Engadget's best of CES 2026: All the new tech that caught our eye in Las Vegas This year, over 4,000 exhibitors descended on Las Vegas, Nevada to showcase their wares at CES, and the Engadget team was out in full force . The week started with press conferences from the biggest companies at the show, which were often a flurry of AI buzzwords, vague promises and very little in the way of hard news. More than one company even decided to forgo announcing things during their conferences to make way for more AI chatter, only to publish press releases later quietly admitting that, yes, actually, they did make some consumer technology. It's appropriate, I guess, that as we're beginning to feel the knock-on cost effects of the AI industry's insatiable appetite for compute resources -- higher utility bills and device prices -- companies would rather use their flashy conferences to reinforce AI's supposedly must-have attributes rather than actually inform the public about their new products. We're by no means AI luddites at Engadget, but it's fair to say that our team is more excited by tangible products that enrich our lives than iterative improvements to large language models. So, away from all of the bombast of NVIDIA's marathon keynote and Lenovo's somehow simultaneously gaudy and dull Sphere show, it's been a pleasure to evaluate the crowd of weird new gadgets, appliances, toys and robots vying for our attention.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during an Amazon Devices launch event in New York City, Feb. 26, 2025. TECH TAKEOVER: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says artificial intelligence will "change the way" work is done and expects the company's total corporate workforce to be reduced as a result. 'GIANT OFFERS': Meta has allegedly tried to recruit employees from competitor OpenAI by offering bonuses as high as 100 million, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed on a podcast that aired Tuesday. ENERGY OUTLOOK: The rise of artificial intelligence and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency will continue to push electricity consumption to record highs in 2025 and 2026. POWER DRAIN CRISIS: Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, to generate an image or let artificial intelligence summarize your email, something big is happening behind the scenes.

Lego and McLaren collaborated on a fully drivable, life-sized replica of the McLaren P1 hypercar made almost entirely out of Lego Technic pieces. Imagine being able to turn any object into a Lego masterpiece with just your phone. Well, that's exactly what Brick My World offers. This innovative app is here to make custom Lego creation fun and accessible for everyone, whether you're a seasoned builder or just getting started. By using advanced artificial intelligence and mobile scanning technology, Brick My World opens up a world of creative possibilities.

The Agency

Los Angeles will utilize AI-powered scanners at Union Station over the next month in an effort to stop passengers with hidden weapons from boarding the rails. Commuters descending to underground platforms for the A, B and D lines (formally known as the Blue, Red and Purple lines) will enter into the testing ground for Metro's 30-day pilot program, which went into effect on Tuesday, though the scanners will not run every day. The program arrives amid growing concern over passenger safety, with Metro recording an uptick in arrests this year for riders carrying concealed weapons. The roughly 6-foot-tall Evolv Technology scanners use artificial intelligence to pinpoint on a person's body where they could possibly be carrying a weapon, according to the company's website. All weapons are banned on the Metro system, and it is illegal to carry a concealed firearm without a permit in California.

A new "empathic voice interface" launched today by Hume AI, a New York–based startup, makes it possible to add a range of emotionally expressive voices, plus an emotionally attuned ear, to large language models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI--portending an era when AI helpers may more routinely get all gushy on us. "We specialize in building empathic personalities that speak in ways people would speak, rather than stereotypes of AI assistants," says Hume AI cofounder Alan Cowen, a psychologist who has coauthored a number of research papers on AI and emotion, and who previously worked on emotional technologies at Google and Facebook. WIRED tested Hume's latest voice technology, called EVI 2 and found its output to be similar to that developed by OpenAI for ChatGPT. Later, a real movie star, Scarlett Johansson, claimed OpenAI had ripped off her voice.) Like ChatGPT, Hume is far more emotionally expressive than most conventional voice interfaces. If you tell it that your pet has died, for example, it will adopt a suitable somber and sympathetic tone.

"Prevailing Narrative" podcast host Matthew Bilinsky discusses the federal law enforcement request for Google to hand over YouTube data on certain users on "Fox News @ Night." Ford Motor Company recently filed a patent application that's raising eyebrows and sparking debate about privacy and surveillance on our roads. The patent, "Systems and Methods for Detecting Speeding Violations," describes a system that could turn Ford vehicles into mobile speed detectors capable of reporting other drivers to the police. The patent application was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in January 2023. However, it was formally published by the USPTO on July 18, 2024.

John Oates, of Hall & Oates, is wary of the future represented by artificial intelligence in the music industry. "Look at what's coming in with AI, the possibility that AI is going to be replacing songwriters and artists for that matter," Oates told Fox News Digital. "The idea that there could be a new… David Bowie album. AI could take David Bowie's voice and extrapolate and sample his music for his entire career and write new David Bowie songs, and the record company could put it out." He added, "A younger generation might not even know. They might not even know he's dead for that matter. So there's a lot going on and you have to pay attention."

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Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. A Nobel Prize-winning economist is sounding the alarm about the future of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers amid the rapid development of artificial intelligence, arguing that many of the currently in-demand jobs could soon be obsolete. "The skills that are needed now -- to collect the data, collate it, develop it and use it to develop the next phase of AI, or more to the point, make AI more applicable for jobs -- will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job," said Christopher Pissarides, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, in a recent interview, according to a report from Time. "Despite the fact that you see growth, they're still not as numerous as might be required to have jobs for all those graduates coming out with STEM because that's what they want to do." The comments come as 2023 became a breakthrough year for AI technology, which has rapidly developed and gained increased mainstream applications.