Google’s products and services have been flooded with AI features over the past couple of years, but smart home has been largely spared until now. The company’s plans to replace Assistant are moving forward with a big Google Home reset. We’ve been told over and over that generative AI will do incredible things when given enough data, and here’s the test. There’s a new Home app with Gemini intelligence throughout…

Amazon’s voice assistant is hanging on by a thread. And that thread is generative AI—or, in Amazon’s case, Alexa+. Amazon hasn’t had a problem getting people to buy cheap, Alexa-powered gadgets. However, the Alexa in millions of homes today doesn’t make Amazon money. It’s largely used for simple tasks unrelated to commerce, like setting timers and checking the weather. As a result, Amazon’s Devices business has reportedly been siphoning money,…

In the age of cloud computing, protections baked into chips from Intel, AMD, and others are essential for ensuring confidential data and sensitive operations can’t be viewed or manipulated by attackers who manage to compromise servers running inside a data center. In many cases, these protections—which work by storing certain data and processes inside encrypted enclaves known as TEEs (Trusted Execution Enclaves)—are essential for safeguarding secrets stored in the cloud…

Ever wonder why ChatGPT slows down during long conversations? The culprit is a fundamental mathematical challenge: Processing long sequences of text requires massive computational resources, even with the efficiency tricks that companies have already deployed. While US tech giants can afford to throw more hardware at the problem, Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which is cut off from a steady supply of some advanced AI chips by export restrictions, has extra…

With a new set of Microsoft 365 features, knowledge workers will be able to generate complex Word documents or Excel spreadsheets using only text prompts to Microsoft’s chatbot. Two distinct products were announced, each using different models and accessed from within different tools—though the similar names Microsoft chose make it confusing to parse what’s what. Driven by OpenAI’s GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel,…

On Monday, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, a new AI language model the company calls its “most capable model to date,” with improved coding and computer use capabilities. The company also revealed Claude Code 2.0, a command-line AI agent for developers, and the Claude Agent SDK, which is a tool developers can use to build their own AI coding agents. Anthropic says it has witnessed Sonnet 4.5 working continuously on…

Google plans to begin testing its recently announced verification scheme for Android developers in the coming weeks, but there’s still precious little information on how the process will work. F-Droid, the free and open source app repository, isn’t waiting for the full rollout to take a position. In a blog post, F-Droid staff say that Google’s plan to force devs outside Google Play to register with the company threatens to…

You can’t spot a hedgehog from space, but you might be able to find where they live by looking for brambles. That’s the premise behind ongoing research at the University of Cambridge, where scientists are using satellite imagery and AI models to map potential hedgehog habitats across the UK by first identifying their favorite hiding spots: bramble patches. European hedgehog populations have declined by roughly 30 to 50 percent over…