have been mixed. A 2014 pilot program in Orlando, FL, showed a 53% reduction in use-of-force incidents and a 65% drop in civilian complaints. But a large-scale study in Washington, D.C., in 2017 found no significant effects.
Members of the public might believe that body cams exist to protect civilians from police abuse, and popular demand for cameras is almost entirely based on the belief that they’ll reduce overly aggressive police tactics. But, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), police and sheriff’s departments deploy body cams to improve officer safety, increase evidence quality, reduce civilian complaints, and reduce agency liability.
Body cams are usually associated with cops. But the technology is increasingly deployed to prisons, private security, healthcare, education, retail, transportation, construction, highway construction and maintenance, sports, and just about any industry performing inspections.
These industries are finding that body cams improve documentation, increase safety, reduce theft and inventory loss, help with regulatory compliance, bolster employee accountability, generate evidence for use in lawsuits, and provide other benefits.
The future of body cam tech is AI
The first body cams were primitive. They were enormous, had narrow, 68-degree fields of view, had only 16GB of internal storage, and had batteries that lasted only four hours.
Body cams now usually have high-resolution sensors, GPS, infrared for low-light conditions, and fast charging. They can be automatically activated through Bluetooth sensors, weapon release, or sirens. They use backend management systems to store, analyze, and share video footage.
The state of the art — and the future of the category — is multimodal AI.
A company called Polis Solutions partnered with Microsoft to develop an AI body cam system called TrustStat. Built on Microsoft’s Azure Government platform, TrustStat uses multimodal AI technology to study video, audio, and speech to interpret and analyze body language and actions, and other cues. According to the companies, it looks at entire interactions from start to finish to provide a nuanced understanding of police encounters with the public.
It’s designed to solve the problem of sifting through thousands of hours of footage to extract actionable information, with vastly more advanced versions coming soon to body cams for police and across all sectors.
AI ‘body cams’ for everybody
As the use of AI body cams grows to include all police departments, security personnel, and large numbers of employees across many industries, the public will also be getting AI body cams.
I’ve written in the past about the mainstreaming of AI glasses with cameras for multimodal AI. Remember Google’s Project Astra demo from Google I/O 2024? In that video, a researcher picked up a pair of AI glasses running Google Gemini and conversed with the AI about what they both were looking at.
Handling the video input could be similar to how Microsoft deals with captured screenshots for its Recall feature, available on Copilot+ PCs. In that system, Recall uses OCR to grab any text in the screenshots and convert it to ASCII. Recall then applies a CLIP-style embeddings model to the screenshot content. This creates vector representations of both textual and visual elements in the images, enabling semantic search.
Using such a system in multimodal AI, a user could converse with their AI agent, asking questions about what the glasses were pointed at previously.
These glasses will almost certainly have a dashcam-like feature where video is constantly recorded and deleted. Users can push a button to capture and store the past 30 seconds or 30 minutes of video and audio — basically creating an AI body cam worn on the face.
Smart glasses will be superior to body cams, and over time, AI body cams for police and other professionals will no doubt be replaced by AI camera glasses.
This raises the question: When everybody has AI body cams — specifically glasses with AI body cam functionality — nwhat does society then look like?
The legal and social implications of AI camera glasses
Let’s start with the basics. Say, 10 years from now, when a police officer pulls over a driver, both the cop and the driver will record the encounter, save the video, and use AI to report back on what happened in the encounter on how each person interacted with the other.
This will likely prove popular with the public. When law enforcement controls the cameras exclusively, the occasional bad cop might be able to choose to record or not record, leading to a selective accounting of the incident. If people are also recording, that could improve the intent of body cams in the first place. Either way, everyone will be surveilled.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison could have been referring to this earlier this month when he said, “We’re going to have supervision…. Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
All encounters between people could be subject to AI-analyzed body cam-like surveillance.
A striking contrast exists between fictional predictions about mass surveillance and what actually happened. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the government installed screens in every home, workplace, and public space to monitor citizens (and propagandize them). For a century, we’ve generally conceived of mass surveillance as something the government does to the public.
As it happened, we, the citizens, installed cameras in those places — webcams, doorbell cams, security cams, and smartphones, recording, watching, and capturing video. AI camera glasses will simply add more cameras to the billions already in use, which will be more automated and actionable through AI analysis and interaction.
Legally, footage from body cam-like AI camera glasses probably will andshould be considered “digital memory.” Of course, everyone has the right to natural memory of what they experienced. That right should be extended to digitally captured memory unless that “memory” violates another person’s privacy.
In free societies, AI camera glasses with AI body cam-like functionality won’t be banned. (If they’re required for a person to have clear eyesight, for example — because they’ll be fitted with prescription lenses — it would be legally difficult for the police to confiscate.)
The main point of all this is that we all know about police body cams. We should know now about AI processing of body cams.
And it’s time to understand that the functionality of AI-based body cams is coming soon to everyone.
Given the company is apparently in meetings with regulators with a view to clarifying how Europe’s DMA (Digital Markets Act) would be applied to its AI service, the fact it hasn’t (yet) signed on the dotted line suggests we’ll be waiting for it to reach Europe.
The EU AI pact has been inked by many other big tech firms; Adobe, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir, and Samsung are among 115 companies who’ve signed the document.
