Bethesda Softworks canceled its online melee game BattleCry in 2015, so it was weird that the publisher still had a studio named BattleCry Studios. Today, the company announced that it has remedied that oddity by shifting that development group under the Bethesda Game Studios team that is responsible for the publisher’s flagship role-playing franchises Fallout […]
Amazon has added a new feature for its Alexa voice assistant that you will let you make successive requests without needing to repeat your Echo speaker’s wake word, as noted today by CNET. Amazon is calling the new setting “follow-up mode,” and while it won’t let you nest one request into another, it will let […]
The high-end audio technology company Bose is getting into the augmented reality game with a new product and a $50 million fund devoted to startups that will develop services for its new platform. While most of the industry is focused on a visually augmented experience, Bose is most concerned with the intersection of sound and […]
Google is celebrating Mario Day (March 10th, MAR10) in style this year. Nintendo and Google have partnered up to bring Mario to Google Maps on iOS or Android. Mario Time, as Google calls it, will be available in the latest Google Maps mobile apps starting today. A new yellow “?” icon will appear next to […]
Samsung’s new Galaxy S9 may not quite live up to the iPhone X when it comes to Samsung’s implementation of a Face ID-style system or its odd take on AR emoji. But that’s not going to matter much to Samsung device owners — not only because the S9 is a good smartphone overall, but because […]
In a blog post today, Google is announcing that it’s formally embarking on a project to convince the group in charge of web standards to adopt technology inspired by its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. In theory, it would mean that virtually any webpage could gain the same benefits as AMP: near-instantaneous loading, distribution on […]
PlayStation 4’s latest update gives parents a lot more power. On Wednesday, Sony (SNE) rolled out a PS4 software update for its gaming console with several new features — most notably, the ability for adults to restrict how long a child uses the system. Other new features include more personalization and improved image quality for […]
Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, was laughing when it shouldn’t. You might have seen tweets about it: The weird, disembodied chuckle bothered people for reasons you can imagine, as well as because it reportedly could happen unprompted—our assistants, after all, are only supposed to listen and speak to us after they hear the wake word. We […]
If your license plate expires, you can still drive the car. But when a software-based certificate expires, you can’t drive the Oculus Rift to any virtual realm. Owners of the Facebook-owned virtual reality headset for the PC discovered this harsh reality on Tuesday when they booted up the device and faced a warning message, blocking […]
That build, No. 17618, brings back the Sets feature that Microsoft cut from Redstone 4 earlier this year. Sets is a window-management tool that allows users to group together web pages, documents, files and apps and work with them in tabs. In Redstone 4, only a subset of testers got to try out Sets; with […]
With the first developer preview of Android P out today, we’re getting our first look at the visual refresh that Google was rumored to be working on a few months ago. This is an extremely early build of the software, so it’s very likely that more changes are on the way — and some of what’s here might […]
Some Alexa users may feel like they’ve been dropped into a science fiction story about an artificial intelligence gone awry. The virtual assistant in Amazon’s Echo devices has been frightening people with spontaneous laughter, according to multiple social media reports. “I was trying to turn off some lights and they kept turning back on. After […]
