Meta teases new AI-powered editing tools coming to Facebook and Instagram

Meta says Emu Edit “precisely follows instructions” to avoid altering anything besides user-specified changes. | Image: Meta

Facebook and Instagram are getting some new AI-powered creative tools that will allow users to edit their photographs and produce “high-quality videos” using text descriptions. On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new capabilities built on Emu — the company’s foundation model for image generation — that are being integrated into Facebook and Instagram.

The first, dubbed “Emu Edit,” will allow users to “precisely alter images based on text inputs.” The video demonstration for this looks similar to existing tools provided by Adobe, Google, and Canva, providing a way for users to remove or replace objects and people from photographs without any professional image editing experience.

Image: Meta

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Fitbit, once again, was struck by a server outage

Fitbit’s having issues with its servers again. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It appeared that Fitbit suffered from another server outage that affected syncing data from devices.

The news was first spotted by 9to5Google, and Downdetector shows a spike in outage reports starting at about 11AM ET. Some users also posted on Reddit and social media that they experienced issues. I tried syncing my Fitbit Charge 6, and while I was able to pull up the app and initiate a manual sync, the data did not show up within the app itself. Another colleague tried to download the app and was unable to log in. And unlike the last outage — which happened just a month ago — this may not have to do with whether you’ve migrated your Fitbit data over to a Google account. Another colleague who hasn’t migrated their data confirmed that...

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Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 2 Pro are at a new low price of $154

The Buds 2 Pro may be a weird name to say, but they look fantastic in purple. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Early Black Friday deals keep coming in hard and fast, with one of the latest dropping Samsung’s flagship earbuds to a new low. The Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro in all three colors are selling for $154 ($75 off) at Wellbots.

The noise-canceling earbuds offer some fancy extras when paired with a Galaxy phone, like spatial audio head tracking and auto device switching among Samsung gadgets. But even if you don’t have a phone made by Samsung, the Bluetooth buds offer a fairly light and comfy fit with 24-bit audio and IPX7 water and sweat resistance. It’s kind of wild that you can get all of this right now for just $54 more than the new entry-level Galaxy Buds FE that just came out.

Read our review of the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro.

Google has...

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Lucid swerves into the electric SUV market with the three-row Gravity

Lucid Motors officially announced its next electric vehicle, the three-row Gravity SUV. Based on the same platform as Lucid’s only other vehicle, the Air sedan, the Gravity is the California-based company’s first foray into the lucrative and intensely competitive SUV market.

Lucid says the SUV will get up to 440 miles of range, can accelerate 0–60 mph in under 3.5 seconds. It will have a base price of $80,000 and is expected to go into production in late 2024.

But the landscape looks remarkably different than it did three years ago when Lucid first teased the possibility of an electric SUV. The luxury EV market, in particular, is intensely competitive and overly saturated at this time, with offerings from Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac,...

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The Verge’s 2023 digital gift guide

Photo Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales and Cath Virginia / The Verge

We’ve assembled a collection of quick-hit gifts that can be issued within seconds, freeing you of shipping concerns and in-store shopping.

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Taylor Swift fans used record amounts of data during the Eras Tour in North America

Look at all those people using mobile broadband. | Photo by Emma McIntyre/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

Taylor Swift’s juggernaut Eras Tour warps culture wherever it goes. We’ve seen everything from pure economic impact to a delightful fan cam arms race to record-setting concert film numbers. And now we know that all those fans are using absolutely vast amounts of data during the show as well: AT&T’s network alone moved 28.9 terabytes of data during the busiest day of Taylor’s three-day tour stop at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, according to data the carrier has shared exclusively with The Verge. The company estimates 1TB of data represents about 200,000 photos or 400 hours of video moving across its network; 28.9TB is a staggering amount of photo and video sharing.

That’s the most data AT&T’s network has moved at any stadium for any e...

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iPhone 15 owners are having wireless charging issues in GM vehicles, too

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple might’ve solved the iPhone 15’s wireless charging issues in BMWs, but now GM says it’s looking into complaints about another problem. Numerous iPhone 15 owners across Reddit, Apple’s website, and Chevy forums say they can no longer properly charge the phone inside Chevrolet, Cadillac, and Buick vehicles.

One user on a GM truck forum says their iPhone 15 Pro Max worked “flawlessly” in their 2022 Chevy Silverado 2500 High Country until they updated their device to iOS 17.1. After the update, their phone will only charge for around “5 to 10 seconds” before stopping.

