Instagram spruced up its DM features on Monday. You can now share your live location with friends, handy for meetups at concerts or other crowded places. The social platform also now lets you add nicknames in one-on-one or group chats, and there are over 300 new stickers to share in DMs.
Spotify just announced that it’s begun rolling out a new “Recents” page that keeps tabs on everything you’ve been listening to. This section of the app will hold onto content for up to 90 days and integrates with music, podcasts and even audiobooks. The page also keeps an eye on saved content.
The platform says this should be useful for “picking up a paused podcast, finding last week’s earworm or finally playing that saved album or audiobook.” This page replaces the “Listening History” tab and will work for both free and Premium subscribers.
NVIDIA has debuted a new experimental generative AI model, which it describes as "a Swiss Army knife for sound." The model called Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1, or Fugatto, can take commands from text prompts and use them to create audio or to modify existing music, voice and sound files. It was designed by a team of AI researchers from around the world, and NVIDIA says that made the model's "multi-accent and multilingual capabilities stronger."
Remember in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when live audio was suddenly everywhere? The trend was made popular by the briefly viral phenomenon Clubhouse before seemingly every other online platform copied the feature for themselves.
Overwatch 2’s newest hero is a tank with surprising mobility and brutal diving and brawling tactics. Hazard has a punk-rock aesthetic, Scottish brogue and a shotgun that can blast your vulnerable backline heroes to smithereens. But don’t be put off by his tough exterior: This anti-establishment rapscallion has a steadfast belief in bodily autonomy and a love of cute puppies.
Well, the rumors were true: this week the DOJ argued that Google should sell off Chrome to make up for its monopolistic search practices. On top of that, the US government also suggested a potential sale of Android if it can't stop prioritizing its own search on Android smartphones.
The Spotify audiobook experience has been lacking when compared to rivals like Audible, but it looks like that’s beginning to change. The streaming platform just announced a bevy of updates for audiobook listeners and some are downright useful.
Creators who sell assets on itch.io will now have to be a lot more upfront about using generative AI. The marketplace for independent digital creators has introduced a new rule that requires users to label their projects if they were produced using generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney.
It’s Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, and in celebration, Valve has released a special update that adds the Episode One and Episode Two expansions to the base game so you can play it all straight through, along with a two-hour documentary, developer commentary, and much more.