Typing is the new handwriting

Working from home has an advantage you might not use enough: it is not having to use that expensive white keyboard (or the retro one that makes a satisfying clicking sound). Replying to emails, sending messages … stop typing, start talking. You may not be able to do this in an open office but home office is perfect for it. So if you’ve found yourself feeling like typing is a hassle, it’s not just you. More and more people are using speech-to-text for ease - and for speed.

If your current relationship with social media feels like a hostage situation, the exits are multiplying. A crop of smaller, more intentional apps is gaining ground — built around what you actually care about rather than what keeps you on the platform longest. Corner app is "Google Maps, but social" — people curating their favourite local spots into shareable lists. Cosmos is Pinterest without the AI-generated noise. Airbuds shares what you're listening to with friends. Shelf tracks your books, films and music, privately by default. None of them are trying to be everything.

Google's Gemini Spark is not a chatbot — it's a standing set of instructions that runs in the background while you get on with your life. You tell it things once: scan my inbox every Monday, log new client enquiries into a spreadsheet, track job listings in my field. Then it just does them, even when your phone is off. One demo prompt shows it reading your last 50 emails, building a personal writing style guide, and applying it every time it drafts something for you. Still rolling out to early subscribers, but this is the clearest preview yet of what "having an AI assistant" will actually mean — not a chat window you open, but quiet standing instructions that run your admin. And soon - more than just that.

Since Google replaced its search results with AI answers, DuckDuckGo installs have jumped 30% in the US. The people switching aren't anti-technology. They're anti-losing-control-of-their-search Although, I would argue, what control did we have before? DuckDuckGo's CEO put it plainly: "Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out." If you want your links back, noai.duckduckgo.com strips every AI feature by default. If that tickles your fancy.

Advertising now has its own AI awards show. The Generated Awards held its inaugural ceremony in New York last month, recognising nine AI-created ads. The winning spots used tools like Kling 3.0, Luma Ray2 and Runway, and some are genuinely hard to distinguish from live-action footage. When asked whether disclosure should be mandatory, the organiser's CEO said: "I don't think there should be a required disclosure unless there is a legal requirement." That sounds thorny to me.

Motorised shoes are apparently a thing now. Moonwalkers strap onto your regular shoes and use an AI gait controller to read how you walk — then boost you to 7mph without changing your stride. Named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2023, they handle hills, cracks and rain. Whether this is genuinely the future of the last mile or a very expensive party trick remains to be seen. What I want to know is: what about the daily steps that are good for you?