Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ now works with Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp
The new integrations join other services like Yelp, Uber, OpenTable and others.
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How AI broke the smart home in 2025
This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time […]
From Roombas to e-bikes, why are hardware startups going bankrupt?
The hardware world had a brutal week, with iRobot, Luminar, and Rad Power Bikes all filing for bankruptcy. Each company faces its own mix of tariff pressures, supply chain issues, and shifting markets, but together they tell a larger story about the challenges of building physical products in an era of global trade tensions and cheap overseas competition. From […]
Amazon’s new Alexa+ feature adds conversational AI to Ring doorbells
Amazon said that the feature uses the Ring doorbell’s video descriptions to determine who the person in front the camera is based on their uniform, actions, and what they are holding.
It’s the great AGI rebrand
The cringe comes for us all, and for all our hot new turns of phrase. “Rizz” lost its luster when grandparents started asking about its meaning. Teachers who dressed up as “6-7” on Halloween drove a nail into the coffin of Gen Alpha’s rallying cry. And tech CEOs who once trumpeted the quest for “artificial […]
Democratic lawmakers are investigating data centers’ impact on electricity costs
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) fired off a letter on Tuesday to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and several major data center developers to investigate the impact they’re having on Americans’ utility bills. The move comes as rising electricity rates became an increasingly hot-button issue in the US, which […]
Amazon has a new leader for its ‘AGI’ group as it plays catch-up on AI
Amazon’s head of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Rohit Prasad, is leaving the company next year as it reaches an “inflection point” in its development of the technology, CEO Andy Jassy announced on Wednesday. As part of the change, Peter DeSantis, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, will helm a new division focused on […]
Amazon appoints longtime AWS exec Peter DeSantis to lead new AI org
DeSantis has spent 27 years at Amazon, including eight years as an SVP for AWS, the cloud provider that powers about one-third of the internet.
Let’s talk about Fallout season 2
Years often go by between new seasons of big streaming shows – just ask fans of Severance or Stranger Things – but with Fallout the wait hasn’t been so bad. The first season was a welcome surprise when it started streaming last April, managing to capture the series’ distinctly playful take on the end of […]
Amazon reportedly in talks to invest $10B in OpenAI as circular deals stay popular
Amazon is in early discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI in a deal that would see the AI lab using the e-commerce giant’s AI chips.