How to add extensions to Gemini

Image: The Verge

I was driving home the other day and wanted to call my partner and let him know that I was stuck in traffic. (Not an unusual event on Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway.) I’ve got a relatively old car (it’s a 2007 model, so we’re talking no real smarts), and so I depend on my phone rather than any built-in intelligence to deal with calls, music, etc. Usually, there’s no problem, but this time, when I called out, “Hey Google — call Jim on his mobile!” my phone informed me — in a very long-winded paragraph — that Gemini doesn’t do that:

I am a large language model and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about this person is limited.

Oh, right. Gemini.

I had recently installed Google’s new AI virtual assistant to try it out. This meant that Google Assistant, the usual voice-activated service, had been automatically shut down, and that Gemini, which is brand new and not really fully baked, was still missing a lot of the usability of Google Assistant — including, much to my irritation, making phone calls and sending texts.

However, there is a workaround — or rather, a way to increase Gemini’s features. You...

Read the full story at The Verge.

iRobot’s founder is working on a new kind of home robot

Colin Angle, the former CEO of iRobot, is launching a home robot startup. | Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Colin Angle, the co-founder of iRobot and its CEO for three decades, is getting back into robotics with a new startup called Familiar Machines & Magic. According to The Boston Globe, the company is developing a new kind of home robot focusing on health and wellness that might take the form of an animal or a “familiar.”

The company is currently in stealth mode, Angle tells The Globe, and includes the former CTO of iRobot, Chris Jones, as well as iRobot’s Ira Renfrew, who left the company to work on robotics at Amazon, including the shuttered Scout delivery robot.

Angle was working to turn iRobot and its Roomba robot vacuum cleaners into the brains of the smart home before he left the company following the collapse of its sale to Amazon in January of this year. Since then, iRobot has slashed its R&D budget, cut almost 50 percent of its staff, and refocused its business on home cleaning machines.

Familiar Machines & Magic has raised $15 million from eight investors and is looking for $15 million more, according to TechCrunch. A job listing for the company on LinkedIn describes it as a “well-funded, new embodied AI and robotics startup based outside of Boston.”

It's an interesting pivot for Angle to go from the practical to the personal. To date, robots that can do things for you, such as robot vacuum cleaners, robot litter boxes, and robot lawnmowers, have been more successful than “companion bots.” Jibo, Moxie, and Anki are just a few that have powered down over the years.

However, advances in generative AI could bring more potential to the space. These technologies could make robots such as the lovable Lovot or Sony’s Aibo, which the company recently resurrected, seem more human-like, have conversations with you, and be more useful than simply being cute.

For example, Israeli startup Intuition Robotics has been working on ElliQ, an AI-powered social robot designed to keep the elderly and home-bound company, since 2017. I’ve tested a couple of versions of the tabletop robot, and its third-generation model, which incorporates generative AI, is significantly more lifelike and engaging.

What exact type of magic Angle and his Familars will conjure up remains to be seen. One investor described “furry pets to address loneliness” to The Globe. However, some combination of personality and practicality that positively impacts the health and well-being of household members feels like a good place to start.

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Nvidia’s $249 dev kit promises cheap, small AI power

Nvidia announced the latest in its Jetson Orin Nano AI computer line, the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. Sort of like a Raspberry Pi but for powerful AI processing, the tiny $249 computer packs more of an AI processing punch than the kit did before — for half the price. It’s available to buy now.

The Jetson Nano line has been a low-cost way for hobbyists and makers to power AI and robotics projects since its introduction in 2019. Nvidia says the Nano Super’s neural processing is 70 percent higher, at 67 TOPS, than the 40 TOPS Nano. It also has 50 percent more memory bandwidth, at 102GB/s, which should speed up those operations.

The Jetson Orin Nano Super kit uses essentially the same hardware as the original Orin Nano kit, and the company says it will get the same performance gains with a new JetPack update. Nvidia says the boost comes from “a new power mode which increases the GPU, memory, and CPU clocks.”

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang showed off the Nano Super in a video:

The developer kit includes a reference carrier board and a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB system-on-module, comprised of an Nvidia Ampere GPU with tensor cores and 6-core Arm CPU. Nvidia calls the Nano Super Developer Kit “an ideal solution” for building chatbots or visual AI agents, as well as AI-based robots.

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iRobot’s mop-equipped Roomba Combo j7 Plus is nearly matching its best price to date

The Roomba Combo j7 Plus is a highly capable robot vacuum / mop hybrid that comes with its own auto-empty dock. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Cleaning up after holiday parties can be a real pain, but a robot vacuum like the iRobot Roomba Combo j7 Plus can speed up process. And thankfully right now it’s just $669 ($331 off) at Wellbots, which is just $20 shy of its Black Friday all-time low price. If you want to gift the robot vacuum / mop hybrid, you can get it by Christmas when you buy it for $30 more at Amazon and Best Buy.

Everything about the Roomba Combo j7 Plus is designed to make cleaning easier. Like our favorite Roomba, the newer Roomba Combo j9 Plus, it comes with its own auto-emptying docking station and a retractable mop that lifts itself up over the vacuum to keep carpets dry. It also has features like AI obstacle avoidance, allowing it navigate around shoes, gifts, and other clutter left on the floor, and dual rubber roller brushes that does a great job of sucking up dirt from carpets. And if you run into trouble with it, The Verge’s smart home reviewer says that Roombas have “a history of being easy to repair,” unlike pricier rivals like Dreame X40 or Roborock’s S8 MaxV Ultra that may mop better.

Unlike the Combo j9 Plus, though, the last-gen Combo j7 Plus can’t refill its own mop tank. It also doesn’t come with iRobot’s Dirt Detective system, which lets it prioritize and really hone in on particularly messy areas. That said, given the Combo j7 Plus is currently about half the price of the Combo j9 Plus, we think those are fair-trade offs.