The EU AI Pact is a voluntary pledge to develop safe, trusted AI. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology with numerous beneficial effects. Yet, its advancement brings also potential risks,” the pact explains.
Neither Apple nor Meta have signed up
Interestingly, Apple isn’t alone — Meta hasn’t signed either. Nor have TikTok, Anthropic, or Mistral.
Meta did, however, say it has not ruled out joining the pact down the road, according to Politico: “We also shouldn’t lose sight of AI’s huge potential to foster European innovation and enable competition, or else the EU will miss out on this one-in-a-generation opportunity,” Meta said.
The company has been critical of a lack of harmonization concerning AI implementation on a global scale.
What does the pact do?
The goal here is to put checks and balances in place around how AI is introduced in Europe. Signatories have agreed to comply with new European AI rules (the AI Act) which will be introduced in the coming years.
The pledges include a commitment to:
Establish AI governance strategies to foster the uptake of AI in the organization and work towards future compliance with the AI Act.
High-risk AI systems mapping: Identifying AI systems likely to be categorized as high-risk under the AI Act. Those systems might be AI handling infrastructure, safety, or law enforcement, for example.
Promote AI literacy and awareness among staff, ensuring ethical and responsible AI development.
Additional pledges are voluntary, even within the agreement. These include a commitment to human oversight of AI and to ensure AI-generated content is clearly labeled as such.
Where is Apple Intelligence?
Apple hasn’t said anything about all this, though it seems relevant to note that since it doesn’t yet offer Apple Intelligence in the EU, the company may not feel a need to do so.
In the US, where Apple Intelligence is available, Apple in July agreed to a US presidential order governing AI technology. Elements of that agreement seem to echo those coming from the EU.
On reflection, it is possible that Apple’s acquiescence to the deal depends only on achieving a successful agreement regarding how the DMA will be applied to Apple Intelligence in the region. Apple CEO Tim Cook in August explained that the company is engaged with EU regulators, saying: “Our objective is to move as fast as we can, obviously, because our objective is always to get features out there for everyone. We have to understand the regulatory requirements before we can commit to doing that and commit a schedule to doing that, but we’re very constructively engaged with both.”
Don’t hold your breath?
While it is fair to note that the EU AI pact is different from the implementation of the EU DMA on Apple Intelligence, it’s hard not to think that Apple’s non-appearance as a signatory suggests more discussion is required before Apple launches its service in the region. If it even does.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last week announced that the company’s more than 350,000 office workers will be required to work in the office five days a week by default. Jassy’s reasoning: the move will result in better work.
But a new survey conducted by Blind, a forum for verified IT workers, asked 2,585 Amazon employees what they think about the change and that fully 91% don’t like the office requirement. And 73% will consider changing jobs because of the edict.
Blind writes that the change can particularly affect Amazon employees who are parents by removing flexibility and independence, as well as workers who were hired to work remotely or received adjustments for more flexible working hours.
The new arrangement is supposed to take effect on Jan. 2, 2025.
From the editors of Computerworld, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps IT staff understand what the various enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) options can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.
From the editors of Computerworld, this enterprise buyer’s guide helps IT staff understand what the various enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) options can do for their organizations and how to choose the right solution.
When wondering about widgets, one would be wise to weigh which widget is a widget worth welcoming.
Apologies for my atrociously annoying alliteration. (Ah, blast. There I go again.) The thing about a widget, though, is — well, it sounds silly. And it’s easy to write off as being irrelevant to your life as an Extremely Serious Smartphone User.
But playful as they may seem — and frivolous as they often appear — Android widgets can actually be a real asset when it comes to mobile productivity. In fact, once you wade through the Play Store’s endless-seeming array of weather widgets, clock widgets, and, uh, more weather widgets, a sea of genuinely useful options awaits.
These standout Android widgets add value to your smartphone setup by putting timely information and complex functions right on your home screen, where they’re always in sight and easy to reach. With a little creative configuring, you can even make any Android widget available on demand from anywhere with a press of your phone’s physical buttons, if you really want to get wild. However you choose to use ’em, they can save you precious steps and help you get more accomplished in less time.
So without any further ado, here they are: the Android widgets you want.
(Note that I’m not including any Android email or messaging apps in this list, as most of the respectable clients in those categories have similarly fine widgets — and there’s really not much to distinguish one from another.)
Android widgets 101
Before we get into the specifics, a quick primer on what, exactly, Android widgets are — and how you can use ’em (and if you’re already an Android widget expert, feel free to skip this section and head straight into the recommendations!):
Android widgets are like specific slivers of apps that show up on your home screen, right alongside your assorted shortcuts and other such items. They’ve been available on Android since the very earliest Android version, and they offer a diverse range of helpful interactive info that’s always available without any app opening or extra steps required — everything from a scrollable view of your notes and agenda to a list of the latest news stories or stock updates of interest.
In most typical Android environments, you can add a new widget by pressing and holding your finger down onto any open space on your screen and then looking for the “Widgets” or “Add a widget” option in the menu that pops up. From there, you can tap any app you see listed to expand its available widgets and then either tap or press and hold any specific widget to add it onto your home screen.
The steps for adding an Android widget onto your home screen, as seen on a Google Pixel phone.
JR Raphael
Once a widget is in place on your home screen, you can press and hold your finger onto it to move, resize, or remove it as well as to access any available settings and customization choices the widget may offer.