Other iPhone 15 owners have the same complaint across the many vehicles made by GM, including the 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV, 2023 Chevy Traverse, 2024 Buick Encore GX Avenir,...

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I know what Disney Plus with Hulu will look like, because I live in Canada

Prey premiered on Hulu in the US but is available elsewhere through Disney Plus. | Image: David Bukach / 20th Century Studios

Starting in December, Disney will begin testing a new version of its streaming services by combining Hulu and Disney Plus into a single app. The news (which follows Disney’s recent acquisition of Hulu) has led to a lot of questions. Is Hulu going away? What will the app experience be like? Do violent movies like Prey or No One Will Save You really fit with the Disney Plus brand? The good news is that the answer to most of those questions likely already exists outside of the US, which I know because I’ve been using it for more than two years. It’s not confusing at all. In fact, it looks a lot like traditional TV.

At the beginning of 2021, Disney launched a new content hub called Star, which is currently available in a whole bunch of...

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TikTok’s latest feature lets users make AR filters

Image: TikTok

TikTok users will now be able to create video effects right in TikTok without downloading another app. The company announced the new mobile editing feature, available now globally, in a blog post today.

AR effects are a big part of TikTok culture — they spawn challenges, viral games, and essentially a whole genre of content. But up until now, creators had to use a separate program called Effect House to make filters for the app.

In the TikTok mobile app, users can work off of filter templates and experiment with more than 2,000 assets to use in their effects. They’ll also be able to add interactivity in filters that’s triggered through movements like tapping the screen, winking, smiling, and more.

Though filters have always been...

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Sonos fixes its Dolby Atmos loud pop issue after years of complaints

Image: Chris Welch / The Verge

Sonos is issuing a software update to its Arc and Beam (Gen 2) soundbars to fix a loud popping issue that has plagued the devices for years. The issue led to a number of Sonos customers having to disable Sonos Atmos on their hardware to avoid a startling loud bang and series of audio pops that occurred for some after playing Dolby Atmos content. The Verge reported on the issue earlier this year after discovering that Sonos owners had been complaining about the problem for nearly three years.

“We are pleased to share that our team has identified a fix for the popping sound on Arc and it will be shipped to all customers as part of a software release today,” says Sonos in a statement posted to the company’s support forums. You can hear the...

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The Verge’s 2023 gaming and entertainment holiday gift guide

Photo Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales and Cath Virginia / The Verge

Even if someone is the type to buy all the latest big games, we’re certain we can help you find them a unique and adequately geeky gift this holiday.

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Fitbit Charge 6 review: practically a Pixel band

Google’s fingerprints are all over this casual fitness tracker.

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Barnes & Noble is ending support for older Nook e-readers

Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight from 2012. | Image: The Verge

Barnes & Noble is sunsetting support for some of its oldest e-readers. It’ll start by disabling the devices’ services starting in April 2024; afterward, the company will disable access to the Barnes & Noble bookstore, removing the ability to buy new books on the devices beginning in June 2024. The news impacts the following devices: the 2011 Nook Simple Touch; the 2012 Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight (oh hey, we reviewed this); and the 2013 Nook GlowLight.

In June 2024, Barnes & Noble will disable the ability to register the devices with a bn.com account and won’t allow users to sign in with a Nook account. This effectively time-capsules otherwise functional e-readers and locks them with the current owner so they can’t really hand them...

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Nvidia’s GeForce Now gets support for PC Game Pass with Xbox account syncing

Image: Nvidia

Nvidia is rolling out a new update for GeForce Now that allows members to sync their Xbox accounts to the cloud gaming service. Syncing up an Xbox account will allow GeForce Now members to access any PC Game Pass titles on Nvidia’s service, alongside their existing library of game purchases from the Microsoft Store.

Nvidia has completed the work needed to make the Microsoft Store work with GeForce Now, following the first Xbox PC games arriving on the service earlier this year. Nvidia also started rolling out the ability to stream first-party Microsoft games like Deathloop and Grounded as well asthird-party titles like No Man’s Sky and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord through a PC Game Pass subscription in August.

Image:...

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Apple Music Classical for the iPad is here

Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge

Apple has finally made its classical music app available for the iPad. Now, you can download Apple Music Classical, which is included with an Apple Music subscription, directly from the App Store.

Apple first launched its long-awaited classical music app on the iPhone in March, offering a library full of recordings you can search through by composer, work, conductor, and more. The app comes out of Apple’s 2021 acquisition of classical music streaming service Primephonic and allows you to listen to recordings with up to 192 kHz / 24-bit lossless audio.

