Illustration: The Verge Google is going to allow teens to use Bard beginning Thursday, though the AI chatbot will have some guardrails in place, according to a blog post from Google’s Tulsee Doshi.Bard will be available for teens in “most countries around the world” as long as they meet Google’s minimum age requirement to be in charge of their own account, Doshi says. (For many countries, that age is 13; Google lists the exceptions in a support document.) To start, teens will only be able to use Bard in English, but Doshi says Google will add more languages “over time.”Google has a few safety measures to help teens understand how generative AI works and prevent them from seeing unsafe content.As part of the onboarding process for teens, Google will share... Continue reading…

Despite the iPhone 15 series being the latest models in Apple's smartphone lineup, the iPhone 14 Pro paved the way for the current series with the introduction of a more versatile AMOLED display with a varied refresh rate, ushering in the Always-On Display (AOD) and also the much discussed Dynamic Island.

It doesn’t quite bring the products you’ve been imagining to life, but it’ll find you a pretty close match. | Image: Google / The Verge Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is behind a bunch of new shopping features that aim to help users find niche or otherwise unique products for a friend or themselves. These include using AI to generate gift ideas or fashion items you can then shop for. Google is also expanding virtual try-ons to men ahead of the holiday season.Starting today, users in the US who have already opted into SGE via Search Labs will be presented with a selection of suggested subcategories when searching for gift ideas, alongside links to helpful content to learn more about a product or gift category. For example — searching for “great gifts for home cooks” will provide explorable subcategories like specialty tools, artisanal ingredients,... Continue reading…

Nothing is set in stone at this point when it comes to Windows 12, but you may have already heard a rumor or two about Microsoft's next big OS as we inch closer to its potential release in 2024. There are plenty of ways Microsoft can improve and build upon the merits of the current OS to make Windows 12 better, and I hope the company is putting a conscious effort into making it better for gamers too. I say that because Windows 11 didn't exactly have the best reputation among gamers, especially at the beginning. In fact, many users still swear by Windows 10 in 2023.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge It’s a cliché at this point to say that podcasts (and, to a less publicized extent, audiobooks) have a discovery problem. To help fix that, Spotify announced it’s using Google Cloud’s AI tools to improve both content discovery and personalized recommendations for its audio offerings. With this latest move, Spotify is using Google Cloud’s LLMs (large language models) to analyze the roughly 5 million podcasts and 350,000 audiobooks in its content library with a goal of trying to “augment” the metadata, according to a press release. (The Verge has reached out to Spotify to clarify exactly what “augment” means in this case). A podcast or audiobook’s metadata includes information like the title, the name of the host or author, show notes,... Continue reading…

SynthID works by converting audio into a visual spectogram and adding a visual watermark. | Image: Google Audio created using Google DeepMind’s AI Lyria model, such as tracks made with YouTube’s new audio generation features, will be watermarked with SynthID to let people identify their AI-generated origins after the fact. In a blog post, DeepMind said the watermark shouldn’t be detectable by the human ear and “doesn’t compromise the listening experience,” and added that it should still be detectable even if an audio track is compressed, sped up or down, or has extra noise added.Watermarking tools like SynthID are seen as an important safeguard against some of the harms of generative AI. President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, for example, calls for a new set of government-led standards for watermarking... Continue reading…

The new Windows App. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft has created a Windows App for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows, and web browsers. The app essentially takes the previous Windows 365 app and turns it into a central hub for streaming a copy of Windows from a remote PC, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services.Microsoft supports multiple monitors through its Windows App, custom display resolutions and scaling, and device redirection for peripherals like webcams, storage devices, and printers. The preview version of the Windows App isn’t currently available for Android, though. Image: Microsoft The Windows App acts as a hub to connect to remote and cloud PCs. The Windows App is also limited to... Continue reading…

The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N has a soul patch. | Image: Hyundai Hyundai showed off its production performance-variant Ioniq 5 “N” at the LA Auto Show this week, releasing final specifications of the electric crossover and announcing its availability at US dealerships in March 2024.As previously announced in July, this new version of the Ioniq 5 was built by Hyundai’s performance tuning teams under its N sub-brand. The engineers behind the 2025 Ioniq 5 N used Hyundai’s base E-GMP electric vehicle platform, adding motorsport tech learned from the automaker’s “rolling labs” experiment vehicles like the N Vision 74, RM20e, and the RN22e.Hyundai includes features for habitual motorheads like the N e-shift, which mimics the feeling of simulating an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission gas car, and the N... Continue reading…

Photo by: Trae Patton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images Google is testing new generative AI features for YouTube that’ll let people create music tracks using just a text prompt or a simple hummed tune. The first, Dream Track, already seeded to a few creators on the platform, is designed to auto-generate short 30-second music tracks in the style of famous artists. The feature can imitate nine different artists, who’ve chosen to collaborate with YouTube on its development. YouTube is also showing off new tools that can generate music tracks from a hum.The announcement comes as YouTube attempts to navigate the emerging norms and copyright rules around AI generated music, while also protecting its relationship with major music labels. The issue was brought into sharp relief when an AI-generated... Continue reading…

If you've used the internet at all in the last couple of months, you've probably heard of ChatGPT. Like Google Bard and Bing Chat, it's a chatbot powered by natural language processing advancements and has been trained on vast swathes of internet data. You can ask it a question, and it will give you an answer, though the authenticity of the information in the answer that it gives you is sometimes questionable. The public, free version of ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, though you can pay for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and get access to GPT-4 for $20 per month.

Image: Epic Games Epic Games is adding a new voice reporting feature into Fortnite to help catch players who break the company’s community rules.If the feature is on — if you’re under 18, the feature is always on when using voice chats — the device you’re playing the game on will securely capture the past five minutes of audio on a “rolling basis,” according to Epic’s blog post. (Epic stresses that it does not store voice recordings on its servers unless you file a report.) Audio after five minutes is deleted.When you report a conversation, “the voice chat audio captured from the last five minutes will be uploaded with the report and sent to Epic moderators for review,” Epic says. (Reports are anonymous.) Then, the company says it will auto-delete clips... Continue reading…

Threads is adding trending topics and hashtags. | Image: Meta Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta is testing a new tagging feature for Threads that’s like hashtags, but not exactly. Yes, you’ll use a hashtag to create or add to a topic’s conversation, but instead of showing up as a hashtagged word, Threads converts it to a blue-text hyperlink. Australian users will get the first crack at it in the initial “limited test” before it gets a wider release.Typing a “#” into the post text field brings up a card with the topic you’re tagging or other, similar ones. Underneath that, each of the topics comes with a count of posts about it, just like Instagram does.Those with Threads’ new tagging feature can only add a single topic to a post at a time, which will probably limit anyone hoping to spam their... Continue reading…