Now you know — and now we can get into the best widgets worth your while to weigh over.
First and foremost, Keep’s “Note collection” widget gives you an easy way to scroll through your notes — with the option to view all notes, only those that are pinned, or only those that are associated with a particular label. You can see the first several lines of each note right on your home screen, and it takes just a single tap to open any item in full.
Google Keep’s “Note collection” widget puts your personal notepad on your phone’s home screen.
JR Raphael
Equally advantageous is the toolbar built into the Keep widget, which gives you one-tap commands for starting a new note, starting a new checklist, taking a note by voice, jotting down something in handwriting, and capturing a photo directly into your notes. And if all you want are those commands, you can opt to use Keep’s smaller “Quick capture” widget — which gives you the fast-access shortcuts without any notes attached.
If you’d rather see only a specific single note on your home screen, meanwhile, Keep has a widget for that as well. The “Single note” widget lets you select any individual note you want — a list, a photo, even just a plain text memo with something you routinely need to reference — and have it appear in its entirety on your home screen. You can scroll through it right then and there or tap an icon within the widget’s corner to open the note in full within the actual Keep app.
Whether you use a comprehensive note-taking app or not, sometimes all you need is a simple sticky note to remember something simple and keep it placarded prominently in front of your face. ColorNote is an app worth keeping around for that situation — mostly because of its widget.
You can think of ColorNote as a virtual Post-It notepad for your phone: When something noteworthy enters your noggin, all you have to do is add a new ColorNote widget to your home screen, type in whatever you want to remember, and that’s it: The info will then show up on your home screen as if you’d stuck a tiny sticky note right on top of your phone.
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Press all sorts of Post-It notes to your screen with ColorNote’s Android widget.
JR Raphael
The app has its own system for backing up to the cloud, if you want to keep your notes synced across multiple devices. You can also change any individual note’s color by opening it within the main app. But it’s the simplicity of being able to put virtual Post-Its on your home screen that makes ColorNote a widget worth having.
If you prefer the idea of a single scratchpad instead of a series of individual Post-Its, Ruff is the tool for you. The amusingly canine-themed app is designed to bring a single, delightfully simple scrolling sheet of text to your phone. Anything you type into that sheet is automatically saved locally on your device and can easily be archived for later reference or sent anywhere else for sharing or external storing.
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Ruff’s widget puts a personal scratchpad on your home screen.
JR Raphael
Ruff is free to use, though certain features — including the scrolling widget capability — require a one-time $4 in-app purchase to access.
When it comes to managing to-do lists, Todoist is a cut above the rest across any platform or type of device you might be using — and its presence on Android is certainly no exception, in general or specific to the domain of worthwhile widgets.
The main Todoist widget is a simple but effective scrolling list of your tasks within whatever view you choose — your main Todoist inbox, your list of tasks due today, your complete list of upcoming tasks, or a collection of tasks related to one specific project.
You can even create multiple Todoist widgets for different purposes, if you want, and you can customize each of ’em to give it its own distinctive appearance — with a variety of different themes and the option to have the widget dynamically adjust its coloring to match your wallpaper at any given moment.
Todoist’s Android widgets put interactive views of your most important tasks front and center.
JR Raphael
With whatever widgets you select, you can see and scroll through a live view of all the tasks associated with that area and check off any items right from your home screen, without ever having to open up the app. You can also add new tasks via a convenient pop-up that appears when you tap the plus icon within the widget — relying on either built-in buttons for specifying things like the due date, priority, and any required reminders or using Todoist’s simple shortcuts or natural language processing for inputting such info as you go.
Todoist is free in its base form with an optional $48-a-year Pro plan that removes a variety of limitations and a $72-per-user-per-year business plan that adds a bunch of extra team features into the mix.
Tasks aside, keeping your calendar in plain view is one of the easiest ways to increase your efficiency on Android — and two of the best Android calendar apps around have exceptional options for making your agenda readily available.
Google’s own Google Calendar app has come a long way with its widget selection over the years and now boasts a pair of simple, nicely designed options for putting a scrolling view of your agenda or a month-long overview on your home screen.
The more advanced and customizable Business Calendar 2, meanwhile, has a whole host of widget options for practically any calendar-related purpose imaginable — and each offers a sprawling array of choices for exactly what type of info you want to be shown and how you want it to look.
The Google Calendar (left) and Business Calendar (right, in agenda view) widgets are among Android’s best calendar widget options.
JR Raphael
(Business Calendar automatically syncs with your device’s system-level calendar, which means it’ll effectively sync with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, or any other calendar system you’re using.)
Google Calendar is completely free, while Business Calendar 2 is free with an optional $7 Pro upgrade that removes ads and unlocks certain advanced features.
Our next standout selection stretches the definition of what a “widget” can even mean by bringing the same exact concept into your Android notification panel.
The aptly named Calendar Notification puts a persistent view of your agenda right into that area of the Android interface — which means you can get a glimpse at your upcoming events or even a monthly calendar view anytime, anywhere, without even having to stop whatever else you’re doing and head back to your home screen.
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Calendar Notification essentially puts a widget into your Android notification panel — with ample room for customization.
JR Raphael / IDG
You can tap any individual event within the notification-based widget to view more details about that appointment or edit it — and tap an icon at the top of the widget to switch between different views.