Image: Apple

Apple Music Classical for the iPad comes with some optimizations for the larger display, including a full navigational sidebar that lets you quickly jump...

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The house that climate change built

Illustration by Nico H. Brausch for The Verge

The effort to climate-proof our housing is running into a mess of problems, including aging housing stock, out-of-date zoning laws, and NIMBY-ism. Can we build our way to a better future?

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Sony and Apple are giving PS5 owners six free months of Apple Music

The deal is available across all PS5 consoles, including the recently announced PS5 Slim. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Apple and Sony have put together a promotional offer for PS5 owners that allows them to enjoy ad-free access to the Apple Music streaming service for up to six months. The offer is available for new and “qualified returning” Apple Music customers until November 15th, 2024, and can be activated by simply downloading and signing into the Apple Music app on any PS5 model. After the initial six months is up, users in the US will be charged $10.99 per month — the standard price for an Individual Apple Music membership — to continue the service.

PS5 owners who take up the offer aren’t limited to just streaming Apple Music from their console. Once the six-month trial has started you can listen to tunes across any supported devices, including on...

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How an off-road rally for women keeps EVs rolling using clean energy

Photos by Tim Sutton, Mayfield Media, courtesy of Rebelle Rally

Sustainably charging electric vehicles and providing power to over 250 people for eight days in the middle of the desert is no easy task. Renewable Innovations has the answer.

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Google will make fake AI products to help you find real gifts

It doesn’t quite bring the products you’ve been imagining to life, but it’ll find you a pretty close match. | Image: Google / The Verge

Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is behind a bunch of new shopping features that aim to help users find niche or otherwise unique products for a friend or themselves. These include using AI to generate gift ideas or fashion items you can then shop for. Google is also expanding virtual try-ons to men ahead of the holiday season.

Starting today, users in the US who have already opted into SGE via Search Labs will be presented with a selection of suggested subcategories when searching for gift ideas, alongside links to helpful content to learn more about a product or gift category. For example — searching for “great gifts for home cooks” will provide explorable subcategories like specialty tools, artisanal ingredients,...

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Google is embedding inaudible watermarks right into its AI generated music

SynthID works by converting audio into a visual spectogram and adding a visual watermark. | Image: Google

Audio created using Google DeepMind’s AI Lyria model, such as tracks made with YouTube’s new audio generation features, will be watermarked with SynthID to let people identify their AI-generated origins after the fact. In a blog post, DeepMind said the watermark shouldn’t be detectable by the human ear and “doesn’t compromise the listening experience,” and added that it should still be detectable even if an audio track is compressed, sped up or down, or has extra noise added.

Watermarking tools like SynthID are seen as an important safeguard against some of the harms of generative AI. President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, for example, calls for a new set of government-led standards for watermarking...

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Windows is now an app for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and PCs

The new Windows App. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has created a Windows App for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Windows, and web browsers. The app essentially takes the previous Windows 365 app and turns it into a central hub for streaming a copy of Windows from a remote PC, Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, and Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services.

Microsoft supports multiple monitors through its Windows App, custom display resolutions and scaling, and device redirection for peripherals like webcams, storage devices, and printers. The preview version of the Windows App isn’t currently available for Android, though.

Image: Microsoft

The Windows App acts as a hub to connect to remote and cloud PCs.

The Windows App is also limited to...

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YouTube teases AI tool that clones famous singers — with their permission

Photo by: Trae Patton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images

Google is testing new generative AI features for YouTube that’ll let people create music tracks using just a text prompt or a simple hummed tune. The first, Dream Track, already seeded to a few creators on the platform, is designed to auto-generate short 30-second music tracks in the style of famous artists. The feature can imitate nine different artists, who’ve chosen to collaborate with YouTube on its development. YouTube is also showing off new tools that can generate music tracks from a hum.

The announcement comes as YouTube attempts to navigate the emerging norms and copyright rules around AI generated music, while also protecting its relationship with major music labels. The issue was brought into sharp relief when an AI-generated...

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Epic is going to let you report voice conversations in Fortnite

Image: Epic Games

Epic Games is adding a new voice reporting feature into Fortnite to help catch players who break the company’s community rules.

If the feature is on — if you’re under 18, the feature is always on when using voice chats — the device you’re playing the game on will securely capture the past five minutes of audio on a “rolling basis,” according to Epic’s blog post. (Epic stresses that it does not store voice recordings on its servers unless you file a report.) Audio after five minutes is deleted.