Read our iRobot Roomba Combo j7 Plus review.

More deals we think we are worth a look

• The Loop Experience 2 earplugs are on sale starting at $27.95 ($7 off) at Amazon, which is their all-time low price. The earplugs do a great job of cutting down loud noise, which is why we highlighted them this year in our budget-friendly holiday gift guide. They reduce noise by 17 decibels so you can still hear your surroundings but at a safer volume. The earplugs offer a secure universal fit, too, making them a great gift for frequent concertgoers or anybody else yearning for some peace and quiet.
• If you’re looking for a good video doorbell to keep an eye on porch pirates, the Aqara G4 Video Doorbell is down to its best price of $89.99 ($40 off) at Best Buy. It’s one of our favorites, party because it’s the only battery-powered video doorbell compatible with Apple Home that also works with HomeKit Secure Video. Yet the 1080p doorbell also has other things going for it, including 24/7 local video recording, facial recognition, and smart alerts for people, packages, animals, and vehicles.
• The Beats Solo 4 have returned to their all-time low price of $99.99 (about $100 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. It’s a shame they lack noise cancellation, but the headphones still offer good value with bass-rich sound as well as features like spatial audio and lossless playback over USB-C (or 3.5mm). They also offer native support for both iOS and Android, making them a good buy if you want some platform flexibility. Read our review.

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Astronaut Don Pettit shows how to take long-exposure photos from the ISS

A 15-second time exposure image. | Image: Don Pettit

NASA astronaut Don Pettit created his own device to help him take photos of the stars while on the International Space Station — and the results are pretty impressive. In a Reddit thread spotted by Space.com, Pettit describes how he brought a homemade star tracker with him to space, allowing his camera to capture long-exposure photos without the stars leaving any trails behind.

Star trackers are designed to rotate with the Earth — or in Pettit’s case, the ISS — to prevent distortion when taking pictures of the night sky. One of Pettit’s photos, which you can see above, was a 15-second time exposure. He says his tracker completes a rotation every 90 minutes to match the ISS’s pitch rate. “Without this tracker, you can not take photo[s] longer than 1/2 sec without star blur due to the rate of orbital motion,” Pettit writes.

Image: Don Pettit

A photo of a “large Magellanic Cloud visible in the southern hemisphere.”

In a separate post, Pettit notes that aligning the tracker on a moving platform isn’t an easy task, adding that he can currently take up to 30-second exposures “without significant star motion.” Taking photos through the ISS’s windows also presents another challenge. “Looking through 4 panes of glass, two of which are 30mm thick, at an angle makes for some distortion and relative optically induced star motion,” Pettit says.

Image: Don Pettit

A photo showing Pettit’s homemade sidereal orbital tracker.

If you want to see even more incredible images captured by Pettit, you can browse through them on his Reddit account page, X, and Instagram. Many show what photos from the ISS look like without compensating for its movement.

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Walmart starts its own Game Informer-style gaming site

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

The ever-dwindling field of games media has a new player: Walmart. Restart is new website run by Moonrock — a marketing company specializing in bringing brands to video games — and sponsored by the largest retailer in the United States.

A new games site sponsored by Walmart doesn’t seem inherently bad, especially as the games media landscape continues to shrink. Publications are shutting down, ad revenues are drying up, and existing sites now operate with fewer and fewer employees. Earlier this year, Ziff Davis, IGN’s parent company, acquired a handful of media sites including Eurogamer; Rock, Paper, Shotgun; and VG247. In the time since, there have been staff departures and layoffs including buyouts offered to employees earlier this month. According to a report in Aftermath, this latest round of buyouts has apparently left GamesIndustry.biz, a site that’s been around for over 20 years, with only one full-time employee.

Restart’s business model isn’t wholly unique. Before it was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year, Game Informer magazine was owned and operated by GameStop, and for decades Nintendo ran its own magazine. Other websites like IGN, Polygon, and The Verge also run sponsored content and include affiliate links in articles. To survive in the current digital media landscape, the support of deep-pocketed individuals or corporations is all but required. In this regard, Restart is just like any other publication.

According to its editorial mission, “Restart is sponsored by Walmart, but we operate as an independent site.” The mission statement explains that while its articles will feature affiliate links to Walmart products, the site itself will receive no portion of the sale. “We hope you can see this gives us zero incentive to provide biased review scores or other information about a game.”

“Restart is sponsored by Walmart, but we operate as an independent site.”

But Restart is also entering a media landscape where the wall between corporate interests and editorial independence has become perilously thin, and with a few rare exceptions, games media has slowly shifted away from providing readers thoughtful discussion and critique to providing a product that can be monetized to hell and back. That driving ethos is clearly outlined in a post by Moonrock on its Substack. “Restart.run serves as a dynamic hub where gaming content meets retail opportunities, allowing gamers to transition effortlessly from discovering new games to purchasing them on Walmart’s platform.”

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Amy Klobuchar isn’t done with antitrust reform

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Nearly three years ago in January of 2022, the Senate seemed poised to reform antitrust law and place a check on Big Tech’s power. The Senate Judiciary Committee had just voted to advance the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The bill would have forced major changes to how many tech businesses operate, including by prohibiting them from self-preferencing their own products on their marketplaces.

But the bill’s momentum petered out in the months to come. Congress did manage to pass two important competition updates that year, the first allowing state attorneys general to choose which courts they filed antitrust suits in, and the second raising merger filing fees on the largest transactions to raise money for federal enforcers.AICOA, though, never passed through the Senate — let alone into law.

Klobuchar has been one of the leading advocates of antitrust reform. After House lawmakers launched a probe into Big Tech companies in 2019, she and several other lawmakers concluded the monopoly-busting system was broken. Existing antitrust rules were theoretically powerful, their theory went, yet decades of lax enforcement and unfavorable case law left courts and enforcers with flimsy tools for keeping the industry in check. Congress needed to step in and get it back on track.

