Author: News Room
Unboxing a flagship smartphone used to feel like a solved equation. You paid top dollar, handed over your credit card, and received a fully baked piece of hardware capable of navigating basic daily life without a thermal meltdown. Last month, standing under direct sunlight in 45-degree weather, my partner held her $1,000 Pixel 10 Pro up to my car’s air conditioning vent just so Google Maps wouldn’t shut down mid-route. It wasn’t rendering 3D ray-traced graphics or exporting 8K video. I was simply following GPS directions while listening to a podcast – a routine task my three-year-old iPhone 15 handled…
Twitch has quietly started feeding your streams, VODs, and clips into Amazon’s AI training pipeline, and the opt-out button is tucked so deep in your settings that most people will never stumble on it. As Kotaku reports, streaming reporter Zach Bussey spotted a new toggle inside Twitch’s account settings on August 12 that lets you block your content from training Amazon’s generative AI tools. The screenshot spread quickly, and so did the direct link to the exact settings page, mostly because Twitch never bothered to announce the change in the first place. What happens if you don’t opt out? Leave…
Qualcomm wants to fix the biggest problem with budget laptops: performance and battery life. In May of this year, the company showed off its entry-tier new Snapdragon C Platform, made for budget laptops starting at $300, promising speed, battery life, and AI smarts that budget shoppers usually have to skip. Now, the chip giant has just revealed the specs for its latest chip and if what it shows comes true, Intel is going to have a big headache on its hands. But competition is good for consumers, so they will be the real winners here. Snapdragon C specifications Qualcomm Snapdragon…
Pixel 11’s new voice typing feature is called Rambler, and Google built it around the way people actually speak. Gemini Intelligence can clean up dictation even when you use filler words and format your thoughts into clearer text before you send it. Rambler works through Gboard across the Pixel 11 series. Instead of carefully constructing every sentence before you tap the microphone, you can speak naturally, read over what Gemini produces, and send it. It sounds like a small change, but anyone who regularly fixes messy voice transcripts will probably understand the appeal immediately. How the new dictation works Traditional…
For the last two generations, I’ve complained that the Pixel’s video performance trails behind what’s available under other brands. Google has finally agreed. The Pixel 11 lineup landed today with its biggest video overhaul in years. However, not every upgrade made it to every model in the family. So, what’s the biggest video upgrade here? To kick things off, let’s discuss the bump in video resolution. The Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL can now shoot 8K at 24 or 30fps. The feature is powered by Video Boost, the same cloud-assisted pipeline that’s stayed a Pro-only perk since the Pixel…
AI companies are increasingly looking for ways to mark content generated by their models. Now, someone has built an open-source tool designed to remove some of those marks. A GitHub project called watermarks-remover is designed to strip different types of AI provenance signals from text and files. According to its documentation, it can work with invisible Unicode characters, statistical text watermarks and metadata embedded in formats including PNG, JPEG, SVG, PDF, DOCX, ODT, HTML and Markdown. That sounds straightforward until you look at how some of these watermarks actually work. A metadata tag can be removed relatively cleanly. A statistical…
Google’s newest Pixels are finally here, and the Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL are doing most of the heavy lifting this time around. While the standard Pixel 11 settles for a modest refresh, with a faster chip, double the base storage, and faster wireless charging, the two Pro models step up with a brighter, more durable display, better cameras, and HiLight, an array of LED lights around the flash that glow when the phone is face down, signaling whether it’s worth reaching for or better left alone. A faster Tensor G6 chip and a storage bump for the Pro…
Before the Made by Google event even went live, Google disclosed everything about its new hardware lineup: four new Pixel 11 phones, the Pixel Watch 5, its first-ever tracker, refreshed Pixel Buds Pro 2, and a range of new Gemini-powered software features. The good news is that everything announced today is available for pre-order and will hit stores on August 20, 2026. Prices have also increased across the lineup. Without any further ado, here’s everything Google announced today. Made by Google 2026: At a glance ProductStarting PriceColorsDisplayAvailablePixel 11$899Frost, Obsidian, Pistachio, Hibiscus6.3″August 20Pixel 11 Pro$1,099Canyon, Fog, Olive, Obsidian6.3″August 20Pixel 11 Pro…
Sony has confirmed the next batch of games coming to the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog in August, and there are two particularly great additions. Helldivers 2 is available through the service for the first time, while the excellent Kingdom Come: Deliverance II joins later this month. The two games offer very different experiences, but both are among the most notable releases of the past few years. Two very different games headline August Helldivers 2 launched in February 2024 and quickly became one of the biggest multiplayer breakout hits of the year. More than two years later, it still has a…
As voice agents and photorealistic avatars move into enterprise software, the sales call is becoming a test case for whether AI can do more than summarize a conversation after it ends. The pressure point is familiar to anyone who has sat through a software demo: a buyer asks about a security review, integration edge case, migration plan, or competitive tradeoff, and the answer often belongs to a sales engineer who is on another call. 1mind is one company working on that shift. The San Francisco startup builds AI sales agents it calls Superhumans for web, product, email, and live sales…