Apple Has Reportedly Started Recording and AI-Summarizing Conversations at the Genius Bar

Apple is reportedly dipping its toe into recording and AI-summarizing your repair and tech support conversations with its employees at the Genius Bar. This new pilot program called “Live Notes” is being pitched as a time-saving tool for the store employees themselves, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, and is still only in a limited number of stores. The recording of the conversation, Gurman explains, is auto-transcribed and summarized, and then stored in the “record of the repair session” on the Genius Bar employee’s work iPad. But Gurman writes that the tool has “sparked concern” among Apple Store workers, since, obviously, something almost exactly like this could be used for monitoring and evaluating employees. But for now, Apple apparently claims the audio recordings aren’t saved, that the program is opt-in for both parties—the employee and the customer—and that managers don’t get to view the transcripts. Wall Street loves tools like this—and not just big Apple investors. JPMorgan recently rolled out a monitoring tool that sounds similarly Orwellian, but the company similarly claims it’s just a helper for employees. The digital monitoring system uses video call data, meeting