#google

The $100 Fitbit Air is available for preorder today.

The Fitbit Air can be preordered today and will be available starting May 26th. | Image: Google It's a Whoop dupe. That was my first thought when I saw the new $99 Google Fitbit Air. You can hardly blame me. The band is screenless with a metallic fabric clasp. My eyes flickered between the Fitbit Air and my wrist, where I'm wearing a Whoop MG. Was I not seeing double? But as my press briefing went on, my opinion started changing. The Air is sort of like the OG Fitbits that Whoop then duped once Fitbit went all in on smartwatches. Think back to 2012, when the Fitbit One could clip to your pants, be turned into a pendant, or dangle from a keychain. That device was mostly a pedometer, whereas the Air is more of a modern, modular sensor t … Read the full story at The Verge.

Google’s A.I. search technology is far from perfect (don’t count on it for celebrity news), but it excels at tasks like picking out groceries and detecting scams.

Google is updating its AI-powered search experience to surface richer context alongside results, including previews from public online discussions, social media, and firsthand community sources. Links will now display additional metadata such as creator names and community handles to help users evaluate credibility before clicking. The update also highlights links from a user’s existing news […]

Google has pulled the plug on Project Mariner, an experimental feature designed to perform tasks for you across the web, as reported earlier by Wired's Maxwell Zeff. The Project Mariner landing page now contains a message that says: "Thank you for using Project Mariner. It was shut down on May 4th, 2026 and its technology voyaged to other Google products." Google first revealed Project Mariner in December 2024 and later announced an update allowing it to perform up to 10 tasks at a time. Over the past year, Google has integrated features powered by Project Mariner into its other AI tools, including Gemini Agent, which can do things like arc … Read the full story at The Verge.

We’ve rounded up the top ways you can use Google’s AI Mode, Search Live and Shopping to help your plants thrive.

While citing web forums and discussion boards can help users find answers to more niche queries, this design choice could also prove chaotic.

Up to 3x the speed with no loss of quality—is it too good to be true?

Gain real-time intelligence from OpenAI, Google & more

Want real human feedback related to your search results? Google’s AI now fetches it for you. | Image by Google / The Verge Google is updating its AI Search features to make it easier for users to find information from sources they know and trust. One of the more notable changes introduces "a preview of perspectives" from firsthand sources like social media, Reddit, and other web forums, effectively linking your search queries with online conversations around similar topics. Google says this update aims to address that "people are increasingly seeking out advice from others" when searching for information online. This will be relatable for anyone who's added "Reddit" to the end of Google Search terms to find experiences from real humans instead of SEO-optimized … Read the full story at The Verge.

Building a RAG system just got much easier. Google’s File Search tool for the Gemini API now handles the heavy lifting of connecting LLMs to your data. Chunking, embedding, indexing are all managed for you. And with the latest update, it’s gone multimodal. You can now search through both text and images in a single […] The post Gemini API File Search: The Easy Way to Build RAG appeared first on Analytics Vidhya.

The US administration has added four more AI companies to its roster of favoured suppliers, with the Pentagon signing agreements with Microsoft, Reflection AI (which has yet to release a publicly-available model), Amazon, and Nvidia that mean their products can be used on classified operations. The companies join OpenAI, xAI, and Google as companies that […] The post US government increases AI suppliers and rethinks Anthropic’s role appeared first on AI News.

Google is testing Remy, a new AI personal agent for Gemini, according to Business Insider. The tool is designed to take actions for users in work and daily tasks. Remy is being tested in a staff-only version of the Gemini app. The report said it reviewed an internal document and spoke with two people familiar […] The post Google tests Remy AI agent for Gemini as focus turns to user control appeared first on AI News.

Holy moly, I am flying around my phone this week. It’s a wild feeling — especially since Google’s grand I/O gala, which is traditionally the time when shapeshifting new Android additions are supposed to command our attention, isn’t for another couple weeks yet. These days, though, we’ve reached a point where many of the most interesting and non-AI-gobblydegook Android innovations aren’t even coming from Google itself but rather from third-party apps, add-ons, and crafty configuring (a fancy way of saying “good old-fashioned geeky tinkering”). And that’s absolutely the case with this latest superpower I’ve just been granted. It’s an on-demand desktop-style taskbar that makes it delightfully swift ‘n’ simple to switch over to any other app on your favorite Android gadget without first having to head back to your home screen and then poke around to find it. Instead, you just summon that taskbar — or even set it to be always visible, if you’d rather — and, exactly like on a desktop compute

Google Home users can now ask Gemini to complete more complex, multi-step tasks and combine multiple tasks in a single command. Google has updated Gemini for Home to Gemini 3.1, which it says will improve the smart home assistant's ability to interpret and act on requests. The upgrade will also make Gemini for Home better at handling recurring and all-day events and allow users to "move around" upcoming events. Last month, Google also updated Gemini for Home with improvements for understanding natural language and identifying devices correctly. The upgrades follow reports of bugs in Google's new smart home assistant, like confusing differe … Read the full story at The Verge.

Google's smart home ecosystem is getting its biggest update since the AI-fueled 2025 revamp.

Google is partnering with XPRIZE and Range Media Partners on the $3.5 million Future Vision film competition.

Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Elon Musk's xAI have agreed to allow the US government to review new AI models before they're released to the public. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) says it will work with the AI companies to perform "pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities." CAISI, which started evaluating models from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2024, says it has performed 40 reviews so far. Both companies "have renegotiated their existing partnerships with the center to better align with priorities in President Donald Trum … Read the full story at The Verge.

UK staff of Google's AI research lab hope to block the use of the company's artificial intelligence models in military settings.

Agreement with the tech groups follows concerns about Anthropic’s latest Mythos model