Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
Meta’s Muse Charm Puts Your AI Agent on a Keychain by December
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Artificial Intelligence,
Meta saved its oddest piece of hardware for the last two minutes. At the end of tonight's Connect keynote, Mark Zuckerberg did a "one more thing" and held up a small black puck on a cord. It's called Muse Charm, Engadget's Karissa Bell put it at about the size of an Apple Watch, and its job is to give your Muse agent a body you can carry around. Zuckerberg said the design isn't finalized, but Meta plans to ship it "in time for the holidays," in December.
The Charm has a screen, and your Muse avatar lives on it. In Zuckerberg's case that's Agrippa, the toga-wearing Roman he'd been talking to all night. Tom's Guide's live notes say Meta has "only built a few of these so far," that you tap a fingerprint sensor in the corner, and that the "entire Muse AI" is built in. Engadget's Cherlynn Low said it "feels like a Tamagotchi met an AI wearable," and the stage shots back her up.
Click to continue reading Meta’s Muse Charm Puts Your AI Agent on a Keychain by December
YouTube Will Build a Feed From Your Description
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Artificial Intelligence,
Your YouTube homepage is a guess. Most days it's a good one, built out of everything you've watched, skipped, and let autoplay through at one in the morning. It is still YouTube deciding what you're in the mood for, though, and soon you'll be able to tell it directly instead.
That's the headline feature in a batch YouTube announced today. Custom feeds let you describe what you want in a conversational prompt, and YouTube builds a tab for it. The examples run to a feed for workouts, one for long documentaries, and one that surfaces new creators in a niche you care about. It's coming to web, mobile and TV, in the US first, and the only timing attached to it was "soon."
Click to continue reading YouTube Will Build a Feed From Your Description
Advertisement
Meta’s $1,299 VR Glasses Weigh 100 Grams Because the Computer Rides in Your Pocket
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Displays, Video Games,
Every VR headset asks you to strap a computer, a battery, and two screens to your face. Meta's new VR Glasses take the computer and the battery off. The glasses weigh about 100 grams, roughly a deck of cards, and everything heavy lives in a phone-sized puck that clips to your pocket and runs a cable up to your temple. They cost $1,299.99 and go on sale in spring 2027.
Mark Zuckerberg spent a big chunk of tonight's Connect keynote on them. Meta had been focusing less on the metaverse unless there was a breakthrough, he said, and then: "This is a breakthrough." He called it the result of more than a decade of work. It's Meta's first new VR hardware in about two years, since Quest 3S in fall 2024, and the pitch on stage came in three words: "Cinema. Computer. Console."
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
YouTube Studio Will Soon Test Three Cuts of Your Video to Find the Best Hook
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Software,
Every creator has an intro they aren't sure about. You cut the cold open, put it back, trim four seconds, and publish whichever version was on screen when you ran out of patience. YouTube Studio is about to let your audience make that call.
The biggest Studio news from Made on YouTube today is video A/B testing, which lets you run up to three cuts of the same video to see which hook performs best. YouTube says it's coming soon. It arrives with a batch of AI additions to Studio: feedback on early drafts, thumbnails generated to match your channel, and thumbnails that change depending on who's looking.
Beat Saber Goes Controller-Free and Supernatural Comes Back in Meta’s Connect Games Slate
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Video Games,
"VR gaming is alive and well," Andrew Bosworth said on the Connect stage tonight. It's a confident thing to say eight months after Meta closed three of its own VR studios, and Meta backed it up with a games slate built around playing without controllers.
Most of these games are coming to Meta's new VR Glasses, the $1,299.99 lightweight headset that ships next spring (we covered the hardware separately), and most also run on Quest. The headliner is a Beat Saber you can play with bare hands. The surprise is Supernatural, the fitness app Meta bought and then stopped updating, which returns this fall without Meta.