Calendar Notification is free to use with its monthly view only. An optional $5 upgrade adds in all the other views, along with some advanced customization options.
For a truly original and effective single-day overview widget, check out Sectograph — an app that shows the next 12 hours of your day in a clever pie chart format. It’s almost like having a smartwatch on your home screen, with your schedule mapped out by the hour.
And the widget is interactive, too: If you tap on any event within it, the entire circle fills up with detailed info about that appointment and how long you have left until it begins.
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Sectograph divides your day up into slices and gives you a great visual overview of your plans.
JR Raphael
Sectograph has options for customizing almost every aspect of its appearance — and if you pay $8 to upgrade to the app’s Pro version, you can change its color palette as well as bump up to a 24-hour clock and even create separate, individual widgets for different calendars on your device.
Got an important deadline on the horizon — or maybe an upcoming company trip? The delightfully simple Hurry Day Countdown app does one thing and does it well: It lets you create eye-catching countdown widgets for specific events and then keep an eye on exactly how long is left before the moment arrives.
All you do is input your event’s title, date, and time into the app, then select an image for the background, if you’re so inspired — and when you go to add the app’s widget onto your home screen, your info will be there and waiting to be selected.
Count down the time to important events with the Hurry Day Countdown & Reminder widget.
TripIt is the Swiss Army knife of Android travel apps, and its widget is worth every inch of space on your phone’s home screen whenever you have a trip on the horizon.
TripIt serves as a central organizer for all of your travel-related plans (after you either forward your itineraries to a specific email address or authorize the app to access your email directly to find such messages). Its $49-a-year TripIt Pro service then gives you real-time flight updates all throughout your trip — often even beating notifications by airlines’ own apps.
The widget puts all of TripIt’s knowledge into an easily glanceable space on your home screen, allowing you to see and scroll through your plans anytime without having to dig around. And, of course, you can always tap on any element within your plans to jump immediately to a more detailed view.
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TripIt’s interactive itinerary widget is invaluable anytime you’re traveling.
JR Raphael
The core TripIt service is free and works well for basic travel organization — with or without the TripIt Pro addition in the mix.
Got someone you communicate with constantly — maybe a boss, an especially important client, or a significant other?
The recently revamped Google Contacts Individual Contact widget gives you a great way to keep that person within arm’s reach all the time. Each widget shows the profile photo of one specific contact, along with icons to start a new call or text with that person — and, in the most useful twist, the widget updates whenever you get a notification associated with that person to show it front and center.
The Google Contacts widget puts important people on your home screen — with easy access to call and message them (left) as well as interact with their incoming notifications (right).
JR Raphael
You can tap the notification to interact with it and even send suggested replies right from your home screen, whenever such options are available.
Google Contacts is free and readily available (and entirely advisable!) to install on any device where it wasn’t already present out of the box.
Don’t stop with your contacts: With the right Android widget addition, you can put all of your incoming notifications on your home screen — keeping that pertinent info in a prominent place, where you’ll never miss it, and saving yourself from having to swipe down from the top of your screen to open your full notification panel 7,000 times a day.
That’s what Notification Widget is all about. It shows your notifications wherever you want ’em and also gives you fast on-demand access to an expanded view of Android’s notification history (which is typically tucked away and tricky to find). You can even use it as part of a versatile custom command center on your home screen for extra-efficient access to especially important info.
You can see all of your incoming notifications right on your home screen with the simply named Notification Widget.
JR Raphael
Notification Widget is free for its core functions, with an optional $4 upgrade that unlocks an expanded notification history view along with other advanced features.
Keep the latest headlines at your fingertips with Google’s smartly designed News app and its simple but effective widget. The widget shows a scrollable view of the top five stories in your personalized view at any given moment. You can tap any story to read it or tap the “More news for you” button to see more.
The Google News widget puts a mix of current events and items of interest on your home screen.
JR Raphael
It’s an easy way to stay in the loop on the most pressing headlines throughout the day — and, as you’d expect, it’s completely free to use.
If you have a specific set of sources you need to keep track of for your job — company blogs, industry news sites, or other publications relevant to your interests — Inoreader is a fantastic way to make sure nothing slips past your attention.
All you do is add whatever sources you want into the app and then place the widget on your home screen, and all the latest articles from those outlets will always be there and waiting for you in a regularly refreshed, scrollable box.
Track your own custom set of sources with minimal effort with Inoreader on your home screen.
JR Raphael
You can even access your list from a computer, using the Inoreader web app, and the service will keep track of which articles you’ve read in either place so you’ll always know where you left off. Inoreader is free to use with an optional $90-a-year professional plan that lifts a 150-source limit on your subscriptions and adds advanced features such as offline reading and an in-app translation option.
One of the most powerful Android widgets out there is an unassuming option buried within Google Maps. It’s called Nearby Traffic, and it gives you a live view of traffic in your current area.
It’s a helpful way to check in on road conditions and see if it’s a good time to head out the door for your evening commute — or if it’d be worth waiting a while or finding an alternate route.
The Maps Traffic widget is free and bundled into the main Google Maps app.
Investors, take note: You’ve got a splendidly easy way to keep tabs on stocks of interest right from your phone’s home screen — and it’s already on your device and just waiting to be found.
Google added an excellent Finance Watchlist widget into its self-named Google Android app a while back, but you’d really have to go out of your way to even realize it’s available.
