Mobile translation apps have improved substantially in recent years--with a little help on speech recognition from AI. Most apps can now keep up with real-time conversations, if your phone has a strong enough internet connection (so the audio can be processed and converted in the cloud). It means if you're trying to hold a conversation with someone in a language you don't know, you no longer need to spend time typing out words and phrases, or trying to figure out spellings and pronunciations. Instead, simply place your phone between you and the other person, and start chatting. There are several apps that can do this for you, but here we'll focus on the free translation apps on your Pixel phone, Galaxy phone, or iPhone.

In the final days of our pre-Switch 2 world, Nintendo is trying to rethink how sharing games works. The biggest announcement from the company's latest Direct was its upcoming Virtual Game Cards feature, a new approach to sharing digital games that improves on the company's current system, but still carries limitations that keep it from feeling truly modern. Virtual Game Cards attempt to make digital games as easy to share as physical ones. That starts with the company visually representing games as "cards" and using the language of loading and ejecting them, and extends to how simple they are to share. Two Switch consoles logged into your Nintendo Account can share any digital game just by "ejecting" it from one and "loading" it on another.

Happy Monster Hunter Wilds week to all who celebrate: Capcom's thrilling action game has sold 8m units in three days, which means that quite a lot of you are likely to be playing it. I'm a huge fan of this series and am delighted by the latest entry, but after filing the review last week, I've barely had a minute to play it since it came out. Regular readers will know that this is a familiar problem for me: I have two kids, so my gaming time is tight, and the living room TV is very often in use. I anticipated this, so in the run-up to Monster Hunter Wilds' release, I spent 200 on a PlayStation Portal – essentially a screen sandwiched between two halves of a PlayStation 5 controller. I can't decide whether it's one of the most unwieldy things that Sony has ever come out with, or one of the most elegant.

It's been another banner year for home security and smart home at CES, and after scouring the show floor, we've rounded up the smart products that stood apart from the rest. Among our picks: a video doorbell and a smart deadbolt with their own screens (about time), a Matter-enabled smart lamp that can control other Matter devices without an internet connection, a smart pet door that opens when your pets approach from either side, and a smart toothbrush that promises to scour your teeth and gums in 20 seconds flat. Wouldn't it be nice to see who was at your doorstep without fishing out your smartphone--or, you know, opening the door? You can with help from the SwitchBot Video Doorbell, a wired- or battery-powered unit that comes with its own 4 x 3 display, which you can mount in the kitchen, your living room, or even right next to the front door. The display can be outfitted with 512GB of local storage--meaning no need for the cloud--while the doorbell itself supports 4K video and offers a 165-degree field of view.

Black Friday is the big day for retailers slashing prices to kick off the holiday shopping season and clear out their 2024 stock. There's still a week until the big day but you don't have to wait to carve the Thanksgiving turkey and watch the Cowboys lose to snag discounts, because the best early Black Friday deals are live already. The WIRED team boasts decades of experience in product testing and a nose for sniffing out the best deals using a suite of price-tracking tools. For Black Friday, we cross-reference our buying guide recommendations with the latest sale prices to find the best early Black Friday deals on gadgets and gizmos worth owning. Someone from the WIRED Reviews team has tested every product we include in our deals coverage, so you can rest easy knowing we don't highlight low prices on low-quality goods. We strive to find deals at their best price ever, or very close to it (some match previous discounts, but we have never seen them lower unless stated). Updated November 22, 2024: We added deals on devices from PlayShifu, Shargeek, Anker, Mill, CrunchCup, Eve, Govee, Coway, Bosch, Arlo, Eufy, Google, TP-Link, Asus, Amazon, Tymo, Bellissima, CHI, R Co, Paul Mitchell, Arcade1Up, 8BitDo, Rayban, State Bags, reorganized the categories, removed discontinued deals, and updated prices. Get best-in-class reporting that's too important to ignore for just 2.50 1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content. Samsung's second-tier OLED (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is one of WIRED reviewer Ryan Waniata's favorite TVs of the year. This QD-OLED panel boasts fabulously rich colors, can get slightly brighter than the LG C4, and has the perfect black levels and excellent picture quality from any angle that make OLED the dominant TV tech today. This TV has HDMI 2.1 support across all four inputs, and Samsung's Game Hub lets you stream from loads of services, including Xbox. The only obvious downside is the lack of Dolby Vision.

Technology companies are racing to develop artificial intelligence that can run "unplugged" from the internet, providing users with a more personalized and private experience. During this year's Intel Innovation summit, company CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled new "AI PCs" that will increase the use of AI on the devices themselves and not depend on the cloud, according to a report from Spectrum. The company is not alone in its quest to optimize its devices to run artificial intelligence "at the edge," unplugged from the internet and run on local hardware. Apple and Qualcomm have also been involved in the race, the report noted, leading a drive toward AI meant to act more as a personalized assistant for the end user. Most AI tools today rely heavily on data centers that require a stable internet connection, at times overburdening servers attempting to keep up with the growing demand.

Qualcomm is no stranger in running artificial intelligence and machine learning systems on-device and without an internet connection. They've been doing it with their camera chipsets for years. But on Tuesday at Snapdragon Summit 2023, the company announced that on-device AI is finally coming to mobile devices and Windows 11 PCs as part of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and X Elite chips. Both chipsets were built from the ground up with generative AI capabilities in mind and are able to support a variety of large language models (LLM), language vision models (LVM), and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, up to 10 billion parameters for the SD8 gen 3 and 13 billion parameters for the X Elite, entirely on-device. That means you'll be able to run anything from Baidu's ERNIE 3.5 to OpenAI's Whisper, Meta's Llama 2 or Google's Gecko on your phone or laptop, without an internet connection.

CyberGuy explains how to leave FaceTime messages on iOS 17. Whether you're a new parent or a seasoned one, we know how stressful and challenging it can be to raise children in this fast-paced and ever-changing world. Many parents today are looking for ways to leverage technology to enhance their parenting skills and support their children's development. And the best part is, you don't need to be a tech expert to use them. All you need is a device, an internet connection, and a chatbot named ChatGPT.

An intriguing news item dropped into my inbox this week. It said that in the first quarter of this year, an electric vehicle (EV) had become the biggest-selling car in the world, outselling the Toyota Corolla. I know, I know, dear reader: you think this is non-news of the "Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead" variety. But to those of us condemned to follow the tech industry, three things are significant about it: the vanquished car was a Corolla, the EV was a Tesla (the Model Y hatchback), and the runner-up is made by Toyota. The poor Corolla gets a lot of disdainful looks from petrolheads, who tell rude jokes about it and view the vehicle as bland, unimaginative and boring.

That was my first thought when I learned about Nomono's portable recording setup last year. Since then, the price has dropped slightly to $2,490. But my main concern remains: Who needs this thing when you can get a small audio recorder and lavalier mics for far less? Nomono's kit includes four wireless lav mics, as well as a space recorder for room tone and spatial data, all of which charge in a portable carrying case. Your recordings are automatically uploaded to Nomono's cloud service, where you can optimize their audio quality (and eventually edit them in your browser).