Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers the keynote address during the 2020 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, June 22, 2020.
Brooks Kraft | Apple, Inc. | via Reuters
Apple released an AI-powered journal app for iPhones on Monday as part of its iOS 17.2 update.
The Journal app, which was first announced back in June, uses Apple’s Siri to intelligently suggest topics to journal about. It might, for example, prompt you to write about music you were listening to, or document appointments you had that day and workouts you completed.
The Journal app is one example of how Apple continues to invest in new iPhone features on a yearly basis to protect its iPhone franchise from competition from Google’s Android and other phone makers.
The iPhone is still the most important product Apple makes, accounting for $205 billion in sales in its fiscal 2023, or about 52% of the company’s overall sales. The more that Apple adds features that are used on a daily basis — like its credit card, or its app store, or its iMessage service — the harder it is for most users to switch to a competing phone brand or operating system.
The Journal app also highlights Apple’s approach to AI. Apple’s artificial intelligence software, like what’s powering the Journal app, runs on the device itself, not on a server in the cloud, which has privacy advantages over Google’s and Microsoft’s internet-based approach, especially for sensitive information like health data or travel plans. Apple also doesn’t highlight AI as a key feature in its marketing — it prefers the more academic phrase “machine learning.”
How the Journal app works
Apple’s new Journal app uses machine learning to detect important events users might want to write about.
Screenshot/CNBC
Apple’s Journal app is simple. I’ve been testing it on a beta version of iOS for a month. When you open the app up — you can lock its contents with Apple’s FaceID — you’re brought to a screen with a list of your entries and a single “+” button.
Pressing the plus button lets you start a new entry. At first, it looks like a standard text entry box, like in Apple’s Notes. You can type in some thoughts, add a photo, photos you’ve taken, an audio recording, or drop in a Apple Maps location of where you’ve been. The app automatically timestamps the post.
After you’ve added several entries, the front page of the app fills up with your previous entries and you can browse and edit old posts. You can filter your old entries by those that include a photo, or an activity, or those that are tagged with a certain place. Journal entries aren’t published anywhere, just stored inside your individual Journal app.
Where the machine learning magic appears is under the magic wand icon, or the “moments menu.” When you tap the magic wand icon, it suggests things to write about based on what it knows from your phone, such as the music you were listening to or where you were.
For example, when I pressed the moments tab on Monday, it suggested I write about a recent vacation — bringing up a map of where I was, hikes I did while I was on the trip, music I listened to, and photos I took when I was there. For one entry, I simply recorded an audio file of the waves crashing, so I could return to the moment later. (However, it didn’t realize that I had already fully documented that vacation inside the Journal app.)
The Journal app’s push notifications can also prompt the user. It often sends a push notification when it detects that you’ve done an activity that you might want to reflect on. For example, I recently had to rush to catch a ferry. My watch noted a walking workout, and I was listening to music at the time. Journaling workouts could be very useful for people who are training for marathons or other athletic achievements.
The Journal app also sent me notifications asking whether I wanted to write about the experience. Some days, notifications sent by the app simply asks you to reflect on your day. Apple also includes several prompts designed to spur reflection: “Make an audio recording of your surroundings. Write about what you notice.”
The app can also be social, suggesting to journal about activities with others when it detects contacts nearby.
Apple’s Journal app is basic right now. Nothing it does besides suggestions couldn’t be done in an old-fashioned paper journal, or even a page inside Apple’s Notes app. But the suggestions and integration with Apple’s other services set it apart from more low-tech approaches, and highlight how Apple’s integration of hardware and software means that it can learn what’s important in your life without collecting your data on its servers.
Apple is even making its machine learning model that guesses what might be important to the user available to other apps through a programming interface, meaning that other apps could benefit from Apple’s AI.
Apple needs to continue to improve the Journal app in order to find a place in most people’s everyday routines. It would be better if it could automatically fill out more of an entry, especially ones based on photos or other activities. For now, there’s no export function, which would enable the Journal app to become a more useful place to collect thoughts and ideas that could one day be published.
How to get the Journal app on your iPhone.
The journal app is available in iOS 17.2, which can be downloaded on modern iPhones now. Here’s how to get it:
Open Settings.
Tap General
Choose Software Update.
You may notice some other new features in iOS 17.2. The update also includes the ability to change the default alert sound, sticker reactions in iMessage, and a machine learning feature that blurs photos and other content sent to you that may include nudity.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.