Illustration: The Verge X, the platform previously known as Twitter, is rolling out audio and video calls. Several users on the platform, including some of us here at The Verge, have received a notification when opening the app, stating: “Audio and video calls are here!”There’s also a new “Enable audio and video calling” toggle within the app’s settings, which says you can “turn the feature on and then select who you’re comfortable using it with.” It includes options to allow audio and video calls from only people in your address book, people you follow, verified users, or all three. You can then make a call by opening a DM with another user, selecting the phone icon in the top right corner of the screen, and choosing audio or video call. S... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Big changes are coming to Spotify’s royalty model, according to Music Business Worldwide (MBW). If and when they are implemented in early 2024, it will raise the bar for who gets paid from music streaming on the platform — and direct more money to major labels and artists.Two of the three proposed changes should be relatively uncontroversial. According to the report, Spotify will fine music distributors (including labels) for fraudulent activity detected on their tracks. Streaming fraud is pretty widespread, and a crackdown is long overdue. The second change will raise the minimum length of play time for noise tracks (background noise like rain, static, etc.) before they start earning royalties. Currently, any track that gets played for... Continue reading…

Photo by Michael Swensen/Getty Images The United Auto Workers (UAW) union and Ford have reached a tentative agreement to end the union’s six-week strike against the automaker. Last month, workers at Ford, GM, and Stellantis factories walked off the job in targeted work stoppages timed just as the large automakers shift to producing more electric vehicles than ever before.The strike has roiled the auto industry, costing each company hundreds of millions of dollars each week in lost production and throwing the industry’s shift to electric vehicles on ice. An agreement with Ford puts more pressure on GM and Stellantis to strike a deal with the union.According to preliminary reports, Ford agreed to a 25 percent increase in wages, plus cost of living increases, that will bump... Continue reading…

The Magic Capsule technology is coming to Honor’s next flagship. | Image: Honor We were expecting — and we got — a lot of talk about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO George Zhao took the stage at Qualcomm’s 2023 Snapdragon Summit. But the announcement of its Honor 6 flagship came with a surprising detail: it includes a feature that lets you interact with the device using your eyes. With some notable concerns about privacy implications, it looks kinda cool.The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this technology will look like, showing a woman looking at her phone with a snippet of the Uber app running at the top of the screen — something like a Live Activity. By changing the direction of her gaze, she opens the app in full.Honor calls the technology Magic Capsule, and describes it as “eye-tracking... Continue reading…

A drone flying outside of that abandoned train station that Ford wants to turn into an innovation hub. | Image: Michigan Central Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, the once beautiful but now abandoned train station that Ford is rehabilitating into an innovation and technology hub, is about to be swarmed by drones. The Ford subsidiary that operates the train station, Michigan Central, announced today that it’s teaming up with the state’s Department of Transportation (MDOT) to test out the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAM), or drones, to deliver medicine, food, and other small items to nearby residents. Image: Michigan Central The drone delivery testing will take place in what’s being called Detroit’s Advanced Aerial Innovation Region, an area within a three-mile radius of Michigan Central Station in which drones can conduct deliveries... Continue reading…

Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Meta The rumors of Threads’ early demise have been exaggerated.Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X has hit “just under” 100 million monthly users since it was released in early July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday during his company’s quarterly earnings call. “We’re three months in now, and I’m very happy with the trajectory,” he said, echoing the bullish comments he made about how Threads is doing during a recent interview with The Verge. “We’re now getting to the point where we’re going to be focusing on growing the community further. From what we can tell, people love it so far.”As the head of Instagram explained at the launch of Threads, Meta sees an opening to seriously compete with the platform formerly known as Twitter now... Continue reading…

Generative AI (GAI) is all the rage these days with tech companies investing a significant amount of time and money in the development of general purpose large language models (LLMs), chatbots, and AI copilots. One key area in this domain is text generation and now, Grammarly has decided to throw its hat into the ring by announcing the general availability of certain GAI capabilities for its writing utility.

If you recently made the switch from Windows to a Chromebook, or are running ChromeOS on a non-Chromebook tablet or PC, you're probably missing some of your favorite apps. So you might be wondering if you can run Windows apps on a Chromebook. Well, wonder no more, as the answer to that question is yes, you can run Windows apps on a Chromebook, with paid software to help you do it.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Nothing is more frustrating than buying a new pair of headphones, an OLED TV, or a backpack just to find out that you could have gotten it for a lot cheaper somewhere else. In order to keep customers happy — and prevent them from going elsewhere — many retailers offer price-matching policies where they promise to match a lower price you’ve found elsewhere. That’s information that could come in handy now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner.What follows are the price-matching policies for a variety of major retailers. There are a few things to make note of here. First, all price-matching policies have a number of rules attached to them. We’ve summarized some of the rules here, but you’d be advised to go to the... Continue reading…

There are a lot of USB cables on the market, but not all are created equal. While there are plenty of cheap alternatives, you're going to want to try and purchase ones that offer excellent durability, great speed, and safe charging.

Image: Valve Valve announced Wednesday that it has released SteamVR 2.0, launching the major update exactly a month after the surprise launch of the SteamVR 2.0 beta in September.“In this release we’re bringing all of what’s new and exciting on the Steam platform into VR,” Valve says in a Steam post. “This is our first big step in a larger ongoing effort to better unify the Steam ecosystem for all users, providing a more consistent experience across devices. This update also allows us to add new Steam features in the future much faster and more frequently.”SteamVR 2.0 has been a long time coming, with Valve saying in a 2019 year-in-review Steam post that it was “hard at work” on the update. Here are some of Valve’s highlights for what you’ll find... Continue reading…

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor is considered to be a mid-tier chip yet offers impressive performance with six physical cores and a total of 12 threads. Like other AM5 processors from AMD, the Ryzen 5 7600 only supports DDR5 RAM. We've rounded up our favorite picks for getting the most from this CPU and you can find the best RAM for the Ryzen 5 7600 in this guide.