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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google's latest Pixel launch event has come to an end. Even though some of the products Google revealed were leaked well in advance, the company still managed to throw in a couple of surprises.Here are all the biggest announcements from the Made by Google event.The Pixel 8 Pro gets a price bump and a temperature sensor Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google has officially announced the Pixel 8 Pro, and it comes with quite a few upgrades. That includes a Tensor G3 chipset, along with an updated rear camera array with a 50MP main sensor, a 48MP telephoto lens with 5x zoom, and a 48MP ultrawide camera. It will even have a new Zoom Enhance feature that can retroactively add detail to an image when you pinch to zoom... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge While the AI industry has focused on making its algorithms less biased based on the lightness or darkness of people's skin tones, new research from Sony is calling for red and yellow skin hues to also be taken into account. In a paper published last month, authors William Thong and Alice Xiang from Sony AI, as well as Przemyslaw Joniak from the University of Tokyo, put forward a more multidimensional" measurement of skin color in the hope that it might lead to more diverse and representative AI systems.Researchers have been drawing attention to skin color biases in AI systems for years, including in an important 2018 study from Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru that found AI was more prone to inaccuracies when used on darker-skinned... Continue reading...

Would you believe this was probably the safest image we could have used here? | Image: Meta / @Pioldes Some early user tests for Meta's new AI-generated sticker tool have resulted in some dubious (and rather hilarious) creations. After gaining access to the new AI-generated sticker tool on Facebook Messenger, X user @Pioldes was able to create a host of inappropriate sticker images - including child soldiers, gun-wielding Nintendo characters, Mickey Mouse taking a crap, and nude illustrations of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.Other examples show that Meta's AI-sticker tool will also happily slap a pair of breasts onto...well, just about anything, judging by the busty images of Sonic the Hedgehog and Karl Marx. There's even a sticker that depicts a woman breastfeeding Pikachu.

Image: Meta Meta's text-based chat feature for Horizon Worlds will be available for all users beginning this week, Meta said in a blog post on Tuesday. The text chat, which Meta dubs world chat," offers a way to communicate with other people inside a Horizon Worlds experience without using your voice. Meta first launched world chat in a limited way in June.The world chat feature is accessible from the options you can pick from when you lift your left wrist while in VR; it's a little world icon inside a speech box. And to make text chat a bit easier, Meta says it offers quick replies so that you don't have to take the time to manually spell out messages, which can be a big pain in VR.Unfortunately, I don't have access to world chat myself just... Continue reading...

Everybody do the pinchy pinch. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Double tap, which lets Apple Watch users tap their thumb and index finger together twice to contextually control the watch, is one of the coolest features of the latest Apple Watch models. It wasn't included at launch, but 9to5Mac reports that it's available now in the watchOS 10.1 developer beta. The public beta and general release are almost certainly not far behind, but if you have an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 and you're feeling mildly adventurous, you can try it out today - it's easy to sign up for the developer betas these days. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Double tap does have some customizability, though mainly for the widget stack and music controls. The contextual pinchy pinch lets... Continue reading...

This is Hot Pod, The Verge's newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.Ariel and Amrita coming to you with another joint issue today. It's a jam-packed Tuesday, with Spotify debuting its biggest audiobook development yet, an exclusive interview with the writer of the Audible Original Six Sermons, and Malcolm Gladwell's Pushkin Industries laying off a third of its staff.Spotify gets serious about audiobooksAt a company event this afternoon, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify subscribers in the UK, Australia, and, in the winter, the US will be able to stream 15 hours of premium audiobooks each month. It's a big leap from Spotify's initial a la carte audiobook model and has the potential to... Continue reading...

Founded and funded by ex-Apple designers: a portable USB-C blender. Continue reading...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge As Meta continues to take steps back from news promotion on its platforms, its head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, is leaving the company, reports Axios. She was hired in 2017 to help news organizations get their content in front of users as the company pushed to make Facebook a major news aggregator.Brown will continue to remain affiliated with Meta" as a consultant, according to internal documents Axios viewed. Meta, during her tenure, added a News tab, worked to get big licensing deals with news publishers, and even offered grants through its Facebook Journalism Project to help fund struggling local news outlets.Brown said in a 2018 Code Conference interview that her job was not to go recruit people from news organizations... Continue reading...

Image: Peter Wynn Thompson The monthly price of ad-free Discovery Plus is jumping up in cost from $6.99 per month to $8.99 per month (plus taxes), Warner Bros. Discovery announced on Tuesday. The new price is effective Tuesday, meaning that if you're already a subscriber, you'll see the higher price on your next billing cycle on or after November 2," the company says. The streaming service's ad-lite" tier will stay the same price, meaning you can still get it for $4.99 per month.Discovery Plus gives you access to more than 70,000 episodes of shows from networks like TLC, HGTV, Discovery, and Lifetime, meaning it's a great choice for people looking to watch reality shows and unscripted series. Just read my colleague Emma Roth's article about why she pays for... Continue reading...

Tom Hiddleston as Loki. | Image: Marvel Studios Loki's second season feels like the MCU making a valiant attempt at getting its multiverse together. Continue reading...

The iPhone 15 Pro Max takes great portrait photos. | Photo by Sam Price-Waldman for The Verge What many folks are calling a slow year of advancements in the iPhone 15 lineup is far from true for the iPhone 15 Pro Max's camera. Willy-nilly use of the word lenses" aside, there are more framing options this year thanks to extra digital lenses and a dedicated 5x telephoto lens. The video quality is now the best you can get on a smartphone and even offers a ProRes log output. Photos of people at night have improved dramatically. And a software trick allows you to add a portrait mode blur effect after a photo is taken. These are some of the small changes that make for a better experience, but as a professional photographer, there is still a missing piece.Every year, I set out to take 1,000 photos with the newest smartphone camera... Continue reading...

Amazon's big-screen Kindle Scribe still isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than it was when it first launched. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge We're now less than a week out from Amazon's October Prime Day and, as expected, Amazon has already started to drop discounts on Echo speakers, Fire tablets, and other items ahead of the two-day shopping event. The current promo also extends to the Kindle Scribe and the latest Kindle Kids, which are on sale at Amazon and Target starting at $264.99 ($75 off) and $79.99 ($40 off), respectively.If you're deciding between the two e-readers, the differences are pretty stark. The Kindle Kids is basically a kid-friendly version of Amazon's entry-level Kindle, which remains our top pick when it comes to ebook readers. It offers identical performance to the standard edition, only it comes with a case, an extended two-year warranty, and a year... Continue reading...

Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Studio 2 has new chips, a new touchpad, and a very, very high price tag. Continue reading...