YouTube Is Putting a Gemini Editor in Shorts That Trims Your Pauses for You
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Artificial Intelligence,
Most of editing a Short is grunt work. You scrub through a clip to find where you stopped saying "um," you nudge a cut until it lands on the beat, and you shuffle clips around until the thing moves fast enough that nobody swipes away. YouTube wants a chatbot to do that part.
At Made on YouTube today, YouTube announced a conversational editing assistant built on Gemini for Shorts and the YouTube Create app. You start with one of its suggested prompts or type your own, and it builds a first draft. From there you keep chatting, and it offers personalized suggestions: trim the pauses, reorder clips for better pacing, reorder frames, and trim music and sync it to the beat. You can jump out to the regular timeline and edit by hand at any point, then come back to the chat. YouTube didn't say when it ships or in which countries.
Muse Is Replacing Meta AI on Meta’s Glasses, and You Get to Name It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Artificial Intelligence,
Talking to your glasses in public is awkward enough without starting every request with a corporation's name. At Meta Connect tonight, Meta said Muse, the personal AI agent it launched on September 8, is coming to its AI glasses and taking over from the built-in Meta AI assistant. You'll be able to give the assistant on your glasses your Muse's name and voice, which gives you an alternative to saying "Hey Meta."
Mark Zuckerberg showed it live. His Muse is a toga-wearing Roman named Agrippa, and Zuckerberg talked to it through a pair of Meta's glasses using Muse's new voice mode, reading off a long, complicated list of tasks. Agrippa gave the answer every good assistant gives before it goes off to do the work: "working on sending you options now."
Click to continue reading Muse Is Replacing Meta AI on Meta’s Glasses, and You Get to Name It
YouTube Shopping Is Headed to 35 Countries, and Ask YouTube Wants to Answer Your Shopping Questions
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet,
If you've ever bought a pair of headphones because someone held them up to a camera and talked about the bass for eleven minutes, you already use YouTube as a shopping search engine. At Made on YouTube today, the company leaned into that from both ends: more ways for creators to get paid when you buy something, and an AI that will answer the shopping question for you.
The creator half is the more concrete one. The YouTube Shopping affiliate program, which lets creators tag products in their videos and earn a commission on sales, is expanding to 35 countries by the end of the year. YouTube says more than 1.3 million creators are already in the program, and that gross merchandise volume through it has grown 13x over the last two years.
Bentley’s First EV Charges to 80 Percent in 16 Minutes. It Also Pipes In Fake Engine Noise.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, Transportation,
A lot of what you paid for in a Bentley was sound. The big engine clearing its throat outside a restaurant did real work for the sticker price. The Torcal, Bentley's first electric car, revealed in London today, has none of that. So Bentley composed some and named it Bentley Dynamic Symphony.
The car under the soundtrack is serious. It's a five-meter SUV, designed, engineered and built in Crewe, with two permanent magnet motors driving all four wheels. That's 821 PS in the standard car and 888 in the S, good for 0 to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds, or 2.8 if you buy the S. Top speed is 155 mph, or 162 in the S. Those are the numbers Bentley led with. The one it left out is the price.
Meta’s Glasses Can Now Be a Hearing Aid, If You Pay $150 to Turn It On
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Portable Audio / Video,
Meta's glasses can now work as a hearing aid. The feature is FDA-cleared for mild to moderate hearing loss, it held up in early hands-ons, and after a 30-day free trial it costs $149.99 on top of the glasses, a number Meta left out of its keynote.
Meta announced Hearing Enhancement at Connect on Wednesday night. Last year it showed Conversation Focus, which helps anyone pick out a voice in a noisy room. Hearing Enhancement goes further. The FDA cleared it as a self-fitting, over-the-counter hearing aid for people with mild to moderate hearing loss, so you don't need a prescription. It arrives in the US later this year on Meta Glasses, the line Meta launched with EssilorLuxottica in June starting at $299. The new Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) and the camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio get it after that.
Click to continue reading Meta’s Glasses Can Now Be a Hearing Aid, If You Pay $150 to Turn It On