Legislative efforts to overhaul the system have failed — yet in 2024, antitrust enforcement is experiencing something of a boom. Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google each face a federal anti-monopoly suit (two, in Google’s case.) The Department of Justice secured a win in its Google Search case, while Epic Games won a ruling against Android’s Play Store. The DOJ and Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration have tightened merger guidelines and aggressively scrutinized deals.

Klobuchar is now reaching the end of her time chairing the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. While its mission might look a bit less urgent these days, she argues it’s as important as ever. “It would be a lot easier to have some set rules of the road in place instead of this laborious, long litigation process,” she tells The Verge in a phone interview. Today, she’s overseeing a hearing about how to continue a bipartisan path to reform as the Trump administration prepares to take over.

Whilethe most groundbreaking legislation hasn’t passed, she says, antitrust issues have still garnered more interest from congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle in recent years. “Maybe because of the bipartisan support and the good work that’s being done, we do keep bringing these cases,” she says. “But the lesson from the last four years is aggressive enforcement matters.”

Klobuchar expresses hope that President-elect Donald Trump’s antitrust watchdogs will continue pursuing important cases. While the Senate won’t hold new hearings to approve existing FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson’s ascendance to chair, she noted that FTC commissioner nominee Mark Meador wrote a positive article about the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster. “I consider that a good sign,” she says. Klobuchar adds that former Democratic enforcers have told her that Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ Antitrust Division, Gail Slater, “gets it.”

Republicans will get to set the subcommittee’s agenda next year when they take over the majority in the Senate. But while she’ll no longer be chairing the panel, Klobuchar says, she’s going to continue to work for reforms. “It couldn’t be more important right now, with a new administration coming in, that we find ways to work across the aisle to get this done.”

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Gemini, GTA, and the search for the next big thing

Google announced a bunch of new stuff last week, from Gemini 2.0 and Project Mariner to Android XR and Project Moohan. As ever with Google, it feels like a lot of stuff without necessarily a coherent plan behind it. But if you look closely enough, and start to put some of the pieces together, the combination of those announcements might up to something like Google’s vision for the future of everything.

On this episode of The Vergecast(our last Tuesday episode of the year), The Verge’s Kylie Robison and Victoria Song join the show to do some Google puzzling. They describe their experiences with all of Google’s new projects and experiments, and explain why Google thinks XR could be the killer app for AI — and vice versa.

After that, Chris Grant, group publisher for The Verge and Polygon, joins to talk about the two biggest 2025 stories in gaming: the impending launches of Grand Theft Auto VIand the Nintendo Switch 2. He explains why GTA is such an important and enduring gaming franchise, why he’s confident the Switch 2 won’t be like the Wii U, and why the whole gaming world is waiting for these two things so intently.

Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!), with some help from The Verge’s publisher Helen Havlak. Helen mentioned last week that she uses Figma to manage her garden, and let’s just say you all had some follow-up questions about that. So Helen came back to explain her whole system.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Google:

• Google’s AI enters its ‘agentic era’
• I saw Google’s plan to put Android on your face
• Gemini 2.0: what’s new in Google’s new flagship AI model
• Google announces Android XR, a new OS for headsets and smart glasses

And in games:

• GTA VI: all the news on Rockstar’s next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series
• Switch 2: all the news and rumors on Nintendo’s next console

Also, here is some screenshot inspo of Helen’s Figma garden in all its to-scale glory.

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A New Social is a new non-profit that wants to help bridge platforms

Image: A New Social, NASA

The open social web still isn’t as open as we all might want, but a non-profit is being formed to try and change that. The non-profit, called A New Social, is being headed up by Ryan Barrett, the founder of Bridgy Fed, and Anuj Ahooja, an engineering leader and writer.

“We believe that a healthy ecosystem competes on innovative features, not critical mass,” A New Social says on its mission page. “The social web should be centered around people, not platforms, and artificial walls should not deny them the relationships they’ve built online.” The organization is “betting on services built on open protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto” and says it will “work directly with developers to continue ensuring competition in the open social web, with a focus on advocating for users every step of the way.”

The non-profit is still in its very early stages; Barrett and Ahooja will be “recruiting a Board of Directors, identifying cross-protocol projects, and reaching out to developers to collaborate on tools and services needed for cross-protocol community building,” according to a press release.

But they’ve already identified A New Social’s first project: Barrett’s own Bridgy Fed, which you can use to have your Bluesky posts appear on ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon (aka the fediverse) and vice versa. And A New Social is already talking with big players in the open social web, including Bluesky, Flipboard, Mastodon, and Meta.

“All of these platforms are making some big important promises to their users,” Ahooja says in an interview with The Verge. He points out that Threads has made promises to federate (which it is doing in baby steps), while Bluesky has promised that its end goal is decentralization. “Us sitting in the middle puts us in a place where we have to be loud when they are not keeping those promises up.” He says that Bridgy Fed is an “implementation of a larger user advocacy problem that we’re trying to solve.”

I think it’s a cool idea, but I was a touch skeptical during our interview — just before we talked, I had read about how another promising fediverse project Ahooja worked on, sub.club, would be shutting down. How can users put their faith in open social web projects like Bridgy Fed long term if those projects might just fizzle out?

Ahooja says that’s part why they’re working with platforms, not just users. “We think that top-down education is more important than anything,” he says. That’s also why they’re taking a cross-network approach, according to Barrett; individual platforms and tools will grow and shrink, but overall, decentralized social media platforms are gaining mindshare, he says. If they can help the overall space get connected and stay connected, “then that’s net positive,” he says.

