A new feature coming to Slack will allow you to build interactive reports, polls, dashboards, presentations, microsites, and other tools directly inside a chat. With Slackforce Surfaces, you can describe to Slackbot what you need, and it will use AI to gather information from relevant conversations and connected apps, like Google Drive or Salesforce, to create it.

Once Slackbot creates a Surface, you can share it with colleagues and pin it to channels, allowing other people to view it, interact with it, and leave comments. In one example shared by Slack, a user asks Slackbot for help creating an arcade-themed visualization of AI token usage …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It's the hot new thing in tech, and it's where all the jobs are. Students who don't learn to use it fall behind. And to help them catch up in time, its creators are graciously providing the resources and curriculum for learning it, often pro bono.

That's the narrative AI companies are pitching schools on right now, but according to New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer, it's also how the tech industry has built its influence in classrooms for the past 15 years.

In a new book, Coding Kids, Singer details how tech companies took a central role in promoting computers and coding skills in education, promising computer sci …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Looking to take full advantage of your 4K television, but your current streaming stick doesn’t have the right features? Through September 13th, you can grab an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K from Woot for just $16.09 when you use the coupon code FIRE30 at checkout. With support for Wi-Fi 6 and 2GB of memory, it’s fast enough for streaming movies or playing games with Xbox Cloud Gaming or Nvidia GeForce Now. While this is the 2023 model, it’s functionally identical (and also has the same specs) to the current Fire TV Stick 4K Plus that costs considerably more. It received a name change in late 2025 to differentiate it from the more basic 4K Select model.

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K

Where to Buy:

• $49.99 $16.09 at Woot (with coupon code FIRE30)

Like the other 4K Fire TV sticks, the 2023 model supports a huge variety of streaming services and apps, and the Alexa Plus voice assistant feature lets you quickly find a show or movie without having to scroll through each one. With support for Dolby Vision, HDR10 Plus, and Dolby Atmos, you won’t have to compromise on video or audio quality during your next movie night.

Other deals to consider

• Green Man Gaming has the Steam version of Resident Evil Requiem on sale for $41.64, with the full discount showing up once you add it to your cart. This iteration of the game tasks players with investigating a series of murders related to the 1998 Raccoon City incident, a core piece of lore for the series, and it alternates between perspectives. Read our review.
• You can grab a two-pack of Ring Alarm Contact Sensors at Amazon for $20, a $10 discount compared to what they usually cost (but half off their original price). These sensors easily install onto window or door frames with either adhesive or screws, and send signals to the Ring Alarm Base Station when opened or closed. They have a three year battery life, with replaceable batteries once they finally run out.
• The Lenovo Idea Tab Pro is on sale for $279.99 at Best Buy, $180 off its usual price. The 12.7-inch Android tablet features a 2944 x 1840 display, with a variable refresh rate up to 144Hz, great for scrolling the web, or even some light gaming. The deal also includes the Lenovo Tab Pen Plus, which has over 4,000 sensitivity levels for a natural feel while drawing or taking notes.

A new federal program to test the feasibility of electric, hybrid-electric, and autonomous aircraft kicks off today in Texas - before the rules governing this new technology have even been finalized.

Earlier this year, the Federal Aviation Administration's Advanced Air Mobility and Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) selected eight state-led projects to serve as some of the first public tests of these new aircraft. The first one kicks off today in Texas, featuring three eVTOL companies: Joby, Beta, and Wisk.

For the next week, these companies will conduct test flights demonstrating future routes …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Universal Music Group is launching a new AI-powered platform that will allow users to draw from its catalog of licensed music to create song remixes, mashups, and new takes on tracks, according to an announcement on Thursday. The record label is developing the platform through a multiyear licensing agreement with ElevenLabs, a company that specializes in AI voice and music generation.

Artists can choose whether to participate in UMG and ElevenLabs' upcoming platform, which marks yet another AI deal for the record label. UMG is currently developing an AI music platform with Udio and has struck AI licensing deals with Spotify, Nvidia, and Kla …

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The iPhone Duo was the unequivocal star of Apple's "Surprise and shine" event, but not for people who were mostly paying attention for news on wearables. Thankfully, Apple had a lot to share about its new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. There's no update to the SE model for 2026, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (the SE 3 rules). Also, no price changes either, which can't be said for the entire iPhone lineup.

While both new watches look similar to their predecessors, there are a number of updates under the hood that might intrigue some people enough to warrant a preorder. My colleague Victoria Song got hands-on with both smartwatches …

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Marvel's Wolverine captures just how angry its lead character is. The latest PS5 exclusive from Spider-Man developer Insomniac, Wolverine is a straightforward action game that is at its best when you're (literally) slicing through enemies or thrust into a sequence pulled from a blockbuster movie, like climbing the fuselage of a plane as it careens toward land or racing a motorcycle across rain-slicked city streets. It's the kind of game that can really get your heart rate rising, and keeping Logan mad is a key part of the strategy. In many ways, it's a throwback to straightforward action titles of the past - and it's a refreshing change of p …

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Meta has launched its new Muse assistant, marking the company's first real foray into AI-powered productivity tools. The company says its AI agent can "take the busywork off your plate" by helping you with online shopping, emails, trip-planning, and more. I decided to try out the new tool and see how well it performed - especially from a company that previously prioritized entertainment over productivity. Though the AI assistant generally worked as I expected it to, the unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me largely overshadowed my experience.

