Alexa AI, Midjourney, Trump Mobile, and the Juneteenth Flag
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
📊 Unstructured Data
⚫ Alexa
🖼️ Midjourney
📖 AI Playbook
🤡 Trump Mobile
🖊️ Google Design
🟥🟦 Juneteenth Flag
Podcast
Structured Thinking for Unstructured Data: A Conversation with Founder Kirk Marple
In this episode of Product by Design, Kyle is joined by Kirk Marple, founder and CEO of Graphlit, to explore the world of unstructured data and how it’s transforming with the rise of LLMs and AI-native tools. Kirk shares his journey from working at Microsoft and General Motors to building Graflit—a platform designed to make unstructured data as usable as structured data.
News and Useful Reads
Amazon Rebuilt Alexa Using a ‘Staggering’ Amount of AI Tools
AI is quickly becoming a more integral part of everything. Not only the parts we see, but also behind the scenes, as is the case with Alexa.
“The rate with which we're using AI tooling across the build process is pretty staggering,” Rausch says. While creating the new Alexa, Amazon used AI during every step of the build. And yes, that includes generating parts of the code.
Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, V1
Video continues to be one of the next frontiers of AI. And Midjourney, the popular image generation tool, released its AI video this week.
V1 is an image-to-video model, in which users can upload an image — or take an image generated by one of Midjourney’s other models — and V1 will produce a set of four five-second videos based on it. Much like Midjourney’s image models, V1 is only available through Discord, and it’s only available on the web at launch.
Precision over hype: A product manager’s playbook for launching AI that lands
If you’re building products, you are constantly facing the question of how to use AI. I know that I am. Fortunately, the principles of good product development don’t change just because the technology does.
AI has moved from experimental to essential. GenAI is the new battleground—every product team is racing to embed it, ship faster, and stake their claim.
But while the pressure to launch is real, so is the fallout from rushed, messy rollouts.
We Did the Math: Trump Mobile Is a Bad Deal for Consumers
The latest grift from Trump and family seems to be coming in the form of a cell phone and plan. Unsurprisingly, it won’t be made in America. And it’s not a good deal either. But grifts rarely are.
The research behind Google’s bold new direction for design
I’m continually impressed with the amount of research and development that goes into some things at Google. And their new direction for design definitely fits the bill. Whether it will achieve its goals is yet to be seen, but in an age when it feels like research is put on the back burner, it is nice to see significant research being done around design.
Expressive design makes you feel something. It inspires emotion, communicates function, and helps users achieve their goals.
Other Interesting Finds
What Does the Juneteenth Flag Symbolize?
National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation founder Ben Haith designed an early version of the flag in 1997. Three years later, artist Lisa Jeanne Graf revamped the design into the banner people recognize today. The final big change came in 2007, when the date “June 19, 1865” was added to the side of the flag.