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Nest Learning Thermostat review: pretty smart

The fourth generation of the Nest Thermostat improves on the original in almost every way, and it’s still a stunner.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The FTC is officially banning hidden junk fees from hotel and ticket prices

Illustration by Hugo Herrera / The Verge

The Federal Trade Commission has approved a new rule preventing hotels and ticket sellers from hiding extra fees associated with a purchase. Under the rule, businesses must provide “up-front disclosure” of the total price of a hotel stay, vacation rental, or live event tickets before checkout.

The rule, which was first proposed last year, targets the “resort,” “convenience,” and “service” fees that often covertly raise the final price of a hotel stay or tickets for a live concert or sporting event. It doesn’t ban companies from charging these kinds of fees; it just requires them to disclose the total cost of a purchase (including fees) when advertising or displaying their price.

Additionally, businesses must display the total price of a purchase “more prominently than most other pricing information.” Though businesses can still exclude shipping fees and taxes from advertised prices, they must now show these fees before customers start entering their payment information. The rule is set to go into effect in April 2025.

“People deserve to know up-front what they’re being asked to pay — without worrying that they’ll later be saddled with mysterious fees that they haven’t budgeted for and can’t avoid,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in the press release. “The FTC’s rule will put an end to junk fees around live event tickets, hotels, and vacation rentals, saving Americans billions of dollars and millions of hours in wasted time.”

With Andrew Ferguson set to replace Khan as FTC Chair under the Trump administration, the agency has approved several last-minute changes that will directly impact consumers. In addition to approving a new “click-to-cancel” rule that should make it easier to cancel subscriptions, the FTC also expanded its Telemarketing Sales Rule to cover tech support scam calls.

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The Honda Prelude returns as a sporty hybrid with a new drive mode

Image: Honda

Out to prove that the sports coupe is far from dead, Honda announced the return of the Prelude with an all-new hybrid-electric powertrain.

It’s been over two decades since Honda last released a new Prelude, but the company began laying the groundwork for its return with the release of a concept version last year. Now, a hybrid Prelude is scheduled to arrive in the US in 2025.

It will also mark the debut of Honda S+ Shift, a new drive mode that the company says “further advances Linear Shift Control to deliver maximum levels of driver engagement.”

The company is describing the Prelude as having “two motors,” but that doesn’t make it dual-motor or AWD. Honda’s hybrid powertrain has had two motors for several generations, both of which sit adjacent to the internal combustion engine.

The debut of Honda S+ Shift

“One electric motor acts as a generator, creating electricity for the battery and propulsion,” Honda spokesperson Chris Naughton said, “and the other is a traction motor that propels the vehicle — and captures regen when slowing.”

There’s not much else to note about the Prelude’s return; Honda is probably waiting until closer to the production to release key specs.

I’m sure there will be some bemoaning the fact that Honda had an opportunity to release a fully electric Prelude that would have been rad as hell. To be sure, the company says it’s still committed to achieving carbon neutrality for all of its “products and corporate activity” by 2050 — and that includes 100 percent of EV sales by 2040.

But Honda also has a pretty good track record for hybrid vehicles, which it considers an important bridge to full EVs. And clearly, the US is heading toward a dark period for EV sales with the incoming Trump administration expected to roll back a lot of the incentives and regulations aimed at growing EV adoption.

Hybrid-electric trims currently make up more than 50 percent of Accord and CR-V sales, Honda says, and the newly introduced Civic hybrid is expected to ultimately represent about 40 percent of Civic sales. Cumulative sales of Honda electrified vehicles top 1 million.

Meanwhile, the fully electric Honda Prologue (based on GM’s Chevy Equinox EV) is already enjoying brisk sales since its US launch earlier this year. And the company plans to unveil a production-ready Honda Zero model at CES next year.

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Google Home tests access tiers for everyone in your smart home

Illustration: The Verge

Google Home is testing a new feature that will allow friends and family members to help manage smart devices around your home. Two access levels are available: “Admin” which provides full control over account and device permissions, and “Member” for people who require more limited access.

Google says that Admin access is for “trusted partners or people who co-manage the home with you.” Admins can add, remove, and manage users, add and remove devices, and link subscriptions to the home account. Members can manage basic device controls like viewing live security camera feeds, and adjusting personal settings like voice and face match assistant features.

Two further permission tiers are available for Members: “Settings” to fully control devices and home-wide settings like automation and Nest Wifi device network features; and “Activity” to authorize access to device and home-wide history for things like cameras, locks, and sensors.

The customizable Member access was first announced in November alongside the Google Home extension for Gemini. Only users who are enrolled in the Google Home public preview can send invitations to the new access levels.

Participants can add someone as an Admin or a Member by opening the Google Home app settings, tapping “Household and access,” and selecting the plus icon to invite a new home member. Those you invite don’t need to be enrolled in public preview themselves, but will need to be running the latest version of the Google Home app.

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Waymo is sending autonomous vehicles to Japan for first international tests

Photo by Andrej Sokolow / picture alliance via Getty Images

Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are going to Tokyo, marking the first time that the Alphabet company is deploying vehicles on public roads in a foreign market.

Waymo is billing the excursion as a simple “road trip” for collecting data about the nuances of Japanese driving, including left-hand traffic and navigating a dense urban environment. The vehicles will be driven manually for the purposes of gathering mapping data and will be managed by a local taxi fleet operator, Nihon Kotsu. About 25 vehicles will be sent, with the first set to arrive in early 2025.

And while the tests will undoubtedly be seen as laying the groundwork for a future Tokyo-based robotaxi service, Waymo said it isn’t ready to announce anything quite yet.

“While we look forward to bringing the life-saving benefits of the Waymo Driver global, we have no plans to serve riders in Tokyo at this time,” Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp said. “Rather, we’re bringing our technology to learn and understand how Waymo fits into the existing transportation landscape and learning how to best partner with local officials and communities.”