Once you add it onto your home screen, though, you can add any specific investments into its list — stocks, mutual funds, even cryptocurrency, if that’s your jam — and then see each item’s up-to-the-minute status at a glance anytime.
Keeping up with investments is easy with the customizable Google Finance Watchlist widget.
JR Raphael
The Finance Watchlist widget is bundled into the Google app that’s preinstalled on all Android devices, and it’s free to use.
Keep your two-factor authentication codes handy with Authy’s immensely practical widget, which puts a scrollable list of your 2FA-enabled accounts on your home screen and then lets you pull up and copy codes for any account with a quick tap. (If you keep your 2FA data password- or fingerprint-protected — which you most certainly should — you’ll have to provide authentication before any codes are accessible.)
The next time you find yourself holding a piece of physical paper you need to save — be it a receipt, a business card, or even a bar napkin on which someone’s written incredibly important information (as one does) — the Google Drive Scan widget will be your new best friend.
The widget, part of the main Drive app, doesn’t look like much on your home screen. But tap it, and a camera viewfinder will immediately appear. Hold your phone over your paper, hit the shutter icon on your screen, and that’s pretty much it: Tap once more to confirm, and the image will be saved as a PDF to your Drive storage — in whatever folder you specified when you first set the widget up.
(You can also opt to crop the image, if needed, or “scan” additional images to be attached as extra pages in the PDF.)
The best part? Thanks to Google’s character recognition system, you can then search Drive for any word shown on the paper to quickly find the PDF in the future. And if you ever want to convert all of the image’s text into plain, editable text within a document, you can do that, too.
Don’t let this next knockout’s name fool you: While the Google Home Favorites widget is part of the Google Home app, it’s really more of an all-purpose connected-device control widget that can be handy for any purpose — home, home office, or even a more traditional workplace (so long as it has smart devices inside!).
The Home Favorites widget puts one-tap toggles for any and all Google-Home-connected gizmos on your home screen for easy ongoing access. That could include anything from connected cameras and thermostats to smart lights and Google-Assistant-associated screens and speakers (which are great office-side companions, by the way).
All sorts of connected device controls are a tap away with the Google Home Favorites Android widget.
JR Raphael
The app and widget are free to use and compatible with a wide range of both Google-made and third-party products.
Turn any website into your own custom widget with the wondrous Widgetify Android widget wizard.
It couldn’t be much easier to use: You just type or paste in whatever website you want into the Widgetify setup interface, adjust any options you want — including how often the site refreshes — and that’s it: You’ve got a live view of that web page in a place you can always peek in at and see exactly what’s going on.
Widgetify makes it simple to see a live view of any web page on your home screen.
JR Raphael
It’s a fantastic way to keep any site you peek at frequently in easy view — whether it’s your own company website, a forum you frequent, or even a favorite news source of some sort. And it’s completely free to use.
IFTTT is short for “If This, Then That” — and its Android widget is overflowing with productivity-oriented possibilities.
The IFTTT widget can be configured to perform dozens of different time-saving tasks. You could create an IFTTT widget that serves as a quick-add function for Google Calendar events, for instance, and one that gives you a one-tap command for quickly posting messages to a specific Slack channel.
IFTTT’s widget can automate and simplify all sorts of time-consuming tasks.
JR Raphael
There’s a widget for tracking your work hours in Google Sheets and another for emailing a fast note to yourself. There’s even an IFTTT widget for making your phone ring in case you ever need an excuse to shuffle out of an endless meeting. (Don’t worry — I won’t tell.)
Install the app, add a widget, and start exploring. The options are practically endless.
IFTTT is free with up to two active applets (the underlying recipes, or automations, that make each widget work) at a time. You can raise that restriction and enable a variety of advanced features with a $3.50-a-month or $35-a-year Pro subscription.
Who says your Android app library has to live within a traditional “drawer”?
With Easy Drawer, you can put your entire app collection right on your home screen in a way that’s both efficient to access and delightfully tidy.
The entire widget just looks like a keyboard to start. But when you tap any letter within it, it updates to show you every app that begins with that letter.
Access your apps at record speeds with the clever Easy Drawer Android widget.
JR Raphael
No searching, no scrolling — just one tap of a letter, and boom: You’ve got whatever you want in front of you and ready to open.
You can set frequently used apps as favorites, too, which makes them immediately available at the top of the Easy Drawer interface. And, if you want to make the widget even more useful, you can set it up to surface contacts as well — with one tap to find any person in your phone and then one more tap to call or text them.
Easy Drawer is free with an optional $2 upgrade for its premium version, which adds in some extra customization options.
Last but not least is perhaps the most powerful and versatile Android widget of ’em all — a search bar called Sesame.
You can think of Sesame as a continuation of the same concept shown in Easy Drawer, only without the keyboard and with even more oomph. It’s also like a pumped-up version of the regular Google search bar that’s present on many Android home screens: In addition to searching the web, as the Google widget does, Sesame’s widget will let you search your apps, your contacts, and even your calendar events. It indexes specific areas within apps, too — so you could start typing the first couple letters of a Slack team, for instance, and it’d pop up a direct link to take you right to that part of Slack.
Tap the Sesame bar (as seen at the top of the left image) and type in one or two letters, and you’ll be able to get to almost any part of your phone in a flash (as illustrated in the image at right).
