After The Siri Scandal, Apple Slips A Microphone Into The Genius Bar

Apple is reportedly testing an AI system called Live Notes in some Apple Stores, capable of recording and summarizing your exchanges with technicians. The guarantees announced are numerous. The gray areas, too.

Whether your call to customer service is recorded “for training and quality purposes”, no one really hears it anymore because it has become so commonplace. Apple has just decided that its Apple Stores can join this club. A pilot program called Live Notes is currently being tested in a limited number of stores: when a customer drops off an iPhone or Mac for repair, the employee could trigger a recording of the conversation, transcribed and summarized in real time by an AI, then added to the session file displayed on their professional iPad. The stated goal is to free technicians from note-taking so they can focus on the customer.

The guarantees put forward by Apple are calibrated to reassure: registration would be opt-in for both parties (the employee and the customer must both accept), the raw audio would not be kept, only the transcription and the summary, reread and modified by the technician before validation, would be archived, and managers would not have access to the transcriptions. Which leaves a margin between what was said and what will be archived. The formula is reassuring. What is less clear is the list of what no one has yet confirmed: how many Apple Store pilots, which AI model processes the data, whether the processing is local or in the cloud, how long the transcriptions are kept in the internal system, and above all what happens to these rules when the program leaves its test phase.

Employees who understood the issue before anyone else

What has sparked concern among Apple employees is not so much customer registration as the question of what this system could become for themselves. An AI which transcribes each exchange between a technician and a customer is also, mechanically, a tool capable of measuring the performance of this technician, of analyzing his formulations, of timing his interventions. Apple says managers don’t have access to transcripts today. The word “today” is worth remembering. JPMorgan recently deployed a comparable tool for its teams, also presented as a neutral productivity assistant, which analyzes videoconferencing data, calendars and keystrokes to compare actual work and declared work. This type of program always starts from the same promise, and rarely evolves in the direction of restraint.

Apple and microphones: the previous one at 95 million dollars

In the area of trust around audio, Apple has a weighty case. In 2019, it was revealed that contractors were manually listening to Siri recordings to assess their quality, including fragments of private conversations captured by accident. Apple suspended the program on an emergency basis, publicly admitted that it did not meet its privacy ideals, and apologized. An amicable agreement of $95 million then resolved the complaints. Tim Cook had meanwhile established himself as a public voice for privacy, going so far as to call privacy a “fundamental human right”.

Live Notes is presented as a discreet, limited tool, surrounded by guardrails. The Siri program incriminated in 2019 was also. The real question isn’t whether Apple is lying right now about what Live Notes does. It is to know whether the today’s guarantees will hold when several hundred stores around the world have adopted it and the pilot phase will be a memory.