The inclusion of GO, a popular taxi app in Japan, in the strategic partnership could signal Waymo’s intention to put its autonomous vehicles into service through a locally based mobility provider. Waymo is already doing this in the US, making its autonomous vehicles available on Uber’s ridehail app in Austin and Atlanta.

“We have no plans to serve riders in Tokyo at this time”

Waymo’s robotaxi business in the US is growing, albeit slowly. The company currently has approximately 700 vehicles in operation in several cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Phoenix. It also plans to launch a robotaxi service in Atlanta in an exclusive partnership with Uber and is planning to launch in Miami in 2026. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that Waymo was providing 175,000 paid trips per week, or about a million miles.

In Tokyo, Waymo’s vehicles will be operated by trained autonomous specialists employed by Nihon Kotsu. Once the company feels like it’s ready, it will transition to hands-free autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel. Karp wouldn’t say whether that would eventually progress to fully driverless operations. The vehicles will be geofenced to certain neighborhoods in Tokyo, including Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Chūō, Shinagawa, and Kōtō.

In bringing its vehicles to its first foreign country, Alphabet is trying to project confidence in its technology, especially at a time when companies are pulling back on costly robotaxi projects. General Motors recently announced that it would no longer fund Cruise and would instead pivot to driver-assist technology and personally owned autonomous vehicles.

Several companies have tested their autonomous vehicles in Japan, but the country is a bit of a backwater compared to China and the US. Part of the problem seems to be the country’s robust auto industry is focusing its testing in countries other than its native one. Toyota and Nissan are both seeking to deploy robotaxis in China in collaboration with local operators.

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The Framework Laptop 16 just got a modular gadget that enables quadruple SSDs

Framework’s double SSD caddy for its Framework 16 expansion bay. | Image: Framework

The most ambitious laptop ever made just got a long-promised modular upgrade. Starting today, you can pay $39 to add two extra M.2 slots to the Framework Laptop 16 — letting you potentially carry around an AI accelerator, an eGPU adapter, or a grand total of four solid state storage sticks for ludicrous capacity.

As Framework’s blog post points out, the new “Dual M.2 Adapter” is Framework’s first new modular component since launch that takes advantage of the Laptop 16’s big expansion bay around back. At launch, you only had two options: a Radeon RX 7700S discrete graphics card for extra money, or a mostly empty bay that only contained fans.

But now, you can add the Dual M.2 Adapter to that mostly empty bay to fit an additional pair of M.2 2280, 2260, 2240 or 2230 modules, with four lanes of PCIe 4.0 each, on top of the twin SSD slots (M.2 2280 and M.2 2230) that come with the laptop to begin with.

With current stick SSD capacities topping out at around 8TB (2280) and 2TB (2230) respectively, that means you can theoretically cart around 26TB of storage at once... not counting any 1TB Framework Expansion Cards you stick into the sides of the laptop, or any giant SD cards you plug into the $25 full-size SD card modules that Framework finally released this fall.

(With 2TB SD cards on the market, I guess the actual maximum capacity of the Framework Laptop 16 is now 38TB.)

And while those who bought the Radeon discrete GPU won’t be able to take advantage without swapping out that module, swaps are thankfully quick and easy:

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In addition to the adapter, Framework has swapped out the Framework Laptop 16’s liquid metal cooling for Honeywell PTM7958 thermal paste, and will help provide that for any customer who asks; while Framework characterizes this as a change to fix possible “performance degradation over time,” I definitely encountered uncomfortable levels of heat and fan noise right away in my review and long-term tests.

Find more about Framework’s recent updates in its full blog post — like the new “Framework Mystery Boxes” tinkerers can buy to try out an assortment of random, possibly non-functional parts that users have returned to the company.

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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 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.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has more than 100 million daily active users

Illustration: The Verge

Threads now has more than 100 million daily active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. It’s a notable milestone not just because it’s a big number; it’s also the first time Meta has a daily active user figure publicly.

In recent weeks, Meta has been very vocal about Threads’ growth after a lot of people flocked to Bluesky. While Bluesky tracker says that that platform currently has a little over 25 million total users, Zuckerberg shared Monday that Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s clear that Threads is still much larger than Bluesky.

Threads has also ramped up its feature releases, including updates that appear to be inspired by Bluesky like custom feeds and curated collections of accounts to follow. Meta is also testing the ability to choose your own default feed, which is a much-needed change. But it’s not all good; Threads might get ads early next year.

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TikTok CEO meets with Trump as the platform tries to avoid a ban

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to meet with President-Elect Donald Trump on Monday as the platform faces a ban in the US, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. The move makes Chew the latest tech executive — following Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — to meet with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

TikTok already lost in appeals court while fighting the ban-or-divest law that goes into effect on January 19th, and today, it asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

Though Trump initially led the ban on TikTok over claims about national security concerns, he started to reverse course earlier this year. In March, Trump said he didn’t want a TikTok ban because “...without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people.” He later joined TikTok in June.

When asked about the TikTok ban during a press conference on Monday, Trump said he would “take a look.” Along with meeting with Trump, tech giants, including Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI, have donated to Trump’s inauguration fund as well.

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Fediverse creator payment platform sub.club is shutting down

Sub.club, which lets fediverse creators offer paid subscriptions and premium content and launched at the end of August, is already shutting down. “With regret, we will be winding down this project over the next few weeks,” the sub.club team announced last week. Creators using the service will be “fully paid,” but sub.club feeds will stop working “by the end of January.”

As I wrote when I first covered sub.club, the service seemed like an interesting way to let people on the fediverse more easily monetize their audience without having to point them toward other platforms like Patreon. But the group that built it, The BLVD, has run out of funding.

