# Tech Ecosystems, Privacy Hardware, and AI Automation

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-07-28

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
This episode is sponsored by Accenture.
If your advertising operations are out of the way, everything else is in stock.
Spotify and Accenture are building the rhythm of Ad Sales together.
With automatic automation, smart analytics and efficient workflows, we can improve the campaign and better data for the whole company.
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More pressure, more effect and more time to connect the moments and fandoms to really count.
Can Apple make smart glasses that aren't a constant privacy threat?
I'm Imran Shaikh and your Daily Crunch for Tuesday featuring three Big Tech Headlines starts right now.
Snapchat's now letting users share the music they're listening to in real time via a new feature in SnapMap TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Called Now Playing, the feature lets users link their streaming service account, starting with Spotify, and share what they're currently listening to via SnapMap and therefore see the songs their friends are enjoying.
The future has been integrated with Spotlight videos too, which are Snapchat's TikTok-like short-form videos.
You can save any songs you discover in a Spotlight video directly to Spotify or visit the track's page on the platform to do so.
Users can choose who can see their listening activity and the future won't show your last played song or listening history though.
Sharing will remain active as long as you have opened Snapchat within the past 24 hours.
If a user is inactive for more than 24 hours, sharing will be paused automatically and only resumed when the app has been opened again.
You can also pause sharing for 3 hours, 24 hours or...
indefinitely.
The new feature comes as social media platforms continue to embrace music discovery and sharing.
The integration adds another feature to SnapMap, which has more than 450 million monthly users.
On Monday, Meta said it's rolling out its Meta AI chatbot within Threads DMs, giving users a way to chat with the AI assistant.
Although Threads users in select markets could already interact with Meta AI in public posts, like PeopleCan with Grok on X, this new integration lets users talk with the AI assistant privately.
By giving users an easier way to talk to an AI chatbot, Meta is looking to keep users within its ecosystem, with an eye towards discouraging them from using third-party assistants like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google Gemini.
Meta AI is already available within DMs on Meta's other platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The new integration lets users share threads, posts, images, links, and videos directly with Meta AI.
You can ask follow-up questions and dive deeper into topics too.
The update rolled out globally on Monday.
Meta noted it's continuing to test Meta AI in Threads public feeds in a handful of global markets and is considering feedback before expanding availability more broadly.
Users who want to see fewer Meta AI replies in their feed can mute at Meta.ai, use the Not Interested option on any Meta AI post, or hide Meta AI replies that appear on their post.
By further integrating Meta AI into Threads, Meta is positioning its ex-rival as a place where you can get information and recommendations.
without having to leave the app.
As Apple prepares to launch its first smart glasses, the company is also wrestling with how to address consumer privacy concerns, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
You see, Gurman reports that Apple has pushed back the launch target from early 2027, with the glasses now set for unveiling at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2027 and actually becoming available by the end of that year.
That delay allows Apple to work on the product itself and on the messaging around privacy.
It sounds like the company's noticed the concerns around meta smart glasses, sometimes declared as pervert glasses, being used to make non-consensual video recordings.
That could be a bigger issue for Apple, which constantly emphasizes privacy in its marketing.
Among other things, Apple will reportedly try to emphasize privacy-friendly features like on-device processing, as well as the absence of facial recognition.
The company will likely steer clear of using customer recordings to train AI models, and it's unlikely to follow Meta's reported practice of using contractors to review customer footage.
Now to the latest in startup business news, all in about one minute with our friend, producer Dennis.
Thank you, Imran.
And multiple robotics companies are tackling one of AI's hardest problems, and that's building foundation models capable of executing tasks they were never explicitly trained to handle.
Their approaches run the gamut, from studying millions of web videos and conducting computer simulations to collecting motion data from humans performing tasks in gloves with built-in sensors.
Enigma, a research lab who has now emerged from stealth, is taking a fundamentally different approach.
Rather than focusing purely on model capabilities, the less than one-year-old startup wants to study how humans engage with robots in hopes that these interactions will lead to intuitive interfaces and possibly a different kind of robotic brain.
To finance its mission, Enigma raised a $71 million seed round.
And Prentiss, a new AI research lab focused on computer use models, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Launched in April, Prentiss is training models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems with the goal of building AI agents that can control computers to automate those tasks.
Apprentice will ostensibly develop agents tailored to these customers' needs, such as handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund expectations without needing a human to hunt down paperwork.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Aisha Malik, Anthony Ha, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow, same tech time, same Crunch channel.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.