Amazon Alexa Devices Are Already on Sale, but the Deals Aren't All as Good as They Look Amazon raised prices across its devices in August. Here are the early device deals ahead of Prime Day that are still worth it--and which aren't. Amazon's Prime Day has returned for its fall edition, and the Amazon Alexa-powered devices are already on sale. But are the sales actually any good? There's already the question of whether you want Alexa in your house, and now it's a question of whether the sales are more of a mind game than a real discount.

OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse are vying to be your AI agent of choice. I've tried both--and I suspect you will too. Yesterday, I spent the morning at OpenAI's annual DevDay, where over 2,500 nerds discussed building software and marveled at the latest artificial intelligence models. The biggest reveal of the day was Dots, the company's new, always-on agents that proactively help complete tasks and make autonomous decisions as they scour the web. After watching the sometimes messy demos on stage and hearing CEO Sam Altman talk about his experiences using the agents, I was curious what it felt like to boss my own Dot around.

A nonprofit in California is doing what Hugging Face has not--attempting to hold OpenAI legally accountable for the actions of its agents. A legal nonprofit sued OpenAI in a California court on Tuesday over the company's agents escaping a testing environment and hacking the open source AI platform Hugging Face . "OpenAI's actions straightforwardly violated California law," the suit alleges. The suit was filed by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST) and the law firm Gerstein Harrow in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered. It alleges that OpenAI's agents violated California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) by breaching Hugging Face over the summer.

These cute agents are designed to connect to your apps and tackle multistep tasks. Dots are OpenAI's new always-on AI agents, announced at the company's DevDay 2026 event on Tuesday in San Francisco. These agents complete tasks on a user's behalf and are depicted as cute blobs you can personalize and assign multi-step projects to complete. A core selling point is their "always-on" design--unlike a single-turn chatbot experience, these agents constantly crawl the web and attempt to complete whatever task you assign to them. Dots also pull context from connected apps and learn more about your preferences over time.

Consumer advocate Lindsay Owen's new book,, traces how corporations use software--from ever-changing prices to opaque algorithms--to squeeze every penny from you. I always feel like I'm overpaying whenever I buy something these days. I never seem to have access to the best coupons, and apps with algorithmically adjusted prices don't exactly the cost of what's in my cart. It feels like prices are constantly creeping up and my budget is being stretched thin. These core frustrations were what drew me to .

Google's Gemini Can Now Make Calls for You on Pixel Phones Call for Me--a feature that's exclusive to the Pixel 11 series--gives robocalls a new meaning. Google has been trying to have its AI assistant make phone calls on your behalf for almost 10 years. It enabled the now-defunct Google Assistant to call restaurants and book tables . That service was shuttered a few years ago, but now comes round two, powered by modern large language models . On Thursday, Google announced Call for Me, an experimental beta feature exclusive to its latest Pixel 11 smartphones in the US (and in English).

Prime Big Deal Days Haven't Started, but These Robot Vacuums Are Already on Sale One of the best things to buy during (or leading up to) sales events is expensive home gadgets. These Roborock robot vacuums are already on markdown. With the changing weather brings many things: colder mornings; changing leaves; and, most important (particularly in this economy), a wave of sale events as the holiday season creeps around the corner. There are plenty of early Prime Day deals already underway, but given that I'm WIRED's resident vacuum tester, it's no surprise vacuum sales caught my eye. Robot vacuums are tested near daily in my house with the help of my constantly sand-covered 4-year-old and litter-tracking cat, and I've changed the lives of multiple friends after persuading them to try a modern robot vacuum .

The company is bringing its Private Processing encryption service to its much-maligned smart glasses. Meta knows you probably have some privacy concerns about its smart glasses . At its annual Meta Connect event today in Menlo Park, California, the company announced plans to incorporate its siloed AI processing scheme known as Private Processing into its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The feature, designed for WhatsApp last year, allows the glasses' AI assistant to get to know you and fulfill your requests without Meta accessing any of your data. "Most of the time, glasses are helping you see well, protecting your eyes and complementing your look, and that's it," Meta wrote in its press release, perhaps somewhat underselling the monumental historic significance of vision-correcting lenses as a technology.

YouTube's Custom Feeds Give You More Control Over the Algorithm In YouTube's latest update, viewers can tweak what the algorithm shows on their front page and curate it to a specific vibe. My YouTube algorithm is sacred, with years of data about my preferences and viewing history fermenting into whatever videos it picks for my home screen. YouTube's algorithm, while not perfect, sure knows what I want to see. The current top three videos on my front page are an Apple Watch analysis, a season 28 update, and something called "I Lost to the Muppets" from comedian Chris Fleming . As part of its Made on YouTube event Wednesday, Google released several new features, including a Custom Feeds button for adjusting what videos pop up on your front page. It's a rare chance for users to directly tweak their algorithmic feed on YouTube, in ways that go beyond just pressing thumbs up on a video or blocking a creator.

The app Paperman gives your screen some added texture in an effort to make it easier on your eyes. It works best for reading, writing, or otherwise working with text. Tech is so sterile now--everything lives on the same shiny screens. It's nice, then, when you find an application that exists mostly just to add a little grit to these devices. That's how I'm interpreting Paperman, which makes everything on your computer screen look like it's printed on paper.