YouTube is testing a new feature that will let creators use AI to “restyle” licensed songs for their shorts. The small group of creators with access can enter a prompt to change up different elements in a song, such as its mood or genre, and the expansion of YouTube’s Dream Track AI feature will generate a reworked 30-second soundtrack.

YouTube:

If you’re a creator in the experiment group, you can select an eligible song > describe how you want to restyle it > then generate a unique 30-second soundtrack to use in your Short.

These restyled soundtracks will have clear attribution to the original song through the Short itself and the Shorts audio pivot page, and will also clearly indicate that the track was restyled with AI

YouTube has...

Continue reading…

Eufy’s new Floodlight Camera E30 attaches a 2K camera that can tilt and pan 360 degrees to a pair of 2,000-lumen LED floodlights and throws in local video capture without subscription fees. Although Eufy, the smart home brand of Anker, sells similar products with batteries and solar panels offering more flexibility on where they can be mounted, most homes already have a floodlight. That makes the hardwired E30 an easy replacement that is available now through the company’s website and Amazon for $149.99,

There are alternatives we currently recommend in our floodlight camera buyer’s guide, but for $150, the Eufy E30 offers several premium features without requiring ongoing fees to actually use them.

Being hardwired also means the E30,...

Continue reading…

Volkswagen and Rivian have crossed all their T’s and dotted all their I’s in their new $5.8 billion joint venture, which officially kicks off its work on November 13th, the companies announced today.

Last June, VW said it would invest $5 billion in Rivian as part of a new joint venture that’s focused on developing a new electrical architecture and vehicle software for future models, including subcompact cars, with the first planned for 2027. The investment size has now increased to $5.8 billion.

The new joint venture, dryly named “Rivian and VW Group Technology, LLC,” will be led by Rivian software chief Wassym Bensaid and VW Group chief technology engineer Carsten Helbing. Teams will be based in...

Continue reading…

EA has shared a lengthy blog detailing all the technical work that went into rendering hair in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

While it used to be, and in some cases still is, a struggle to find a game with a character creator that included a diverse range of hairstyles, newer games are getting better at providing styles to represent folks on the kinky / curly hair spectrum where a lot of people of color reside. However, the new struggle is getting those hairstyles to look and act natural. I remember looking at all the hairstyles in Horizon Forbidden West and being bemused that the dreadlocks on Varl looked like they were made out of foam, while his beard was simply straight hair without an ounce of kink a Black man like him typically has....

Continue reading…

A new way to spend $10 on a 12-ounce coffee just dropped. Starting today, Starbucks is accepting delivery orders right inside its app. Delivery is handled by DoorDash, and right now, it’s limited to “participating stores” in the US and Canada. But if you’re in the delivery area and willing to pay a small fortune in fees, getting your Starbucks order into your hands has never been easier.

Starbucks has been offering delivery through DoorDash in the US since early last year, but only within Doordash’s app. Previously, order ahead options in the Starbucks app were limited to in-store and drive-through pickup. Now, you can toggle between pickup and delivery. Placing a delivery order brings up an interface identical to the one on DoorDash’s...

Continue reading…

Nintendo games rarely see big discounts, but the holiday shopping season always proves a good opportunity to save on some contemporary classics. After initially offering special holiday bundles of its Switch consoles, Nintendo has also announced a Black Friday sale on various games and controllers set to begin November 24th and run through the 30th.

Major Nintendo titles like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Pikmin 4, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and more will be $20 off at retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Walmart once the sale commences. Additionally, Switch accessories like Joy-Con controllers and Nintendo’s Pro Controller will also be $20 off, along with a slick Tears of the Kingdom carrying case getting a $10 discount....

Continue reading…

An Italian startup called Artinoise has created an unusual USB-C accessory for mobile devices that turns them into playable musical instruments. The Zefiro looks like a flash drive or a tiny vape, but by gently blowing into one end, it can be used to play simulated instruments with even less skill than what was needed to play those plastic recorders in grade school.

The Zefiro is being made available through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign looking to raise just over $5,300 to fund production. According to the company, “We have been developing and manufacturing musical instruments for years; now we just need to collect pre-orders for our latest creation and kick off manufacturing!”

Those backing the campaign early can preorder a...

Continue reading…

While the best iPad deals usually land during major sale events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, many great iPad deals are attainable outside those times. The day-to-day discounts may come and go like changing winds, but there’s often something to be saved, particularly on the more affordable iPads. The most recent iPad Pro and iPad Air are causing prices on older models to drop even further, and now that Apple has a new iPad Mini, we’re seeing regular discounts on the last-gen Mini as well.

It’s difficult to know where exactly you can find the most notable iPad deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing each and every day, so let us help you out....

Continue reading…

VMware made its Fusion and Workstation software that creates and manages virtual machines free for personal use earlier this year. Now, the company announced that as of Monday, it’s free for everyone, including commercial customers. Also, the Fusion (for Macs) and Workstation (for Windows and Linux) Pro versions are no longer available for purchase.

Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware in 2022 was one of the biggest tech acquisitions ever. Since then, it has bundled the company’s products to “simplify its portfolio” and dropped many existing SKUs. It has already announced an end to offering VMware perpetual licensing for standalone offerings to push enterprises towards its Cloud Foundation or vSphere Foundation subscription...

Continue reading…

Sony is cutting the price of the “slim” PS5 digital edition by $70, making it more affordable for the holiday season. Typically, that PS5 model costs $449.99, but it will start at $379.99 through December 24th, according to a new ad.

