Google’s new “24/7” AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I’m not sure it’s worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs. The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take on tasks and work on them […]
Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O, and it’s become one of my favorite Decoder traditions. There’s always a lot of news at I/O, and this year […]
Last year I deepfaked my kid’s stuffed animal to make it look like his plush deer was on vacation. It was an experiment to see if I could re-create the events depicted in a Gemini ad Google was running, and I never showed the videos of Buddy the deer on his adventures to my four-year-old. […]
Google is many things, but most of the time it’s a verb: It is what it is to search the internet for information. But what if it’s an AI agent doing the searching? And it’s doing it proactively? Without even telling you about it? In the world Google imagines, in which so much of the […]
Selling the smart home has been hard. Even Amazon has lost money in the space, despite putting hundreds of millions of Echo devices in people’s homes. Google has also reportedly struggled to turn a profit from its substantial investment in Nest. But now Google is seeing dollar signs in the prospect of selling AI-driven subscriptions […]
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. This week’s issue is a special early edition tied to The Verge’s Google I/O coverage. You can expect our next issue at its usual time […]
“There’s an app for that” was the promise of the App Store from the very beginning. The app that will get your phone to do the thing you want it to? It’s just a few taps away. The tagline wasn’t strictly true – I’m still waiting for that one perfect grocery list app. Still, apps […]
Google announced a new YouTube Shorts Remix feature that lets users restyle clips or even insert themselves into other people’s videos using Gemini Omni. Now, at the bottom of a YouTube Short, when you click the remix icon, you’ll see an option to “reimagine” it. Here, you can prompt Gemini to turn a video into […]
For years, tech companies have promised AI will give everyone a capable personal assistant but delivered something more like a clueless intern. Over the past six months, that has started to change, thanks largely to the viral open-source AI agent platform OpenClaw. And among the top AI labs now chasing similar success, one seems particularly […]
Google is adding a new Android feature that resembles Apple’s Handoff, allowing you to start a task on your Android phone and continue it right where you left off from a compatible tablet. “Continue On” is designed to eventually be bidirectional, but Google says that at launch it will only support tasks moving from a […]