“Unfortunately we were not able to quickly achieve sufficient traction with product-market fit / adoption for sub.club, or to attract investors, partnerships, etc.,” Bart Decrem, The BLVD’s founder, tells The Verge in an email. He says more than 150 creators were on sub.club. “Still bullish on the fediverse, and the success of Bluesky is a great thing, but it does look like it will take a while to connect all the pieces.”

“As we see more users onboard to platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads and the open ecosystem grows, the need will eventually arise for a subscription service that isn’t tied to a single platform, is protocol-based, and allows for user portability,” sub.club adviser Anuj Ahooja says. “Hopefully, sub.club, or a service like it, can fill the gap at that time.”

Because of The BLVD’s lack of funding, it is pulling the plug on two other projects, too: Mammoth, an open-source iOS app for Mastodon, and moth.social, a Mastodon instance that is the companion server to Mammoth. Late in November, the Mammoth Mastodon account said that Mammoth was “now operating without funding or a paid team.”

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You can now schedule a DM on Instagram

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram will now let you schedule direct messages, as first reported by TechCrunch. With this feature, you can long-press on the “send” button and then choose a date and time that you’d like to send your message.

As noted on Instagram’s support page, you can schedule messages containing only text, meaning you can still only send photos, videos, or GIFs to friends or family members in real-time. When you click on a chat with a scheduled message, Instagram will display a notice that shows how many messages you have scheduled.

Screenshot: The Verge

Tapping into the notice and long-pressing your message also gives you the option to delete it or send it right away. Right now, it looks like you can only schedule a message as far out as 29 days.

The company has added several features as part of its efforts to build out its DMs, including a way to edit messages, draw on photos, and share your live locations with friends, similar to Snapchat.

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Blackmagic’s Vision Pro immersive camera can be yours for only $29,995

Blackmagic has announced that its URSA Cine Immersive commercial camera for shooting high-quality 3D immersive video is now available to preorder “direct from Blackmagic Design Offices,” with the first deliveries going out in early 2025. The camera, which could enable more immersive content for the Vision Pro, costs $29,995 — or a mere 8.6 Vision Pros.

First revealed in June, the Cine Immersive will let cinematographers shoot 90fps video in stereoscopic 3D at 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye — or more than twice the estimated per-eye resolution of the Vision Pro’s screens. They’ll be able to edit the footage using the proprietary Apple Immersive Video format in DaVinci Resolve Studio, which Blackmagic plans to add support for early next year.

Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty said the DaVinci update will enable “a true end-to-end workflow for Apple Immersive Video.” He added that the company is “looking forward to working closely with filmmakers” on immersive videos ahead of the camera’s wider release later in 2025.

Blackmagic included images of the camera in its email to The Verge. It looks cool, so I’ve included them for your perusal:

The Vision Pro has some immersive content outside of Apple’s videos — in apps like Amplium or Explore POV — but none of them quite have the quality of Apple’s videos. Until now, Apple has been the only company producing content with its format, and only a handful of such videos are available at this point. That could change, eventually, if studios take advantage of Blackmagic’s new camera and DaVinci update.

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Serbian authorities are reportedly hacking and installing spyware on activists’ phones

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Police in Serbia are using mobile device hacking tools to break into the phones of activists and journalists and then installing spyware to track them, Amnesty International warns in a report. The organization says the state uses tools built by Israeli company Cellebrite, which are intended to help law enforcement unlock devices for forensic purposes.

Amnesty International calls for the Serbian government to end these surveillance practices:

Serbian authorities muststop using highly invasive spyware and provide effective remedy to victims of unlawful targeted surveillance and hold those responsible for the violations to account. Cellebrite and other digital forensic companies also must conduct adequate due diligence to ensure that their products are not used in a way which contributes to human rights abuses.

Amnesty International gathered various accounts of Serbian authorities processing the phones of civil society members, who were detained under various premises, with additional procedures (such as drug testing and psych evaluations) that added extra time to the length of detention, and therefore the total amount of time the authorities had access to their phones. During this time, police would plant “Novispy” — a spyware program that is likely state-developed — on their phones. Some devices were broken into using a (since-patched) Qualcomm vulnerability, Amnesty International explains in the document.

One case reported by 404 Media mentions Serbian news outlet FAR’s deputy editor, Slaviša Milanov, and the editor-in-chief were driving together when they were stopped by Serbian authorities, who detained them and confiscated their phones. When the phones were returned, they noticedchanges, like data and Wi-Fi being toggled off and apps using a lot of energy.

Milanov says his Android device, a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10S, was running extra software when he got it back and that the police had extracted 1.6GB of data even though he had not given up his password.

Cellebrite senior director Victor Cooper responded to questions from Amnesty International, saying the company’s products “are licensed strictly for lawful use” that requires a warrant or a legally-sanctioned investigation per the end user agreement. Cooper also told 404 Media that Cellebrite is investigating the “alleged misuse” of their technology and is “prepared to impose appropriate sanctions” with any relevant agencies.

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YouTube is letting creators opt into allowing third-party AI training

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube is rolling out a way for creators to let third-party companies use their videos to train AI models. To be clear, the default setting for this is off, meaning that if you don’t want to let third-party companies scrape your videos for AI training, you don’t have to do anything. But if, for some reason, you do want to allow that — Google says that “some creators and rights holders” may want to — it’s going to be an option.

“We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their YouTube content in the AI era,” a TeamYouTube staffer named Rob says in a support post. “As we gather feedback, we’ll continue to explore features that facilitate new forms of collaboration between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorized methods to access content.”

YouTube will be rolling out the setting in YouTube Studio “over the next few days,” and unauthorized scraping “remains prohibited,” Rob writes.

