The Wall Street Journal reports that 68% of CEOs "plan to spend even more on AI in 2026, according to an annual survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs from advisory firm Teneo." And yet "less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said." They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources. Teneo also surveyed about 400 institutional investors, of which 53% expect that AI initiatives would begin to deliver returns on investments within six months. That compares to the 84% of CEOs of large companies — those with revenue of $10 billion or more — who believe it will take more than six months. Surprisingly, 67% of CEOs believe AI will increase their entry-level head count, while 58% believe AI will increase senior leadership head count. All the surveyed CEOS were from public companies with revenue over $1 billion...

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Microsoft may have found a sneaky way to promote Copilot. The iPhone App Store’s changelog for apps like the OneDrive app now shows “generated using Copilot” at the bottom of the notes, which is not explicitly required by Apple, hinting that this might be a subtle way of promoting Copilot.

This isn’t new, as the company has been adding “*These notes were generated using Copilot” at the end of every changelog from May 13, 2025. It was only spotted by Windows Latest today. However, we didn’t see this treatment under the changelog version history for most Microsoft apps on the App Store for iPhone.

Also, the changelog in the OneDrive app for Mac doesn’t have any mention of being generated by Copilot, despite being pretty detailed. The Play Store in Android phones does not show version history, so we are not sure if this is just for the iOS apps like OneDrive or if Microsoft edited all the changelogs but missed the one for OneDrive

With that said, iOS sure does lack a powerful and feature-packed AI, and Copilot is going to need all the attention that it can get in order to have a meaningful market share among others like ChatGPT, Gemini, and even Perplexity.

Microsoft developers write “Release Notes” using Copilot

Microsoft has been fairly vocal about using AI to write code for some of the software that the company makes. Now it seems that one of Microsoft’s own teams may be experimenting with Copilot for a much simpler job, which is writing release notes for the OneDrive iOS app.

In the App Store’s changelog, some updates include the line “*These notes were generated using Copilot” at the bottom of the notes. That’s a bit funny when you think about it. An AI writing about fixes and features coded by the same AI (well, at least 30%, if Satya Nadella’s words are to be believed).

But it’s also interesting because Apple’s App Store guidelines do not require developers to disclose how they write their release notes, so this line feels like a deliberate choice from Microsoft.

Windows Latest noticed that this Copilot credit doesn’t show up on every patch. In our checks, smaller bug-fix updates don’t include the Copilot line, but more substantial updates do. If this were a mistake or an automatic template, it would be everywhere.

This makes sense when you look at Copilot’s actual market position. Copilot isn’t conquering the generative AI world in raw user numbers the way ChatGPT does. Internally, Microsoft has doubled down on Copilot with big investments in OpenAI.

So maybe it’s not wild speculation to wonder if teams are encouraged to use Copilot internally, if only to generate release notes or get more usage telemetry.

App update changelogs are an easy place to mention Copilot

Changelogs are low-risk content. Nobody expects poetic writing or deep technical accuracy there. At the same time, they are highly visible. Every update pushes that text in front of millions of users. If Microsoft wants to normalize the Copilot name without forcing it into users’ faces, this is a safe place to do it.

Apple does not yet have a first-party, AI chatbot that rivals Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT. Siri doesn’t count based on how well (or worse) it performs now. Apple Intelligence is tightly scoped and still rolling out in stages. That leaves iOS apps as one of the few places where an AI can be promoted without Apple controlling the narrative.

App Store changelogs are also one of the few user-facing text surfaces that Apple does not heavily editorialize or restrict. So, if Microsoft gets some users to try to use Copilot, it’s a win for the company.

If anything, this may be one of the earliest visible signs of AI-generated content becoming the default.

Would you take AI-generated changelogs as seriously as human-written ones?

The post Microsoft’s iPhone apps are quietly doing free Copilot promotion using Apple App Store Release Notes appeared first on Windows Latest

In this post, we explore what dialogue should do and how to write it – with examples. We’ve created a quick start guide to writing dialogue.

