Sunday, 1 November 2026
Google DeepMind's PlanAssist Cut Time on Routine Planning Checks by 58% in Three English Councils
Google DeepMind’s PlanAssist Cut Time on Routine Planning Checks by 58% in Three English Councils
The least glamorous queue in British government just got an agent. PlanAssist, built by Google DeepMind with the UK government, Google Cloud and Faculty on Gemini, takes a householder application — a loft conversion, a rear extension — checks the documents against heritage constraints and local and national policy, looks for previous objections, and drafts a cited report for a planning officer to edit. In pilots at Barnet, Camden and Dorset since June, officer time per assessment fell by 58%, and more than 70% of the drafts were approved without a single edit. Routine applications like these make up as much as 70% of an officer’s workload. Now comes a 12-month beta on live applications: twelve more councils join in three cohorts, fifteen in all, and if it holds up the government wants it on offer to every council in England in 2027. An officer still signs off every decision. The interesting number is the 70% — the share of reports nobody touched, and the share of the job that was, it turns out, mostly paperwork.
Apple Intelligence Reaches China in December, With Alibaba’s Qwen Inside Siri
Two years after its US debut, Apple Intelligence gets a date in mainland China: a developer beta from November 4, then iOS 27.3 for everyone in December. Apple’s own models run the core set — Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime and Phone, Writing Tools, photo Clean Up, Genmoji, notification and mail summaries. Alibaba’s Qwen is wired into Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence, answering questions about photos, PDFs and slides, and writing text from scratch; it needs a Qwen account or Sign in with Apple. The phone and Siri must be set to English or Simplified Chinese, and it runs on iPhone 15 Pro and newer. Left out: Siri AI, the rebuilt assistant shown at WWDC 2026. So Chinese users get the AI features, a Chinese model to power some of them, and the old Siri to type to — which, depending on the day, may be the better deal.
Apple’s New CEO: “Absolutely Going to Leverage AI” — Just Not for Its Own Sake
Two months into the job, John Ternus told Wired’s Steven Levy that Apple is “absolutely going to leverage AI” in new products, but won’t ship it for its own sake: done right, people shouldn’t need to care whether AI or ordinary software made a feature work. Asked whether agents could make apps unnecessary, he allowed it might make life easier, then said making products is a deeply human thing Apple loves doing. On the charge that Apple fell behind — the powerful Siri slipped to this summer — he said, “I really like where we’re at.” It is a reasonable position for a company that sells the devices every agent has to run on. Whether the agents agree to stay inside the apps is another matter.
Source: TechCrunch, October 31, 2026