Upgrades include 360-degree audio and deeper integration with Gemini. Last fall Google teased that it was working on an all-new Google Home speaker due out sometime in mid 2026. And while it took a tiny bit longer than expected, today the company began taking pre-orders for its latest speaker ahead of its official on-sale date of June 25. While the new Google Home serves a similar role to the existing Nest Audio, including the ability to function as linked stereo speakers when paired with a second unit, there are a number of other design changes and upgrades. Instead of relying on directional sound, the Google Home was created to deliver clear 360-degree audio in an even more compact chassis.

Arriving six years after Google's last smart speaker, the new HomePod-style device was redesigned to play host to Gemini's chatbot. The last time Google released a smart speaker, the world was in the throes of a pandemic . Yes, it's been six years since the company trotted out a dedicated speaker. However, this newest Google Home Speaker brings a big change with it: The device has been redesigned to showcase the new Gemini assistant instead of the Google Assistant that powered all previous speakers and smart displays. Google announced the speaker last fall alongside new Nest smart home cameras and video doorbells, promising a spring 2026 launch.

A.1 Comparison of Results for Gemini with Different Format Transformations Gemini attained optimal performance metrics for sensitive category and format transformation scenarios tasks, surpassing all comparator models in maximum achievable performance. The focus was then placed on Gemini's ability to recognize and restore both original and transformed data. The experimental results are shown in Table 1. In the main text section Experiments, due to space constraints, only four key observations were analyzed, as follows: i) The LRAcc and DRAcc of total format transformed data is less than original data, which indicates that it is more difficult to recognize and restore data after format transformed. These transformations only affect numbers, and only the IMEI and IMSI (purely numeric) sensitive categories support such transformations. Due to the lack of contextual information in the sample data, large language models may confuse these with personal identifiers, mobile numbers, and MEID.

The remarkable progress in text-to-video diffusion models enables the generation of photorealistic videos, although the content of these generated videos often includes unnatural movement or deformation, reverse playback, and motionless scenes. Recently, an alignment problem has attracted huge attention, where we steer the output of diffusion models based on some measure of the content's goodness. Because there is a large room for improvement of perceptual quality along the frame direction, we should address which metrics we should optimize and how we can optimize them in the video generation. In this paper, we propose diffusion latent beam search with lookahead estimator, which can select a better diffusion latent to maximize a given alignment reward at inference time. We then point out that improving perceptual video quality with respect to alignment to prompts requires reward calibration by weighting existing metrics. This is because when humans or vision language models evaluate outputs, many previous metrics to quantify the naturalness of video do not always correlate with the evaluation. We demonstrate that our method improves the perceptual quality evaluated on the calibrated reward, VLMs, and human assessment, without model parameter update, and outputs the best generation compared to greedy search and best-of-N sampling under much more efficient computational cost.

Do You Actually Need to Pay for Transcription Software? I tested Wispr Flow and various AI-powered transcription software to see whether you should bother subscribing or stick with free services. The pitch--that you'll be able to write faster by talking out loud instead of typing-- is compelling, especially if you're a slow typist. The marketing promises you'll be able to write at the speed of thought, 4x faster than your keyboard. I already type faster than I can think.

When most of us think of AI chatbots, we think of complex systems running on powerful hardware in massive data centers. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini a question, then watch it think as it pings some faraway server network to process, before it generates an answer. The reality is that's just one way to interact with the latest AI models, and you can run an open-weight chatbots on a recent iPhone. A local chatbot might not be as powerful as its cloud counterparts, but there are compelling reasons to ditch ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, which I'll go over in this guide. I'll also explain how to install a local AI model on your phone. It might seem complicated, but I promise it's easier than you think.

Gemini can trigger smart home routines based on what your cameras see. Google is updating Gemini for Home, the version of its AI assistant for smart homes, with new camera-based automations, reliability improvements and an updated version of the Google Home app. Gemini for Home launched in early access in October 2025, and has replaced Google Assistant on Google's smart home cameras, speakers, doorbells and displays. At I/O 2026, Google expanded its Google Home Gemini built-in program to make it easier for companies to make compatible cameras and speakers. That focus on cameras wasn't a coincidence; the biggest change the company is rolling out now is the ability to use Gemini to create automations triggered by what your cameras see.

PCWorld reports that Google's AI services are increasingly resembling advertisements, with new premium offerings like the $100/month Spark AI agent for digital life management. Google has shifted Gemini to a compute-based usage model while introducing advanced AI glasses that raise significant privacy concerns due to integrated cameras.

PCWorld reports Google's new Gemini-powered smart glasses prototype represents a refined approach to smart eyewear, manufactured by Samsung with discreet camera and touch controls. The lightweight glasses integrate Google's AI assistant for real-world navigation, search functions, and phone replacement capabilities while maintaining a normal sunglasses appearance. Despite improved public acceptance and seamless design, limitations include basic heads-up display, battery concerns, and sometimes forced AI features. A decade after Google launched Google Glass to spectacular failure, it's trying again. And I think that the world (and I) will be more receptive to what Google's online AI interpreter, Gemini, can do when plugged into your ear.

Google is sprucing up its Gemini models, revamping search, and enabling AI agents in everything. There are also some spiffy new smart glasses coming this fall. Google just wrapped its keynote address at its annual I/O developer event . The company showed off a swath of new agentic AI features and some demos of its upcoming Android-powered smart glasses. As it has in the past few years, the spectacle largely revolved around Google's perpetual stream of AI efforts.