Read the other posts in our Quick Start series:

1. A Quick Start Guide To Creating Characters
2. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Fantasy
3. A Quick Start Guide For Beating Writer’s Block
4. A Quick Start Guide To Writing For Children
5. A Quick Start Guide To Writing YA Fiction
6. A Quick Start Guide To Writing A Memoir
7. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Descriptions
8. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Romance
9. A Quick Start Guide To Writing Science Fiction
10. A Quick Start Guide To Foreshadowing
11. A Quick Start Guide To Writing An Inciting Incident

A Quick Start Guide To Writing Dialogue

The first piece of advice a new writer is always given is to make their dialogue sound realistic. This is so wrong it’s frightening.

Have you ever sat in a coffee shop and listened to people talking? They jump like fleas from one topic to another. Every sentence has ‘um’, ‘er’, long pauses, inane conversation about the weather, minutes of ‘hi how are you’, ‘how’s the family’, ‘how’s work’, etc. No one wants pages of that. What they do want is dialogue that sounds natural.

Bad dialogue sounds stilted. The best way to decide if you’ve written bad dialogue is to read it to someone else. If you find yourself tripping over words, missing words etc, then it’s bad dialogue. Great dialogue takes almost forensic observation of how people talk, not necessarily what they talk about. It also takes practice. Lots of practice.

What should dialogue do?

1. It should give the reader information – but not as an info dump.
2. it should be active, moving the plot along, not waffling about things that have no relevance to the plot.
3. It should be relevant to the genre. New York City police are unlikely to talk like Mr Darcy from Regency England.
4. It should reveal plot, character, motives, emotions or lack of them, truth, and lies, clues, etc. As Hercule Poirot says, “If you let people talk, they will tell you everything you need to know.”
5. It should align with the tone of the book, the era it’s set in, and the age, education, intellectual ability, idiosyncrasies, and general outlook of the speaker, the location in which the book is set, and the interior landscape of the book. For example, if you were reading a book featuring Jeeves and Wooster by PG Wodehouse, you would rightly expect Wooster to say things like, “What ho, my good man,” and not, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
   

Dialogue should always:

1. Be on a new line, unless it follows an identifying action.
2. Can start or end with ‘said John’ – for example.
3. Should always end with a comma if followed by a dialogue tag. For example, “I’d love to go the fair,” said Maria.
4. If there is no following identification tag, then the dialogue should end with a full stop, or, if necessary, a question mark. Use exclamation points with strict restraint.
5. Be used often enough so that readers don’t lose track of who’s talking.

However, if you have ‘said John’, ‘said Mary’ after every line, that becomes boring and interferes with the story.

You only need dialogue tags a.k.a. identification tags when:

1. A new person speaks.
   Imagine a conversation taking place between two people, when a third person walks into the room and speaks. The reader needs to know, clearly and immediately, that it was the third person talking. For example, Agatha Christie’s famous detective Poirot and his sidekick, Hastings are talking about a body has been found in Professor Plum’s kitchen. We know there are only the two of them in the room. Then we read, “I’ve booked you tickets for the 10am train from Paddington,” said Miss Lemon from the doorway. If we didn’t have the ‘said Miss Lemon’, we wouldn’t know who was talking.
2. Every third or fourth line when only two people are having a conversation and haven’t mentioned the other’s names in their own dialogue.
   This prevents confusion on the part of the reader if the two people speaking very similar ways of expressing themselves. It’s best to have the characters use each other’s names occasionally. Young children are more likely to use the other person’s name more often.
3. More than two people are part of the conversation
   Even if each character has a different way of expressing themselves, if there are more than two people in the conversation, dialogue tags keep the reader grounded within the world of the story.
4. Stick as much as possible to he said/she said
   ‘John said’ disappears in the reader’s mind. But phrases like ‘John reiterated’, will pull readers out of the story.

