Amazon's Alexa has had an AI upgrade. Now she's got more to say Amazon's Echo smart speaker - more commonly known as Alexa - is getting an AI-powered upgrade which will roll out across the UK. Alexa+ turns the digital assistant into a more chatty device which Amazon says will be able to follow threads and be more proactive in its responses. There has been criticism the Echo has stagnated since its launch in 2016, while AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have become much easier to communicate with. It will be interesting to see how users react to this - we expect this could be polarising, with some enjoying the more relaxed, familiar interactions while others may find it disconcerting, said Jessica Miller, head of data insights at FDM/CCS Insight. UK consumers will notice an immediate difference, she added.

Aqara's Matter-compatible camera promises easier smart home integration The company says it's the first Matter-certified camera. Smart home company Aqara has launched what it says is the first camera certified for Matter, the open source standard that enables interoperability across brands, like Google and Amazon. The Aqara G350 is an indoor security cam that also functions as a Zigbee and Matter hub in the Aqara Home app, which means the camera will enable you to control various devices across smart home protocols from different brands within one location. The camera itself comes with a 4K wide-angle and a 2.5K telephoto lens, providing both panoramic and closeup views. It also has 9x hybrid zoom and a pan-tilt mechanism that can give you 360-degree coverage of the room it's in.

They said the company'has shown it is willing to... steal the intellectual property ofAmerican creators.' After ByteDance suspended the global rollout of its new Seedance 2.0 AI video generator on the weekend, US senators have now told the company to immediately shut down the app. Seedance 2.0 poses a direct threat to the American intellectual property system and, more broadly, to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch wrote in a letter to the company . Responsible global companies follow the law and respect core economic rights, including intellectual property and personal likeness protections, the senators wrote. They cited Seedance AI examples including an AI generated Thanos and Superman battle, a rewritten ending and that famous (fake) Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt battle .

The companies haven't yet announced a timeline. At GTC 2026, NVIDIA and Bolt announced what they hope will be a symbiotic partnership. Bolt gets NVIDIA technology that would be costly and impractical to build on its own. Meanwhile, NVIDIA not only gains a major customer but also access to the European rideshare company's driving data. Bolt says its fleet data will build a learning engine for autonomous vehicles (AVs) using NVIDIA tech.

NVIDIA claims DLSS 5 will deliver'photoreal' image quality with AI this fall The company plans to rely on AI for more than just additional frames. Just months after announcing DLSS 4.5 at CES, NVIDIA has unveiled its next major upscaling technology, DLSS 5. The company is doubling-down on AI for this next iteration, claiming DLSS 5 "infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials" using a real-time neural rendering model when it arrives this fall. So what does this mean in practice? In an on-stage demo at NVIDIA's GTC 2026 keynote, CEO Jensen Huang showed off the technology with and DLSS 5 adds a noticeable amount of detail to character's hair and skin tone, but it also appears it's being compared to those games without any DLSS features turned on.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on that long-anticipated sequel. A judge has ruled that publisher Krafton must reinstate Ted Gill as CEO of Unknown Worlds Entertainment, . The company fired Gill and two other co-founders last year as part of a shakeup . The Delaware judge said Krafton had violated the terms of its contract with Unknown Worlds when it fired the executives. To remedy these breaches, Gill is reinstated as CEO of Unknown Worlds with full operational authority over the studio, wrote judge Lori W. Will.

The encyclopedia company's lawsuit also said ChatGPT cannibalizes traffic to the Britannica and Merriam-Webster websites. OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates made-up content or ' hallucinations ' and falsely attributes them to Encyclopedia Britannica. The lawsuit doesn't specify an amount for monetary damages, but Britannica is also seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating these accusations. When reached out for comment, a spokesperson for OpenAI told Engadget that, ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives.

OpenAI's adult mode reportedly won't generate pornographic audio, images or video The company's own council on wellbeing and AI appears to be against the feature. OpenAI's forthcoming adult mode will allow users to engage in lewd conversations with ChatGPT, but not use the chatbot to generate explicit images, audio or video. In response to reporting from an OpenAI spokesperson characterized the upcoming release as capable of producing smut rather than pornography. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first floated the idea of allowing people to use ChatGPT for erotica, saying the company wanted to treat adult users like adults. OpenAI originally planned to release adult mode at the start of 2026.

The Online Services Accord Against Scams was signed by major tech companies including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. A coalition of Big Tech companies is working on a more comprehensive solution to combat online scams . As first reported by, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Adobe and Match Group announced the signing of the Online Services Accord Against Scams. The new agreement is meant to put up a united industry-wide front against online fraud and scams, particularly those from sophisticated criminal networks that use multiple platforms. According to the report, the measures will include adding fraud detection tools, introducing new user security features, and requiring more robust verification for financial transactions.

Embark Studios' CEO Patrick Söderlund admitted that there is a quality difference when it comes to using voice actors versus AI. In an unexpected twist, humans have taken some jobs back from AI. Embark Studios' CEO Patrick Söderlund recently told that the studio re-recorded some of the AI-generated voice lines in with human voices, only after its successful launch in October. There is a quality difference, Söderlund told A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is. With Arc Raiders' player count peaking at nearly half a million users on Steam, the game's breakout success was still marred by its use of text-to-speech AI. While there was no generative AI used for the visuals of the extraction shooter, Embark Studios paid its actors for approval to license their voices for text-to-speech AI, according to Söderlund.