When you report a conversation, “the voice chat audio captured from the last five minutes will be uploaded with the report and sent to Epic moderators for review,” Epic says. (Reports are anonymous.) Then, the company says it will auto-delete clips...

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Spotify’s podcast and audiobook discovery will get a boost from Google Cloud’s AI

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

It’s a cliché at this point to say that podcasts (and, to a less publicized extent, audiobooks) have a discovery problem. To help fix that, Spotify announced it’s using Google Cloud’s AI tools to improve both content discovery and personalized recommendations for its audio offerings.

With this latest move, Spotify is using Google Cloud’s LLMs (large language models) to analyze the roughly 5 million podcasts and 350,000 audiobooks in its content library with a goal of trying to “augment” the metadata, according to a press release. (The Verge has reached out to Spotify to clarify exactly what “augment” means in this case). A podcast or audiobook’s metadata includes information like the title, the name of the host or author, show notes,...

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Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 N performance EV is coming March 2024

The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N has a soul patch. | Image: Hyundai

Hyundai showed off its production performance-variant Ioniq 5 “N” at the LA Auto Show this week, releasing final specifications of the electric crossover and announcing its availability at US dealerships in March 2024.

As previously announced in July, this new version of the Ioniq 5 was built by Hyundai’s performance tuning teams under its N sub-brand. The engineers behind the 2025 Ioniq 5 N used Hyundai’s base E-GMP electric vehicle platform, adding motorsport tech learned from the automaker’s “rolling labs” experiment vehicles like the N Vision 74, RM20e, and the RN22e.

Hyundai includes features for habitual motorheads like the N e-shift, which mimics the feeling of simulating an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission gas car, and the N...

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Google is going to let teens use Bard, though with some guardrails

Illustration: The Verge

Google is going to allow teens to use Bard beginning Thursday, though the AI chatbot will have some guardrails in place, according to a blog post from Google’s Tulsee Doshi.

Bard will be available for teens in “most countries around the world” as long as they meet Google’s minimum age requirement to be in charge of their own account, Doshi says. (For many countries, that age is 13; Google lists the exceptions in a support document.) To start, teens will only be able to use Bard in English, but Doshi says Google will add more languages “over time.”

Google has a few safety measures to help teens understand how generative AI works and prevent them from seeing unsafe content.

• As part of the onboarding process for teens, Google will share...

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Threads is testing hashtags with a side of trending topics

Threads is adding trending topics and hashtags. | Image: Meta

Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta is testing a new tagging feature for Threads that’s like hashtags, but not exactly. Yes, you’ll use a hashtag to create or add to a topic’s conversation, but instead of showing up as a hashtagged word, Threads converts it to a blue-text hyperlink. Australian users will get the first crack at it in the initial “limited test” before it gets a wider release.

Typing a “#” into the post text field brings up a card with the topic you’re tagging or other, similar ones. Underneath that, each of the topics comes with a count of posts about it, just like Instagram does.

Those with Threads’ new tagging feature can only add a single topic to a post at a time, which will probably limit anyone hoping to spam their...

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The best smartphone you can buy for under $500

You can get a great device for less than $500 these days if you know how to pick your priorities. | Image: The Verge

You can’t have absolutely everything at this price, but you can get a great smartphone. Whether you want an iPhone, a 120Hz screen, or water resistance, you’ve got options.

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The FCC can now punish telecom providers for charging customers more for less

Illustrator by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Federal Communications Commission has approved a new set of rules aiming to prevent “digital discrimination.” It means the agency can hold telecom companies accountable for digitally discriminating against customers — or giving certain communities poorer service (or none at all) based on income level, race, or religion.

The new rules come as part of the Biden Administration’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which requires the FCC to develop and adopt anti-digital discrimination rules. “Many of the communities that lack adequate access to broadband today are the same areas that suffer from longstanding patterns of residential segregation and economic disadvantage,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said following today’s vote....

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Be My Eyes AI offers GPT-4-powered support for blind Microsoft customers

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft is working on offering a better customer service experience powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 for its visually impaired users through a partnership with Be My Eyes, a company that helps visually impaired individuals tackle everyday tasks with the help of sighted volunteers.

Microsoft is integrating a digital visual assistant tool Be My Eyes created — Be My AI — into its Microsoft Disability Answer Desk, allowing visually impaired Microsoft users to resolve technical issues or perform tasks like updating software without needing the assistance of a call center agent. After testing the tool earlier this year on Microsoft users, Be My Eyes said the tool resolved inquiries in four minutes on average, which is less than half the average...

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