Another support page says that you’ll be able to pick and choosefrom a list of third-party companies that can train on your videos or you can simplyallow all third-party companies to train on them. The initial list of companies includes the following, according to TechCrunch:

AI21 Labs, Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, ByteDance, Cohere, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Perplexity, Pika Labs, Runway, Stability AI, and xAI.

YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon tells The Verge that TechCrunch’s list is accurate. “These companies were chosen because they’re building generative AI models and are likely sensible choices for a potential partnership with creators,” Malon says.

This announcement follows reports of AI models from big companies — including OpenAI, Apple, and Anthropic — being trained on content and datasets scraped from YouTube. Google itself already uses YouTube data to help train its AI tools. “As we have for many years, we use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications,” the company said in September, when it announced this feature was in the works. “We do this consistent with the terms that creators agree to.”

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ChatGPT’s AI search engine is rolling out to everyone

Image: The Verge

ChatGPT’s AI search engine is rolling out to all users starting today. OpenAI announced the news as part of its newest 12 days of ship-mas livestream, while also revealing an “optimized” version of the feature on mobile and the ability to search with advanced voice mode.

ChatGPT’s search engine first rolled out to paid subscribers in October. It will now be available at the free tier, though you have to have an account and be logged in.

One of the improvements for search on mobile makes ChatGPT look more like a traditional search engine. When looking for a particular location, like restaurants or local attractions, ChatGPT will display a list of results with accompanying images, ratings, and hours. Clicking on a location will pull up more information about the spot, and you can also view a map with directions from directly within the app.

Another feature aims to make ChatGPT search faster when you’re looking for certain kinds of sites, such as “hotel booking websites.” Instead of generating a response right away, ChatGPT will surface links to websites before taking the time to provide more information about each option. Additionally, ChatGPT can also automatically provide up-to-date information from the web when using Advanced Voice Mode, though that’sonly available to paid users.

In earlier livestreams, OpenAI also announced the launch of its text-to-image model Sora and rolled out a $200 per month ChatGPT Pro subscription.

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Google’s Whisk AI generator will ‘remix’ the pictures you plug in

An AI-generated image I made in Whisk using Google’s suggested images as prompts. | Image: Google via Whisk

Google has announced a new AI tool called Whisk that lets you generate images using other images as prompts instead of requiring a long text prompt.

With Whisk, you can offer images to suggest what you’d like as the subject, the scene, and the style of your AI-generated image, and you can prompt Whisk with multiple images for each of those three things. (If you want, you can fill in text prompts, too.) If you don’t have images on hand, you can click a dice icon to have Google fill in some images for the prompts (though those images alsoappear to be AI-generated). You can also enter some text into a text box at the end of the process if you want to add extra detail about the image you’re looking for, but it’s not required.

Whisk will then generate images and a text prompt for each image. You can favorite or download the image if you’re happy with the results, or you can refine an image by entering more text into the text box or clicking the image and editing the text prompt.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

A screenshot of Whisk. I clicked the dice to generate a subject, scene, and style. I swapped out the auto-generated scene by entering a text prompt. Whisk created the first two images, which I iterated on by asking Whisk to add some steam around the subject (because it’s a fire being in water), resulting in the next two images.

In a blog post, Google stresses that Whisk is designed to be for “rapid visual exploration, not pixel-perfect edits.” The company also says that Whisk may “miss the mark,” which is why it lets you edit the underlying prompts.

In the few minutes I’ve used the tool while writing this story, it’s been entertaining to tinker with. Images take a few seconds to generate, which is annoying, and while the images have been a little strange, everything I’ve generated has been fun to iterate on.

Google says Whisk uses the “latest” iteration of its Imagen 3 image generation model, which it announced today. Google also introduced Veo 2, the next version of its video generation model, which the company says has an understanding of “the unique language of cinematography” and hallucinates things like extra fingers “less frequently” than other models (one of those other models is probably OpenAI’s Sora). Veo 2 is coming first to Google’s VideoFX, which you can get on the Google Labs waitlist for, and it will be expanded to YouTube Shorts “other products” sometime next year.

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Meta rolls out live AI, live translations, and Shazam to its smart glasses

More AI features are rolling out to the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Meta just announced three new features are rolling out to its Ray-Ban smart glasses: live AI, live translations, and Shazam. Both live AI and live translation are limited to members of Meta’s Early Access Program, while Shazam support is available for all users in the US and Canada.

Both live AI and live translation were first teased at Meta Connect 2024 earlier this year. Live AI allows you to naturally converse with Meta’s AI assistant while it continuously views your surroundings. For example, if you’re perusing the produce section at a grocery store, you’ll theoretically be able to ask Meta’s AI to suggest some recipes based on the ingredients you’re looking at. Meta says users will be able to use the live AI feature for roughly 30 minutes at a time on a full charge.

Meanwhile, live translation allows the glasses to translate speech in real-time between English and Spanish, French, or Italian. You can choose to either hear translations through the glasses themselves, or view transcripts on your phone. You do have to download language pairs beforehand, as well as specify what language you speak versus what your conversation partner speaks.

Shazam support is a bit more straightforward. All you have to do is to prompt the Meta AI when you hear a song, and it should be able to tell you what you’re listening to. You can watch Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demo it in this Instagram reel.

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A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

If you don’t see the features yet, check to make sure your glasses are running the v11 software and that you’re also running v196 of the Meta View app. If you’re not already in the Early Access Program, you can apply via this website.

The updates come just as Big Tech is pushing AI assistants as the raison d’etre for smart glasses. Just last week, Google announced Android XR, a new OS for smart glasses, and specifically positioned its Gemini AI assistant as the killer app. Meanwhile, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth just posted a blog opining that “2024 was the year AI glasses hit their stride.” In it, Bosworth also asserts that smart glasses may be the best possible form factor for a “truly AI-native device” and the first hardware category to be “completely defined by AI from the beginning.”