4 Times You Don’t Need Dialogue Tags

1. When the characters speaking have very obviously different ways of speaking.
   For example, Englishman Hastings uses expressions like ‘Jolly good’, ‘I say’, Surely not’. Whereas Poirot, who is Belgian and speaks French, litters his speech with French expressions like ‘Mon ami’, ‘Bonjour,’ Mais, oui’. His sentence structure is not completely English. We don’t need dialogue tags because the way they talk gives us the clues we need. However, you shouldn’t leave out dialogue tags for too long. TOP TIP: Give everyone a different way of speaking. It can be subtle such as word choice based on the age of the character, or obvious, like Poirot and Hastings, Jeeves and Wooster, Groot, or Yoda.
2. When a character has used another character’s name in their dialogue.
   For example: “But, surely, Poirot, we can’t possibly know how the body came to be lying on the kitchen table unless we go and see for ourselves!”
   Clearly this is not Poirot speaking, so it must be Hastings. We don’t need a ‘said Hastings’ dialogue tag.
3. When the identifying tag is an action the speaker is making
   For example: Poirot took out his cigarette case and chose a slim turquoise one. “Mon ami, I need only apply my little grey cells, and I could tell you how.” TOP TIP: If you use an action tag to define who is speaking, it’s advisable to have the action tag first and the dialogue running straight on after it and not on a new line.
4. Avoid emotional dialogue tags.
   For example, “I can’t bear it any longer!” she exclaimed despairingly. It’s too much, and it’s not great writing. Compare that with, “I can’t bear it any longer!” The despair was written in every line on her face.

The Last Word

If you’d like to learn how to write great dialogue, sign up for one of the rich and in-depth workbooks and courses that Writers Write offers and get your dialogue off to a great start.

by Elaine Dodge. Author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device Hunter, Elaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, including ghost writing business books, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.

More Posts From Elaine

1. What Is Deus Ex Machina in Storytelling?
2. What Is True Crime & How Do I Write It?
3. How To Write A Paranormal Story
4. What Is Fan Fiction & How Do I Write It?
5. The 6 Pillars Of Young Adult Fiction
6. Figurative Language – Definition & Examples
7. The 5 Pillars Of Speculative Fiction
8. The 4 Pillars Of Women’s Fiction
9. The 6 Pillars Of Westerns
10. How To Write A Bestselling Book

Top Tip: Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop.

The post A Quick Start Guide To Writing Dialogue appeared first on Writers Write.

Grok's track record is spotty at best. But even by the very low standards of xAI, its failure in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia is shocking. The AI chatbot has repeatedly misidentified 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who heroically disarmed one of the shooters, and claimed the verified video of his deed was something else entirely - including that it was an old viral video of a man climbing a tree.

In the aftermath of the attack, Ahmed has been widely praised for his heroism, but some have tried to dismiss or even deny his actions. Someone even quickly whipped up a fake news site that appears to be …

Read the full story at The Verge.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast "Diary of a CEO." On YouTube, his clone narrates "100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett," which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett's cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called "The Newsworthy," let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out... In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content. Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company... Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality... Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content. Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, in some weeks accounting for 1% of all podcasts published that week on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright. The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects. Instead of a studio searching for a specific "hit" podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening... One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue... Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiastNigel Thistledown... Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nonprofit Code.org released its 2025 State of AI & Computer Science Education report this week with a state-by-state analysis of school policies complaining that "0 out of 50 states require AI+CS for graduation." But meanwhile, at the college level, "Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic competency in AI," writes former college president Michael Nietzel, "starting with freshmen who enter the university in 2026." The new "AI working competency" graduation requirement was approved by the university's Board of Trustees at its meeting on December 12... The requirement will be embedded into every undergraduate program at Purdue, but it won't be done in a "one-size-fits-all" manner. Instead, the Board is delegating authority to the provost, who will work with the deans of all the academic colleges to develop discipline-specific criteria and proficiency standards for the new campus-wide requirement. [Purdue president] Chiang said students will have to demonstrate a working competence through projects that are tailored to the goals of individual programs. The intent is to not require students to take more credit hours, but to integrate the new AI expectation into existing academic requirements... While the news release claimed that Purdue may be the first school to establish such a requirement, at least one other university has introduced its own institution-wide expectation that all its graduates acquire basic AI skills. Earlier this year, The Ohio State University launched an AI Fluency initiative, infusing basic AI education into core undergraduate requirements and majors, with the goal of helping students understand and use AI tools — no matter their major. Purdue wants its new initiative to help graduates: — Understand and use the latest AI tools effectively in their chosen fields, including being able to identify the key strengths and limits of AI technologies; — Recognize and communicate clearly about AI, including developing and defending decisions informed by AI, as well as recognizing the influence and consequences of AI in decision-making; — Adapt to and work with future AI developments effectively.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.