The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. It wasn't supposed to be anything in music, really. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines. The engineer, Homer Dudley, built some pretty neat technology that could both capture and synthesize the human voice.As so much great tech does, the vocoder immediately took on a life of its own. It played a key role in World War II, enabling secret communications across the ocean. And then, only a few years later, it started to become a musical phenomenon. At first a few artists were …Read the full story at The Verge.

Games were previously stored on hard drives before SSDs came along, but since then, we've slowly moved across to solid-state storage. I recall when SSDs were first released onto the market, and manufacturers all urged everyone to upgrade from HDDs. After SATA SSDs, which shared the same interface as the drives they replaced, we introduced NVMe PCI SSDs, which are still relied on today to run the OS and other frequently used applications and games.

AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex are fantastic for use in the home lab. I've been using them to generate automations for Home Assistant, figure out what I'm going wrong with networking, and tons of other things. But they all have one problem: your API keys aren't stored safely.

AI was everywhere at the GDC Festival of Gaming this year. Vendors at the event pitched generative AI tools for things like making AI-driven NPCs and even entire games from a chat box. On the show floor, I spent 10 minutes playing a demo of a pixel-art fantasy world generated by Tencent's AI tools. In a briefing with Razer, I watched an AI assistant for QA automatically log issues in a shooter game. And there were many talks about AI, including a standing-room only presentation by Google DeepMind researchers about playable AI-generated spaces.But there was one key place where AI was missing: the games themselves. Of the many developers I s …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about online age verification and your privacy, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedVirtual private networks, or VPNs, weren't always used to access region-locked Netflix streams, bypass censorship online, or to prevent your internet service provider (ISP) from tracking your browsing history. It took years for VPNs to become the technology we know today, which provides an encrypted connection between your device and a private server, while conce …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'll admit it; the best way to get me to pay attention to a DIY project is to put a cute little face on it. This goes double if said face is displayed on a little screen which updates to represent the state of the project. What can I say? I'm just a sucker for little personifications.

I don’t really rely on a single AI tool anymore. Not necessarily because I went out of my way to build an AI-heavy setup, but because these tools have just naturally become a part of how I get work done. At this point, it’s hard to avoid AI in your workflow, so might as well make it work for you. I’ve tested a lot of AI tools by now, and while I have some on rotation, others have made their way into my productivity stack more permanently.

Grok, how do you make chips? | Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Elon Musk announced plans to build a Terafab plant in Austin, Texas, that will be jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX. The goal is to eventually build chips at scale for robotics, artificial intelligence, and space-based data centers for Musk's various companies.Musk has expressed concern, as have other executives, about the chip industry's ability to keep up with demand as the AI industry has boomed. But building a chip fabrication plant is complex, requires billions of dollars, many years, and a ton of specialized equipment. And, as Bloomberg points out, Musk "has no background in semiconductor production and a history of over-promising on g …Read the full story at The Verge.

Just like researching when at school, the process is significantly easier with a study buddy to keep you on track. NotebookLM is one of our favorite tools for solo study, with deep insights gleaned from the sources you feed it, and nowhere else.

It has been a little while since we last heard about Intel's Battlemage GPUs. In fact, the last time I reported on them was a year ago, when Intel said it might halt the production of high-end cards. If you liked Intel's range of graphics cards and wanted more, here's some good news for you: the company is reportedly getting ready to reveal the Arc Pro B70 and B65 “Big Battlemage” cards in under a week's time. Unfortunately, if you're hoping for a powerful gaming GPU, you may be left disappointed.

Sonos is no stranger to the occasional sale. The iconic audio company routinely runs sales around Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day, and the Super Bowl, though it’s rare to see substantial discounts on its portable speakers outside of tentpole shopping events. Fortunately, if you have no interest in the Sonos Move 2 or forthcoming Sonos Play, the Sonos Roam 2 is currently available from Amazon, Walmart, and Sonos for $139 ($40 off), which is just $5 shy of its lowest price to date.Sonos Roam 2Where to Buy: $179 $139 at Amazon $179 $139 at Sonos $179 $139 at WalmartThe original Sonos Roam was by no means a bad speaker, but the quality-of-life updates on the Roam 2 are genuinely meaningful, particularly if you were the kind of person who constantly struggled to pair the first-gen model with anything via Bluetooth (guilty as charged). The latest Roam has a dedicated pairing button on the back — meaning you don’t have to hold down the power button for a set period of time just to sync it with a new phone — while still letting you tap into Sonos’ larger ecosystem of products via your home’s Wi-Fi network.Sound quality remains unchanged, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The first-gen Roam was one of the best-sounding speakers in its class, with pleasantly crisp vocal performance and enough depth to satiate most folks, especially when Sonos’s automatic Trueplay room optimization tool did its job. It’s a bit of a bummer that the USB-C port remains strictly for power, and that battery life tops out at 10 hours, but I’d venture that most folks are simply going to be using it at the park or simply for an afternoon at the pool. After all, it has IP67 waterproofing, which means it can withstand up to 30 minutes in 3 feet of water.Perhaps best of all, though, Sons claims to have made some tweaks and optimizations under the hood to ensure battery performance holds up in the long run, which was a crux of the original model. I haven’t had the Roam 2 long enough to say for sure, but so far, so good.Other Sonos deals to considerSonos AceWhere to Buy: $399 $299 at Amazon $399 $299 at Best Buy $399 $299 at SonosSonos Beam (second-gen)Where to Buy: $499 $369 at Amazon $499 $369 at Best Buy $499 $369 at Sonos

The good people here at XDA have been falling in love with Claude, and we've been on the hunt for ways to prompt it better. Giving Claude instructions is a great way to get it to work the way you want, and while they often require a bit of tweaking to get them just the way you want, that's part of the fun.