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Instagram will let you recap 2024 with a collage for your story

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Instagram will now let you showcase your favorite moments from 2024 by adding a collage to your story. The new feature, which is only available through the first week of January, lets you combine a bunch of pictures from throughout the year and share them with friends.

You can currently only create collage-like stories by adding a photo to your story, resizing it, moving it around the screen, and then adding more images as stickers. Instagram’s layout feature also lets you add multiple photos to a story, but they only appear in a grid format.

Image: Instagram

Instagram is rolling out some other temporary features as well, including end-of-year-themed “Add Yours” templates, allowing your friends to reply to your story with one of their own. There are also new “New Year” and “Countdown” text effects, holiday chat themes for DMs, as well as secret phrases, such as “happy New Year,” in notes and DMs that trigger special effects.

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YouTube is testing creator voice replies

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The next time you comment on a YouTube video, you could hear its creator’s voice respond to you. YouTube says it’s testing out a feature with a “small number” of creators that lets them record an audio reply to comments on their videos.

YouTube says it hopes this experiment “enables more meaningful relationships between creators and their audiences.” YouTubers in the test group can use it by tapping the sound wave icon when replying to a comment, tapping “record a voice reply,” and then posting it as normal. However, anyone else can interact with these replies just like ordinary text comments.

Here’s one of the creators in YouTube’s test group.

For now, creators in the test group can only create voice replies in the iOS app, and only on their own videos. Where you can hear the replies seems to be limited, too; I didn’t have the option to listen to the above voice reply from YouTuber ThioJoe in a web browser on my Mac, but I could play it in the YouTube app on my iPhone 15 Pro and Pixel 6 phones.

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Sony’s noise-canceling WF-1000XM5 are cheaper than they were on Black Friday

Sony’s XM5 deliver impressive noise cancellation, sound, and comfort. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

The holiday season is a time of celebration, but it can also be chaotic. With all the parties, travel, and family obligations, it’s difficult to carve out time to recharge. That’s why noise-canceling earbuds like Sony’s WF-1000XM5 are so helpful, as they can help you enjoy some peace and quiet even in the busiest of environments. Thankfully, they’re currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target for around $198 ($102 off), their best price to date.

Sony’s WF-1000XM5 are our favorite pair of wireless earbuds on the market. Along with drowning out background noise well, they offer exceptional, detailed sound and clear voice quality. They’re also relatively small and lightweight, and come with four foam-style ear tips so you can comfortably wear them on long flights. Battery life is good, too, so you won’t need to worry about them dying midway through a flight. They should last eight hours with noise cancellation turned on, and when you do need to charge, they do so extremely quickly.

Additionally, Sony’s flagship pair of earbuds offer a handful of other conveniences that make them a great investment. They include support for multipoint Bluetooth connectivity, for one thing, so you can pair them with multiple devices simultaneously. They also boast IPX4 water resistance, so they’ll even be able to withstand some light rain.

Read our Sony WF-1000XM5 review.

Some more ways to save today

• Amazon’s Smart Plug is on sale for $14.99 ($10 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, which is just $2 shy of its lowest price to date. You can use the smart plug to easily add smarts to various traditional gadgets, including Christmas lights, lamps, coffee makers, fans, and kettles. You don’t need a smart home hub either, though bear in mind that the plugs are only compatible with Alexa, so you might want to steer clear if you’re embedded in another smart home ecosystem.
• You can buy Google’s 128GB Pixel Tablet (and speaker dock) for $399 ($65 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, which is $20 shy of its best price to date. The 11-inch Android tablet is a great entertainment device with stellar performance, but it’s the included speaker dock that really makes the Pixel Tablet stand out. The latter lets you turn the tablet into a smart display with Google Assistant support akin to the Nest Hub Max, so you can use it to set alarms, display photos, and even control smart home devices with your voice. Read our review.
• The latest Beats Pill has returned to its Black Friday low of $99.99 ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is just $2 shy of its lowest price to date. The pill-shaped Bluetooth speaker delivers good sound for its size but also comes with some handy perks, including support for lossless audio over USB-C and native support for both Android and iOS. It also features IP67 water and dust protection and a built-in lanyard, so you can easily carry it on the go. Read our review.

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Chuck Schumer wants answers after another weekend of drone chaos

Sen. Chuck Schumer during a December 15th press conference. | Screenshot: NBC News

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide New York and New Jersey authorities with an advanced drone detection system to help “determine what the heck is going on” with continued sightings in the Northeast.

“We’ve seen lots of recent sightings in New York, New Jersey, Long Island, Staten Island.” Schumer said during a December 15th press conference. “With all these sightings over the last while, why do we have more questions than answers?”

Over the weekend, parts of Stewart International Airport were temporarily shut down due to the drone sightings, prompting New York Governor Kathy Hochul to say, “this has gone too far.” Drone activity also shut down airspace over the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for over four hours.

President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday that he’s canceling a trip to Bedminster, New Jersey due to drone sightings in the area. He said, “the government knows what is happening” and “they’d be better off saying what it is.”

During a press conference on Sunday, Schumer requested a “360-degree” detection system like the one built by Robin Radar Systems. The European company sells micro-doppler radars that it claims can distinguish between birds and drones moving up to 60 miles per hour in 3D space. Its website features case studies of its radars being used for security at airports, during the G7 Summit, and to study bird migration in the Netherlands.

Schumer also urged Congress to pass the “Safeguarding the Homeland from the Threats Posed by Unmanned Aircraft Systems Act,” which could give local law enforcement and federal authorities the power to detect drones.

I’m pushing for answers amid these drone sightings.

I’m calling for @SecMayorkas to deploy special drone-detection tech across NY and NJ.

And I’m working to pass a bill in the Senate to give local law enforcement more tools for drone detection.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) December 15, 2024

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