JR Raphael
The widget itself just looks like a search bar, and you can customize its appearance however you like.
Sesame comes with a free two-week trial. After that, it costs $3.50 to continue using — money that’s arguably well spent for all the seconds you’ll save.
This article was originally published in August 2018 and most recently updated in September 2024.
OpenAI is set to transition from its nonprofit roots to a for-profit model amid significant leadership changes, including the abrupt resignation of top executives on Wednesday.
The San Francisco-based startup is planning to restructure as a for-profit public-benefit corporation, ending its oversight by a nonprofit board, according to a Reuters report.
This shift comes as three key technical leaders — Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Vice President of Research Barret Zoph, and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew — announced their resignations.
At the same time, OpenAI is reportedly negotiating a $6.5 billion funding round that would value the company at $150 billion. The deal may be contingent on the restructuring of its corporate structure.
Implications of the change
Founded in 2015, OpenAI was initially dedicated to developing AI “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to its original mission statement.
The company gained global attention after the successful release of ChatGPT in late 2022, which showcased AI’s potential to reshape industries and society. In response, OpenAI expanded its product offerings for both consumers and enterprise clients.
The shift sparked concerns, with early investor Elon Musk filing a lawsuit against the company, accusing CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman of misleading him into believing OpenAI would remain a nonprofit.
However, as the company now eyes a fresh round of investment and with generative AI capturing the interest of enterprises globally, investors may view the restructuring in a more favorable light.
“The idea of OpenAI becoming an explicit for-profit organization makes things easier for potential investors, as it allows them to have a normal expectation of pursuing profit from AI,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights.
Notably, this comes as unit costs and price-to-performance ratios for large language models (LLMs) have been dropping significantly, while open-source LLMs have also gained momentum, according to Leslie Joseph, principal analyst at Forrester.
“Against this backdrop, OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit structure could allow it to diversify and strengthen its partnerships with major tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia in pursuit of a broader charter,” Joseph said.
Concerns on AI safety and ethical use
An OpenAI spokesperson said that the company remains “focused on building AI that benefits everyone and as we’ve previously shared, we’re working with our board to ensure that we’re best positioned to succeed in our mission,” according to the Reuters report.
However, businesses concerned with the ethical use of AI, particularly in areas such as compliance, may view OpenAI’s shift in its corporate structure with caution.
“OpenAI has already shifted away from its initial goals of trust and safety to the point where organizations like Anthropic and Cohere are probably more attractive options for those solely focused on governance, trust, and cultural ethos,” said Park.
Impact of leadership change
The resignation of top executives is also a major concern for investors and enterprise partners as this could affect OpenAI’s innovation trajectory and its competitiveness in the enterprise AI space.
Park noted that in the short term, OpenAI is likely to concentrate on commercializing its existing models and capabilities. This will be a significant challenge for many who originally joined OpenAI to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI) from a nonprofit perspective.
“[But] with over a $100 billion valuation, it is hard to escape the need to make money and pursue practical solutions that compete with the likes of Salesforce’s Agentforce or Microsoft Copilot in a role and business-focused way,” Park said.
Joseph suggested that with several of the founding members now gone, Sam Altman’s control over the company may further consolidate, potentially leading to even less transparency.
However, Park emphasized that OpenAI needs a strong leadership team and cannot rely solely on a “cult of personality” centered around Altman’s vision. “With the shift towards a for-profit focus, open AI is now free to hire a CTO or a chief product officer or chief revenue officer, who is more focused on fully extracting the value associated with open AI models,” Park said. “And they should be attractive roles for software veterans with a strong track record of translating technology into enterprise products. It would not be a surprise to see pros from open source companies or security and governance-focused companies come into OpenAI to lock down models and support enterprise and government-grade products.”
There’s much anticipation among enterprises and consumers alike for AI PCs, the evolution of computing that integrates dedicated AI hardware and software into everyday machines.
But as with any new technology, it’s unclear when AI PCs will finally have their moment. Top analyst firms, including Gartner and IDC, certainly have high expectations for the technology, based on new reports out this week.
Gartner forecasts that 43 million AI PCs will be shipped this year. Similarly, IDC predicts that 57 million units will be shipped in 2024, and by 2028, AI PCs will represent 92% of all PC shipments worldwide.
However, “while AI has been a buzzword of late, it has yet to be a purchase driver among PC buyers,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s worldwide mobile device trackers division. “Businesses certainly recognize the importance of AI, though many struggle to see the immediate use case and instead are opting for AI PCs as a means to futureproofing.”
An ‘onslaught’ of AI PCs
Gartner predicts that by 2026, AI laptops will be the only choice of laptop available to large enterprises (compared to less than 5% availability just three years prior). Further, AI PCs, including both desktops and laptops, will represent 43% of all PC shipments by 2025 (compared to 17% this year).
IDC also predicts that shipments of AI PCs will grow from nearly 57 million units in 2024 to more than 258 million in 2028. Still, the firm tempered its short-term assessment of the market, calling it “modest.” But, Ubrani noted, long-term, there will be an “onslaught” of AI PCs as NPUs are integrated into lower-tier hardware, and producing processors without NPUs becomes cost prohibitive.