One of the first tasks I assigned Muse, which carries out actions using …

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Jimmy Kimmel will be interviewing Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico "under unusual circumstances," posting the interview directly to YouTube, rather than airing it on TV during Jimmy Kimmel Live. In Wednesday night's episode, Kimmel said this was out of concern for retaliation from the Trump administration's FCC:

[Trump's] FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings, it would seem they don't like. And so, out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who woul …

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With the iPhone Duo, Apple has pulled off a familiar trick. It arrives into a mature Android foldable market with a handful of hardware features we've mostly already seen elsewhere, but paired with a level of software polish that makes a lot of them feel new again. It's those software flourishes that have me excited to try the iPhone Duo when it launches next month, but I'm less convinced that its hardware will be anything special.

If Apple had gotten there first, the Duo's biggest surprise would have been its squat, wide, passport-inspired shape. But its slow-moving supply chain meant that Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi all managed to beat Ap …

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Snapchat is launching Plans, a new suite of features designed to help turn the plans already being made in group chats - everything from birthday celebrations to study sessions and weekend hangouts - into real life get-togethers without ever leaving the app.

Plans lets users set event details, invite up to 200 friends with invitations adorned with dynamic Bitmoji that change as friends respond, and track RSVPs. Invites are sent via one-to-one chat and reminders are automatically sent to attendees before the scheduled event starts. A dedicated "My Plans" tab on user profiles lets you keep track of upcoming and past plans.

Snap is strugglin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company's models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and "dishonest" behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data.

In a series of posts on Mastodon, mathematician Andreas Thom raised concerns that interactions he and his colleagues had had with the ChatGPT chatbot before OpenAI's triumphant announcement may have contributed to its success in the field. One of the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple always makes a big show of the latest cameras in its phones, and the major talking point of the iPhone 18 Pro is about the new variable aperture. Both the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max have an adjustable mechanical iris in their main camera modules to let more or less light into the sensor, allowing users to shoot at f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8, and f/4. You can, of course, let the camera select your aperture automatically, but the manual aperture control comes along with other new pro controls allowing you to dial in shutter speeds, manual white balance, and even manual focusing.

As a whole, this is a wealth of new controls for an iPhone camera …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Bad news if you didn't lock in a Trump phone at launch: It now costs $749, a $250 increase on its price at launch. The T1 Phone itself hasn't changed.

Trump Mobile didn't announce the price increase, instead quietly changing its website overnight. This wasn't a total surprise though, especially given the phone ships with an unexpectedly generous 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM. When I spoke to two Trump Mobile executives earlier this year, they called the $499 launch pricing "introductory," and a few months later, the website itself was changed to reflect that, calling it a "promotional price." That wording is now gone.

When I reviewed th …

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Nintendo always promised that the Switch 2 would support variable refresh rate (VRR) when docked, but the console launched without this key feature. A new 23.0.0 firmware update now adds VRR support to the Switch 2 when it's docked and in TV mode.

VRR adjusts a display's refresh rate to match a game's frame rate, smoothing out gameplay and reducing screen tearing. It will be particularly useful for games on the Switch 2 that have an unstable frame rate, and it's a feature that the PS5 and Xbox Series S / X all support.

The latest Switch 2 firmware also includes a new toggle for handheld boost mode in quick settings, as well as an update to …

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Xbox will now publish Physint, an upcoming game from Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima, after PlayStation decided to cancel it.

The unexpected swap came in a flurry of announcements from PlayStation, Xbox, Kojima Productions, and Kojima himself. Sony, which published both of Kojima Productions' previous Death Stranding games, framed it as a "difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions," but insisted their "relationship remains strong."

Kojima put things more bluntly on his personal X account, claiming that Sony gave the studio an unexpected cancellation notice in June, and that it has spent the last three mont …

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Today, Volvo said it was canceling the entry-level electric EX40 in the US, while also giving its aging hybrid XC40 a new look. When it arrives at dealerships early next year, the new XC40 will have updated exterior styling, a gut-renovated interior featuring Google's Gemini AI assistant, enlarged infotainment screen, and a new sensor-and-software safety suite.

Volvo is expected to replace the EX40 with the slightly larger EX50, riding on the automaker's lower-cost SPA3 platform. The EV should reach US dealerships by mid-2027, and will likely start in the high-$40,000 range, according to Automotive News.

As a hybrid, the XC40 serves as a …

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September Apple events are always a swirl of information and new, exciting products, and today's was no different. Apple announced its first foldable, the iPhone Duo, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max; active noise cancellation (ANC) is now on the cheapest AirPods model, the AirPods 5; and a Siri Recap feature comes to the Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4. But missing were the AirPods Pro with cameras that have been rumored throughout the year and, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, are delayed until 2027. I'm happy about that and I hope we never get them.

I have too many concerns about a company - any company - putting cameras a …

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Apple has seen reason: It has a black model in the iPhone Pro lineup again.

Last year, Apple went bold with its colors for the iPhone 17 Pro, offering a flashy orange, a shiny silver, and a dark blue. Don't get me wrong, they looked nice. But there was no black (or dark gray) for the first time since the start of the iPhone Pro lineup, which Apple first introduced in September 2019 with the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max.

I care about this because I always buy the black phone. I learned my lesson with the iPhone 6: I got it in gold to mix things up and came to regret it. I don't need something flashy - I need a phone that blends into the backg …

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Apple announced the company's first device with a folding screen today, the iPhone Duo, but that's where the firsts end. The Duo is not only far from the first foldable on the market thanks to the efforts of Samsung and Google, but it's also not the first product to be called the Duo.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs popularized the saying "good artists copy, great artists steal," but will the iPhone Duo's folding screen, which features a custom nano-texture display material to help minimize the visibility of its crease, be enough to make us forget these other Duos that have come before it? Only time, or how aggressively Apple plans to market i …

Read the full story at The Verge.