Sweekar turns the Tamagotchi into a physical AI pocket pet that won't die on you Well, it won't die if you can raise it to a certain level. Takway, a startup that wants to be the Nintendo of the AI robot era, has unveiled a Tamagotchi-like virtual pet at CES 2026 that's meant to go with you everywhere and develop a unique personality in the process. Sweekar is an AI companion built into a palm-sized toy, a cutesy egg-shaped device with ears and a screen for its face. As with a Tamagotchi, you'll have to feed and play with it to keep it happy and healthy, and its mood and facial expressions will reflect your care. But this virtual pet will remember your voice and the activities you've done together -- and once it's grown up, it will keep itself entertained, go off on its own virtual excursions (kind of like a Finch birb) and bring back tales of its adventures.

The 1990s saw the launch of many iconic gadgets, toys and games that many people are still holding onto for a taste of nostalgia. But the memories from your childhood may also be worth a fortune. Pokemon cards, Furbies and a Kawasaki-branded instrument are among the decades old products that have sold for thousands of dollars at auction. Even more, a rare Super Mario 64 game fetched over one million dollars at a sales event that made it the most expensive video game in history. Below are a few valuable 1990s toys that may be collecting dust in your home. The Sax-A-Boom is a children's toy instrument which had a resurgence of popularity after Jack Black used it at live Tenacious D concerts The Sax-A-Boom is a children's toy instrument which had a resurgence of popularity after Jack Black used it at live Tenacious D concerts.

Due to the empirical success of reinforcement learning, an increasing number of students study the subject. However, from our practical teaching experience, we see students entering the field (bachelor, master and early PhD) often struggle. On the one hand, textbooks and (online) lectures provide the fundamentals, but students find it hard to translate between equations and code. On the other hand, public codebases do provide practical examples, but the implemented algorithms tend to be complex, and the underlying test environments contain multiple reinforcement learning challenges at once. Although this is realistic from a research perspective, it often hinders educational conceptual understanding. To solve this issue we introduce EduGym, a set of educational reinforcement learning environments and associated interactive notebooks tailored for education. Each EduGym environment is specifically designed to illustrate a certain aspect/challenge of reinforcement learning (e.g., exploration, partial observability, stochasticity, etc.), while the associated interactive notebook explains the challenge and its possible solution approaches, connecting equations and code in a single document. An evaluation among RL students and researchers shows 86% of them think EduGym is a useful tool for reinforcement learning education. All notebooks are available from https://sites.google.com/view/edu-gym/home, while the full software package can be installed from https://github.com/RLG-Leiden/edugym.

Artificial intelligence in society is a controversial debate that is only just unravelling. Currently far from consensus, this modern debate is explored in'Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other' (Turkle, 2012), on which the next few posts will be based. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the creation of intelligent machines (Nilsson, 2009), yet is this truly possible? This post will focus on healthcare and childhood entertainment to address the potential harm to our psychological health and close relationships at the hands of AI. Turkle proposes that AI currently cannot, and should not, replace human connections, an opinion justified below.

So it seems it was only a matter of time before the iconic toy became a better reflection of modern technology. Enter the Smart, an upcoming Tamagotchi that adopts a smartwatch-like form factor. New to this model is the inclusion of touch and voice controls. As you might have guessed, the former allows you to wake up your pet and pet them. But when it comes to the voice controls, don't expect speech recognition. A Japanese-language FAQ spotted by Input says you can use the feature to wake your pet up, and it doesn't actually recognize specific commands.

Kids are spoiled for tech these days. Phones, tablets and game consoles are all things they've grown up with, making traditional toys seem somewhat staid. To compete, toy makers have been integrating more and more tech into their products over the past few years, like augmented reality and Bluetooth. And some of these make us adults down right jealous with how cool they are. We've sorted through some of our favorites to highlight the ones that will keep your children busy and maybe even get you sneaking in some time with them after the kids have gone to bed.

We'll wish a Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating and a merry Thursday to those who are not. Google has a movie promo you should probably check out, and have you heard about how MIT's plane flies without any moving parts? Even if it's the cutest phone we've seen in years.Palm phone review: A tiny'second phone' no one needs Unfortunately, the Palm's size will make it too difficult for some to use, while some compatibility issues and poorly executed features are sure to frustrate others. Palm's ambitions were admirable, but as Chris Velazco explains, this $350 device feels like a half-baked answer to a serious problem. Cyber Week has begun.Google makes all movie rentals just 99 cents for Thanksgiving If you've got four days off for Thanksgiving weekend, Google has ways for you to kill time. The Play Store's Cyber Week deals for 2018 include charging only 99 cents for any of its movie rentals on oh, today.

NVIDIA, a company best-known for its graphics cards, is making computers for self-driving cars, the company behind Overwatch has something new in the works and the Tamagotchi is back -- for some reason. Google Home Mini bug could make it record audio 24/7 Voice-controlled appliances need to listen in so they can pick up their hotword, but Android Police received a test Google Home Mini that went a little too far. Apparently, it was recording and uploading nearly every sound it picked up, due to an issue that Google says could've affected some other devices, too. As a result, the company pushed a software update to temporarily disable activating the mic via its touch panel, eliminating the issue. Units won't ship to customers until the 19th; we'll see if there's a full workaround in place by then. The chipmaker prepares automakers for the world of robo-taxis.

From chatbots to smart apps, developments in artificial intelligence are changing the way that banks interact with their customers. Like many people who were young in 1997, I had a Tamagotchi and it meant the world to me. Whenever it was hungry, I hurried to feed my digital pet. If it beeped about being lonely, I'd go give it attention. My parents thought it was a little silly to be that devoted to a toy, but in this day and age it's almost impossible to imagine life without interaction between man and machine.