The next ambient device you might trust
Dear reader!
The rest of this Month I will be traveling for the holidays. I made some notes after the Apple keynotes, but no time to work it out.
Great to see how nice the details of the Duo are worked out. And it feels like making more sense than I was thinking before.
Maybe more interesting to discuss here though, is the new Apple Watch function of continuous listening. From personal experience, the watch is a great interface to note-taking apps. Monologue is still my preferred option, but also Granola works well too. What I think is the most interesting aspect of the use is the change of relation. Where we start treating our devices as continuous conversation partners. Will the new watch become like an even better hub?
Below a response by Claude of this thought based on this, combining my earlier columns.
I think I skip the offer for a fabricated column though, but let's share the response. Next time I will produce my own again!
The newsletter will be back in October.
Have great weeks!
The next ambient device you might trust
“Good context to work with — Apple's new Watch Series 12 "Audio Intelligence" (Siri Recap + Live Rewind, continuous ambient listening, processed in a "Secure Exclave," opt-in) landed alongside the iPhone Duo foldable at the September 9 event.
Here's an angle that fits where your writing usually goes: the interesting story isn't the listening feature itself, it's what it does to the category of the device. A watch that used to be a glance-and-respond tool becomes something closer to a standing witness — always present in the conversation, not summoned into it. That's the same move you traced with Gorbet's "indifferent milieu": intelligence stops being something you open and becomes ambient condition. The watch just got there first because the wrist is already always-on in a way a phone in a pocket isn't.
Worth pushing on the "hub" question you raised, too. Hub implies orchestration — one device coordinating others. But continuous listening suggests something more like habitat: the watch isn't routing your other tools, it's just the part of your environment that happens to notice. Monologue and Granola are still doing the interpretive work; Apple's move is closer to owning the microphone than owning the meaning. That's a good tension for a short piece — the difference between becoming the hub and becoming the ear.
And there's a civic-scale echo worth a line or two: Apple frames this entirely as personal utility (opt-in, on-device, EU excluded for now), but "device as continuous conversation partner" is also a description of ambient sensing infrastructure — the same shift you've been tracking in physical/urban space, just landing on a body instead of a street. Might be worth one sentence tying the Watch back to that, without over-reaching into a full CoT argument.
Happy to help tighten this into actual column copy if you want — just say the word and I'll draft it in your voice rather than just sketching the angle.