This holiday deal brings the slim PS5 digital edition just under the original $399.99 price of the launch version of the PS5 digital console. The footnote at the end of the ad specifies that this price is only for the disc-free console, so it seems like the model with a disc drive already attached will still start at $499.99. But the holiday pricing also means that by buying a digital PS5 slim and one of Sony’s separate $79.99 PS5 disc drives, you can make your own PS5 with a disc drive and save about $40.

A...

Continue reading…

Hyundai, a company that has been just as guilty in the past of spreading the touchscreen scourge in cars as any other, has been course-correcting lately, putting more buttons and knobs into its cars. The reason isn’t surprising: people hate touchscreens, at least for certain essential controls like HVAC systems, and they told Hyundai so.

“As we were adding integrated [infotainment] screens in our vehicles, we also tried putting touchscreen-based controls, and people didn’t prefer that,” Hyundai Design North America VP Ha Hak-soo told Korea JoongAng Daily in an interview that InsideEVs spotted. He said Hyundai, which was as infatuated with touchscreens as the rest of the industry at first, found that in focus group testing people got...

Continue reading…

If you’ve been looking to replace your Android phone’s camera app with one that doesn’t overprocess photos to alter lighting and detail in sometimes extreme ways, now there’s an option. Zerocam is a barebones app that promises to “shoot in RAW and process your photos to remove all artificial effects, delivering soft, pleasant-to-eye images.”

We’ve been talking about the definition of a photo for years, and we’re not the only ones complaining about HDR processing that sometimes makes images seem flat because they lack contrast between light and dark.

This app’s approach is similar to the Process Zero feature Halide offers within its iPhone camera app, but Zerocam goes a few steps further. This app doesn’t even have much of an interface:...

Continue reading…

The iOS version of Google’s Chrome browser is getting upgraded with several features from the Android iteration, including simultaneous Google Lens image and text search. Chrome for iOS could already use Google Lens to search for a picture on your iPhone or one taken from the camera, but now you can add words along with it to narrow your search in one go.

For instance, you can upload a picture of a t-shirt design you like into Lens and type the name of a color that you prefer into search, and it will try to find the shirt you want. This update comes as Apple launched its own Visual Intelligence search, which only works on iPhone 16 and 16 Pro.

Continue reading…

Artificial intelligence is top of mind for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY). Zeldin plans to help “unleash US energy dominance” and “make America the AI capital of the world,” he said in a post on X today.

The EPA regulates emissions that pollute the air and cause climate change, giving it a huge role to play in how much the rise of energy-hungry AI leads to a jump in power plant pollution. From the looks of it, though, the EPA’s incoming leader is prioritizing making sure environmental protections don’t get in the way of doing business — particularly when it comes to expanding AI data centers.

Environmental advocates are already concerned about Trump’s plans...

Continue reading…

Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year. The software giant has been moving existing users of these apps over to the new Outlook for Windows app in recent months, and now it has set an end of support date for the Mail, Calendar, and People apps of December 31st.

Once the apps reach end of support later this year, Microsoft warns that users who haven’t moved to the new Outlook app “will no longer be able to send and receive email using Windows Mail and Calendar.”

Microsoft has been rolling out the new Outlook for Windows app for years, with it officially reaching the general availability stage in August. The new web-based Outlook is designed to eventually replace the full...

Continue reading…

It appears Apple’s rumored push into the smart home will include an Apple smart security camera. Supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports the company is planning to start production of a smart home IP camera in 2026 and aims to sell over 10 million units a year.

Kuo also reports that the camera is “designed to integrate seamlessly with other Apple hardware products via wireless connectivity” and speculates it will integrate deeply with Apple Intelligence and Apple’s Siri voice assistant.

Apple’s competitors, Amazon and Google, both have first-party security camera hardware products for their respective smart home platforms and have already started integrating generative AI. Amazon’s Ring launched a new AI search feature in October, and...

Continue reading…

Waymo is ditching its waitlist in Los Angeles, much like it did before in Phoenix and San Francisco, making its fully autonomous vehicles available to anyone who downloads the company’s Waymo One app.

There are still some geographic limitations with which to contend: Waymo only operates within 80 square miles of Los Angeles County, which includes neighborhoods such as Hollywood, Chinatown, Westwood, Marina del Rey, Mar Vista, and Playa Vista.

Still, it was a sign of the company’s growing confidence in its technology, especially after securing a record $5.6 billion investment round, led by its parent company, Alphabet, to help fund its next phase of growth. Waymo recently said it was conducting 150,000 paid trips and driving over 1...

Continue reading…

Fortnite is going old school once again. Epic has announced that the throwback mode Fortnite OG, which brings back the battle royale’s original island, will become a permanent fixture of the game starting on December 6th.

OG first launched last November as a limited-time event, which turned out to be a big hit and was designed explicitly to bring back lapsed players to the game ahead of the release of Lego Fortnite. Its return means iconic Fortnite elements like Tilted Towers and the Baller will now be a standard part of the experience.

Epic is currently attempting to replicate the success of OG. Fortnite is in the midst of Chapter 2 Remix, which — as the name implies — takes the game’s second chapter and tweaks it. The big shift this...

Continue reading…

Netflix’s subscription plan with ads has reached a new milestone: it hit 70 million monthly users since its launch two years ago. That’s a big jump compared to the 40 million monthly ad-supported users Netflix reported in May.

Additionally, the streaming service said that the ad-supported plan accounted for 50 percent of all new signups in countries where it’s available. Netflix rolled out its ad-supported tier in the US, Australia, Brazil, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and others in November 2022.

It’s no surprise that the ad-supported plan has seen such growth, as the streamer has started nudging users toward the $6.99 per month option by discontinuing its cheapest ad-free tier. The company has also started to build out the...

Continue reading…