North America, major countries in Asia Pacific (APAC), and some western European countries will lead AI PC adoption, IDC predicts, although the firm points out that this will largely be driven by the need for new PCs, rather than need for AI PCs specifically.
Gartner Director Analyst Mika Kitagawa noted that most enterprise-grade laptops will have an NPU core by 2026, which will be a major push from the supply side. From the demand side, on-device AI will be a standard requirement for the enterprise, as more AI functionality shifts from cloud-based to on-device-based; NPUs will speed up on-device AI tasks.
Also, while in 2025, Windows x86-based AI laptops will lead the business segment, that dominance eventually will reduce over time, Gartner said. However, this will not occur in the next five years.
While Arm-based laptops have benefits — they are usually quiet, because they do not need a fan to cool the processor, and have low power consumption, thus extending battery life, there are software incompatibilities on Arm-based Windows devices. This is because not all business applications are natively written for Arm and must use an emulator, Kitagawa explained.
“This could create limited user experiences,” she said. “The majority of enterprises will keep using x86 in the next five years.”
We’re not quite at the tipping point yet
A big reason behind the shift to AI PCs is the arrival of language models that are “distilled, fine-tuned and pruned” into small language models (SLMs) and tiny language models (TLMs) that are able to operate on AI PCs where large language models (LLMs) can’t, explained Jon Nordmark, CEO at enterprise AI platform company Iterate.ai. AI PCs can operate without needing to connect to the internet, and an SLM can be utilized when the computer is plugged in; users can opt to leverage a TLM when on battery to save power.
For companies and consumers, operating AI on a PC is more sustainable, Nordmark explained. Each query or prompt requires about 10 times less energy compared to on the cloud. Privacy is also a big part of demand.
“The AI PC generative AI experience can really be an oracle that users can ask complex business questions and trust to help navigate key decision making,” said Nordmark. This could include, for instance, finding effective SEO keywords, or getting advice on a specific business decision.
AI PCs could “substantially change computing” as they enhance tasks such as real-time language translation, advanced content creation, and workflows, leading to improved productivity, creativity, and personalization, agreed Matt Hasan of aiResults, which specializes in AI for marketing and customer lifecycle optimization (CLO).
With AI hardware built-in, he pointed out, users can run complex algorithms such as image recognition or natural language processing (NLP) locally, providing better speed, security, and the convenience of offline processing.
Still, “while AI PCs are exciting, they may not become the norm as quickly as some predict,” said Hasan. Challenges include the high cost of integrating AI chips, not yet proven everyday use cases, and concerns about data privacy and AI misuse. But “the current hype does suggest that AI-powered computing will eventually become an integral part of the future, even if the transition takes longer than the optimists claim.”
Instead of being passive tools, AI PCs are designed to anticipate needs, automate repetitive tasks, and make decisions based on user habits, said Jon Morgan, CEO and editor-in-chief of business advisory firm Venture Smarter.
“It’s a major leap from the static machines we’ve been using, making computing far more personalized and efficient,” he said. The allure is that AI integration isn’t just about “raw power,” but enhancing experience and adapting to individual workflows.
“We’re not quite at the tipping point yet, but I don’t think it’s far off,” said Morgan. “Once the early adopters demonstrate the practical benefits, the shift could happen faster than expected.”
Generative AI (genAI) and “hallucinations” go hand in hand, regardless of how well the large language models behind genAI tools are trained.
So, Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled Correction, a new capability within its existing Azure AI Content Safety tool that it said can ferret out, then correct, genAI responses that aren’t directly connected to data sources used to train an LLM — in other words, hallucinations.
“Empowering our customers to both understand and take action on ungrounded content and hallucinations is crucial, especially as the demand for reliability and accuracy in AI-generated content continues to rise,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
While “add-on tools” can help double-check the accuracy of the LLM outputs, Gartner has found that using better search techniques for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) or grounding should be a first step to mitigate hallucinations. “We advise clients to use search to provide information to ground the LLM response in an enterprise context,” said Gartner Distinguished Vice President Analyst Jason Wong.
RAG is a method of creating a more customized genAI model through a series of questions and answers provided to an LLM that enables more accurate and specific responses to queries.
Correction is available as part of Microsoft’s Azure AI Content Safety API, which is currently in preview; it can be used with any text-based genAI model, including Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
Analysts, however, are skeptical about how effective Correction will be at eliminating errors. “Hallucinations continue to dog generative AI implementations,” said Wong. “All the hyperscalers have launched products to mitigate hallucinations, but none promise eliminating [them] all together or even reaching certain thresholds of accuracy.”
Microsoft first introduced its “groundedness” detection feature in March. To use it, a genAI application must connect to grounding documents, which are used in document summarization and RAG-based Q&A scenarios, Microsoft said. Since then, it said, customers have been asking what they can do once erroneous information is detected, besides blocking it.
“This highlights a significant challenge in the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape, where traditional content filters often fall short in addressing the unique risks posed by generative AI hallucinations,” Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager Katelyn Rothney wrote in a blog post.
Building on the company’s existing groundedness detection, the Correction tool allows Azure AI Content Safety to both identify and correct hallucinations in real-time — before users of genAI applications encounter them. It works by first flagging the ungrounded content. Then the Azure Safety system initiates a rewriting process in real-time to revise the inaccurate portions ensure alignment with connected data sources.
