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IBM is on a mission to become the most productive company in the world. Join SVP of Transformation and Operations Joanne Wright at the break to learn how its mission can benefit your enterprise and why AI is the catalyst for success.
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Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Friday, August 22nd. I'm Liz Young for the Wall Street Journal. On today's show, we have a double dose of great reporting from a pair of nickels. First we talk with Nicole Nguyen, the Wall Street Journal's personal tech columnist, about how Google's new Pixel 10 offers a glimpse into what the future of AI powered smartphones could look like. And then tech giants meta platforms Google and Apple made headlines when they pledged billions of dollars to make housing more affordable in Silicon Valley. WSJ reporter Nicole Friedman joins to share why six years later, the results haven't lived up to expectations. But first, the new Google Pixel 10 is infused with AI that can edit photos right in the camera app, sift through texts and emails to pull up information you need, and create workout plans based on real time data. We're here with WSJ personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen who tested out the smartphone. Nicole, what are some of the coolest features on the new Pixel this year?
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There are some cool new additions that I'm very jealous of as an iPhone user. One is called Magicq, which rifles through your texts, calendar, email other data on your phone to surface information when it thinks you might need it. So say you call United and you have an upcoming flight reservation. On the phone app you'll see your reservation number, the date for your flight info that you might need when you're on customer service with an airline agent. And another one is called Camera Coach. You point your camera at a scene, you press an AI button, you it sort of sparkles and Gemini ruminates in the background and then it comes up with four options to help you create a better photo. So it's like a virtual photographer helper. And another very cool AI powered feature is called Ask Photos. Ask Photos is in the editing part of the photos experience and so when you go to edit a photo instead of manually putting your finger on the brightness slider and managing all of those settings, you can ask with natural language something like just make this photo look better or remove all of the photo bombers and then Gemini will do that for you.
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You were also able to speak German using the phone. Let's have a listen.
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Hi Tim, how does my German sound? I visit Switzerland a lot and have always thought I need to learn German, but it is a very hard language to Lear.
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Nicole, can you walk us through how that works?
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Sure.
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So this is a toggle called Voice Translate and when someone calls you on the phone or you call them using the phone app old school call, you can switch on this toggle, choose the language that the speaker is speaking to be translated into English or another language. And what it does is it creates a real time voice clone of both your voice and the other caller's voice and translates what you're saying into the other person's preferred language. So it's this AI enabled voice translator that is supercharged because it is also mimicking your voice and emotion at the same time.
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How does the Pixel 10's AI features compare with what's available for the Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy?
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Apple's iPhone does have some generative AI features. Genmoji is one where you can create an emoji that looks like you doing whatever you prompt of it. It also has a writing assistant in the Notes app. But what is missing on Apple's iPhone is a very intelligent voice assistant. And both Samsung's Galaxy phones and Google's Pixel phones, both of those phones have Gemini, which is Google's generative AI chatbot, and a version of Gemini called Gemini Live that turns that chatbot, a conversational voice assistant that also has access to data from your email. So you can say something like summarize all of my unread emails. So that is probably the biggest difference between where Android phones are right now in terms of AI features and Apple's iPhone.
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That was WSJ's Nicole Nguyen. Coming up, Big Tech pledged to spend billions of dollars to build new affordable housing in California. But the results aren't living up to the hype. Find out why. After the break.
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In 2023, IBM set a goal to become the most productive company in the world. It started by asking questions, lots of questions, says Joanne Wright, SVP of Transformation and Operations at IBM.
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How can we radically simplify end to end workflow and processes? What can we eliminate? How do we automate everything that we can? And then how do we embed AI into everything we do? So far, a two year period, we've delivered over $3.5 billion of productivity savings for the company.
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Meta platforms Google and Apple in 2019 promised to spend big to make housing more affordable in their Silicon Valley backyards. But while the three companies have helped fund the construction of thousands of affordable units, other initiatives haven't gotten off the ground. WSJ reporter Nicole Friedman joins us to explain. Nicole, what were the solutions these companies.
