YouTube’s free Playables don’t directly challenge the app store model or break Apple’s rules. However, they do compete with the App Store’s free games.
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As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the new “Web” filter that appears at the top of the results page, users will be able to filter for text links the way they can […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Spotify is building on its AI DJ feature, adding a new AI-powered playlist feature. No, this is not merely asking Spotify to spit out, say, metalcore classics from the 2010s, but instead something more of a “my dog is sad and I love the color purple please make me a list of songs“ sort of thing. You can prompt it, and Spotify will come up with a list of tunes for you. How far you can push it remains to be seen, but I do intend to test its guardrails when I get the chance.
Spotify’s AI work nests into its other efforts to differentiate its service from rivals like Apple Music and offerings from Amazon. The European tech giant has also pushed into audiobooks, podcasting and even edtech in recent years.
Starting in just a few countries, the new AI playlist feature will roll out to more markets over time. How long it will take to reach your hands is not clear, if you, like myself, are not located in the feature’s launch countries. Some Spotify users have complained that the rollout of new products can take longer than they want to reach their home market, it’s worth noting.
The AI wave crashing into the world of music has yet to make artistry obsolete, but it does appear to be working toward finding a place in how we discover and consume art itself. Perhaps that’s a good working compromise.
By now you may be a little tired of hearing about AI all day, every day. Not that there’s anything wrong with AI news per se; lots of tech companies are working hard to infuse new AI tech into their products and services. It’s a big business story at a minimum. Then there’s the consumer angle, where AI comes closer to our daily lives. But for those of us who aren’t mega-ChatGPT users, AI can seem ever so slightly remote from our regular existence. Tools like Spotify’s latest can bring AI more into how we do our regular, mundane tasks like queueing up new tunes. Or not-so-new tunes, at least according to some users who view Spotify’s playlist work as part of a recurring effort to promote the same songs time and again.
Hit play, let’s have some fun!
Google continues rolling out Gemini to different products as today the company announced that Android Studio’s bot is getting upgraded with Gemini Pro.
In May 2023, during the Google I/O developer event, the company introduced Studio Bot powered by the PaLM-2 foundation model. The company is rolling out Gemini in Android Studio in more than 180 countries for the Android Studio Jellyfish version.
In February, Google also updated the base model for the Bard chatbot from PaLM-2 to Gemini Pro.
Just like the Studio Bot, the new Gemini bot lives in the IDE (integrated development environment) and developers can ask coding-related questions.
The company said developers should notice improved answer quality in code completions, debugging, finding relevant resources and writing documentation.
Google said that for privacy reasons, users will have to log in and enable Gemini explicitly to use it. Plus, the chatbot’s responses are dependent mostly on the conversation history and context provided by the developer.
The company said users can easily access the Gemini API starter template through Android Studio to add generative AI-powered features to their apps.
Google is determined to compete with tools like GitHub Copilot in its different developer-facing products. Last year, it introduced the PaLM-2-based Codey assistant to answer queries about programming and Google Cloud Services.
Weeks before the national elections in India, Elon Musk-owned X said it is rolling out support for posting Community Notes — the company’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program — in the key overseas market.
The first set of contributors from India will start posting notes from today and more will be accepted over time, X said. The contributors typically provide more context to popular posts to debunk any myth or offer broader insights. These submissions are then rated by users on factors such as the helpfulness they provide or the accuracy.
In December 2022, the social network enabled the ability for people to look at Community Notes related to posts globally, but users from only a few countries could post such notes.
Over time, the company has allowed members from different countries to start posting Community Notes to provide local context better. With the latest rollout, the program has contributors in 69 countries.
Last year, the company also introduced Community Notes, previously called Birdwatch, for images and videos.
India was one of the last major markets where Community Notes had not previously expanded. With national elections just a few weeks away, many platforms are making efforts to combat potential election-related misinformation. However, X hasn’t made any specific announcement about its efforts for Indian elections.
Though Community Notes is proving helpful in fact-checking posts on X, it has at times struggled to control the spread of misinformation despite contributors adding context to stories. The program may also face a tough test in India’s complex multilingual political landscape.
Last year, the company reallowed political ads on the platform, which were banned by the previous management.
Twitter/X has had a tough stay in the Indian market notably for its legal battle against the government for ordering the platform to block certain posts. Earlier this year, X withheld some accounts and posts related to farmers’ protests in India because of orders from authorities. At that time, the company reiterated that a writ appeal challenging blocking orders was still pending in the courts.
Last year, Musk said in a conversation with BBC that India’s social media rules are quite strict and the company “can’t go beyond the laws of the country.”
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