Microsoft
“This correction happens before the user is able to see the initial ungrounded content,” Rothney said. “Finally, the corrected content is returned to the user.”
The hallucinogenic nature of genAI technology, like OpenAI’s GPT-4 — the basis for Microsoft’s AI — Meta’s Llama 2 and Google’s PaLM 2, occurs because their foundational models are based on massive, amorphous, unspecific parameters or options from which the algorithm can choose answers.
While genAI is most often highly accurate in providing answers to queries, it is also prone to gathering information from places it was never meant to go, just so it can provide a response, any response.
In fact, LLMs have been characterized as stochastic parrots — as they get larger, they become more random in their conjectural or random answers. Essentially, the “next-word prediction engines” just continue to parrot what they’ve been taught, but without a logic framework.
One study from Stanford University this year found genAI makes mistakes when answering legal questions 75% of the time. “For instance,” the study found, “in a task measuring the precedential relationship between two different [court] cases, most LLMs do no better than random guessing.”
Optimizing the search infrastructure by incorporating both lexical and semantic search increases the likelihood that only relevant information is passed to the LLM, Wong said.
“While this can significantly reduce the likelihood of hallucinations, it still cannot eliminate them,” he said. “The quality of the information retrieved for RAG largely determines the output quality, making content management and governance essential as a starting point for minimizing hallucinations.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to enterprise IT. Deployment begins with tools to help admins manage their fleets, fix common faults, and optimize existing assets.
These tools are also coming to the Apple enterprise world in which Cupertino continues to make important investments. Apple device management vendor Kandji has announced its own AI for IT, called Kai. I spoke with Weldon Dodd, senior vice president of global solutions at Kandji, to find out what this new tool offers Apple IT managers who use the device management system.
What is Kai?
“It’s an AI-driven, natural-language query interface that makes it easy for IT team members to get answers to questions about what’s going on in their Apple device fleet,” Dodd explained.
The best way to understand this AI tool is as an intelligent machine that works with Kandji’s Prism, which provides insights into device fleets using syntax-based query search. What Kai adds is that admins can ask questions in ordinary language to generate responses or reports as needed. “It’s built to understand what you need,” said Dodd.
To do this, the system uses the information Prism has already gathered, then combines this with the contextual intelligence of Open AI to make that information actionable, accessible, and useful.
The company says its tool is especially useful for less technical team members, as it helps them get answers on the fly, build reports, and learn on the job. You can find out more about Kai here.
Why is the time right for AI in Apple IT?
There are plenty of reasons vendors in the burgeoning Apple enterprise space want to optimize their tools. One big reason is expertise. With every business now becoming a tech company, demand for human resources in terms of tech skills is intense. That means the most experienced admins are in huge demand. AI can help fill the gap, enabling the most highly skilled staff to sweat more complex tasks.
Those two reasons alone — higher demand, strained human resources — make the time ripe for AI productivity tools to invade enterprise IT, which, of course, they are. In the Apple enterprise space, we know Jamf has been working with generative AI (genAI) since last year. As Jamf’s big Apple admins event, JNUC, approaches — I imagine Jamf will have its own AI news to share — Kandji has unveiled its own take.
What about privacy?
Privacy and AI is one thing for consumers, where it matters a lot. But, for industries, it’s of vital importance to ensure information pertaining to an enterprise doesn’t slip out. Kanji’s use of OpenAI might be a red flag for some businesses. I asked Dodd about privacy when it comes to user-owned devices, what barriers are in place between corporate and personal use on managed personal devices, and how is everything secured.
According to Dodd, Kai gets the data about a customer’s fleet just in time. “It has access to that data only when necessary to answer a question,” he said. “Kai uses the same tenant-level security as the rest of Kandji’s products. During a user’s session, Kai cannot access any other tenant’s data.”
He also confirmed that data used is sent to OpenAI using that company’s secure AI. The data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and access to it is strictly controlled. “If AI allows us to make our user’s lives easier and help them be more effective in their jobs, we’ll use it,” he said. “This is a perfect use case for it, and we’ll continue to explore others over time. AI isn’t just there to check a box for marketing.”
What about Apple and AI?
I’m on record pointing out that Apple is now building the world’s most AI-friendly ecosystem across Macs, smartphones, and tablets. Dodd doesn’t entirely agree: “As a consumer brand, Apple will use AI to help its users do everyday things more easily and effectively; in that sense, it isn’t really an ‘AI platform,’” he said.
At the same time, the sheer size of Apple’s user base means it is now bringing AI to the masses in a way no one else can. Many millions of people will be making conscious use of genAI just as soon as iOS 18.1 ships next month — and that base is only going to grow, one Mac, iPhone, or iPad upgrade at a time.
Of course, we’ve all heard the claims that AI is gorging itself on global energy supply. How can anyone ignore reports that, “emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than the official tally.”
One way to reduce that demand is to create AI models that work at low power on people’s devices, which, of course, is precisely what Apple Intelligence aspires to do. Many of its new LLM models will work quite happily on Mac, iPhone, or iPad; doing so vastly reduces the power required to run each task. Apple is able to achieve this through its ownership of the hardware, software, and key components in its devices.
“Apple’s vertical integration is a key advantage here,” Dodd said. “It can build the powerful processors that AI requires into its devices. We may see LLMs begin to run some of their compute loads locally on devices; Apple is well positioned for that.”