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Were proposing the pledges all took slightly different forms. And so we had, in 2019, Meta and Google each pledged a billion dollars for affordable housing, and Apple pledged $2.5 billion. And so these were big amounts of money, and each company kind of broke it down into different buckets. And each company included some amount of money that was loans for afford affordable housing developers. Each company also included some amount of money in the form of land that these companies actually owned in the Silicon Valley area that they were going to commit to using that land partly or fully for housing. And then there were other initiatives too, that some of the companies committed to that included either partnerships with nonprofits or maybe grants to nonprofits or partnerships with the state of California. So each company did it differently. And now, six years later, we've been checking in on the results.
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And so to your point, have the results lived up to expectations?
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So the overall answer is no. Each of these companies has spent money on affordable housing, but none of them have moved forward quite as quickly or as smoothly as advocates had hoped and had expected back in 2019. And particularly the parts of the pledges that were landed, those have really moved slowly or have made very little progress at all. And no housing has actually been built on these parcels yet. And there's a lot of reasons for that. We did have the pandemic, which slowed down a lot of these initiatives. We've also just had a shift in the economy and the overall kind of real estate needs of these companies. Some of them are less desperate for office space than they were back in 2019. So they're not necessarily investing in real estate and in growth in the same ways that they were. And so that has slowed down some of the initiatives. Google is actually looking to sell one of the parcels that it had committed to building housing on, but it says it is looking for buyers that can build housing on that parcel. And then also you have just the process of building housing in California, which is famously slow. And so that has also contributed. These are big mixed use developments that need to go through local and regional planning processes sometimes, and those can take a very long time.
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Tech companies have long taken the approach of move fast and break things. It kind of sums up Silicon Valley's big picture approach to innovation. Why are these companies now struggling so much to solve something like the housing crisis?
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There's a lot of theories as to why that might be. The housing crisis in California is one that took many decades to develop and one that can't necessarily be solved overnight. And I don't think anybody expected that. These commitments, as big as they were, were going to solve anything that a billion dollars each from Meta and Google, $2.5 billion from Apple. These are big numbers. But when you're looking at the scale of the housing crisis in California, in Silicon Valley, the overall cost of building enough housing to make overall housing affordable is bigger than that. And so this was always going to be a contribution to the solution, but not the overall fix. And so why has it moved slowly? One reason is that these companies did not have a ton of prior experience in building housing. And so they have partnered with the state of California, in some cases with various nonprofits or affordable housing developers that do have experience in this state and in this industry. But it is a learning curve and not everything is a technological solution. These are also kind of political processes.
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What happens next? Are companies still committed?
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The companies say they are still committed. They say that these pledges haven't changed. And to be clear, these pledges weren't supposed to be wrapped up by 2025. They all had different timelines. And so there is more to be seen in terms of whether they follow through on their pledges. The amount of money that the companies had committed to loans to affordable housing developers, that that has moved forward. And a lot of that money has already been committed. The companies say there are thousands of units of housing that are being built or will be built partly thanks to this financing. So that was a little bit easier to get off the ground. What's been harder is the initiatives that either came in the form of land or the initiatives that were maybe a little bit more untested. Meta announced back in 2019 a partnership with the state of California to build housing on state owned land. That was excess land. And there's been no update on that initiative at all. And so that's an example of one that it's a little unclear. Is that going to come together or have the priorities changed?
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That was WSJ's Nicole Friedman. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host. Liz Young. Jessica Fenton and Michael Lavalle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Melanie Roy. Our development producer is ice, Aisha Al Muslim. Chris Zinsley is the deputy editor. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
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It's not just IBM that benefits from its mission to be the most productive company in the world. So do its clients. Joanne Wright, SVP of transformation and operations at IBM explains We've created a playbook.
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That'S client zero for how to do really fast effective a the key has been to drive for progress over perfection. We built a solid foundation with data and taken the opportunity to really learn from the people who have a role to play in running IBM each and every day. Our own experience has taken us from far beyond just doing pilots and theory to real ROI and real productivity. A lot of our clients are very hungry to know what they can learn from us as client zero and then obviously how can they avoid perhaps some of the mistakes we've made or some of the failures we've had? The fact that we've been able to derive and deliver our own use cases across everything that we do really transcends our clients experience.
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Visit IBM.com to learn how AI can drive enterprise wide productivity.
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Custom Content from WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal advertising department. The Wall Street Journal News Organization was not involved in the creation of this content.