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Amazon has finally taken the wraps off its AI-enhanced version of Alexa, called Alexa Plus . The new version of Alexa is powered by a mixture of LLMs and integrations that reach across news partners and all kinds of apps and ordering services. You’ll be able to use Alexa to add events to your calendar, buy concert tickets, and ask questions about the news. Amazon is making some big promises here, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. The service won’t start rolling out until March, and it sounds like availability will be limited even then. You can find all of our coverage in the stream below. Alexa Plus is much easier to chat with. Hands-on with Alexa Plus in the smart home Alexa Plus leaves behind Amazon’s earliest Echo devices Amazon is launching Alexa.com and new app for Alexa Plus Alexa Plus’ AI upgrades cost $19.99, but it’s all free with Prime We can’t try Alexa Plus ourselves in the demo area. Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa Plus Amazon Alexa event live blog: al...

The smart home holds so much promise. It can make life more convenient with lights that turn on as you walk in a room, doors that unlock as you approach , and robots that clean your floors . It can also make your home safer, more energy efficient, and even a little more fun. (Have you tried asking Alexa to beam you up?) But for all its benefits, the smart home can be complicated, confusing, and occasionally maddening . It’s also hard to keep up with all the changes. New gadgets are arriving daily, new features come to old products, and there are so many different ways to turn on a smart light bulb. If you need a guide, that’s what I’m here for. Here, I’ll be posting the latest smart home reviews, guides, news, and opinions on everything happening in the connected home. Follow this page to stay updated on what Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google, and Home Assistant and the rest are doing with their smart home platforms . I’ll keep you in the loop on all the newest technologies — includ...

President Donald Trump has announced that he’s imposing a tariff on goods from some of the US’s biggest trade partners: Canada, Mexico, and China. Under the executive orders signed on February 1st, Canada and Mexico will face a 25 percent tariff, while goods from China will be subject to a 10 percent tax. Energy resources from Canada will also have a lower 10 percent tariff. Trump positioned the tariffs as a way to “halt the flood of poisonous drugs into the United States,” referring to fentanyl. The change will have a big impact on the cost of a wide variety of goods imported from each country, including electronics, produce, clothing, and much more. Though Trump previously said the tariffs will “enrich” citizens , consumers are expected to bear the brunt of the fees as they typically lead to higher prices. Here’s all the latest news on Trump’s tariffs. Trump threatens 25 percent ‘and higher’ tariff on chips. Framework says its laptops shouldn’t get stung by Trump tariffs bu...

Heart rate monitoring on the Powerbeats Pro 2 isn’t fully baked yet. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Bad news for folks hoping the Powerbeats Pro 2 can replace their chest strap at the gym: while the workout buds are great at playing music and can connect to various gym equipment to track heart rate, they can’t do both at the same time. The issue was pointed out in YouTuber DC Rainmaker’s review of the buds . Rainmaker, who’s trusted by fitness enthusiasts for his rigorous heart rate and GPS testing, says that Apple confirmed the issue. The Verge also reached out for further clarification, but did not immediately receive a response. In my testing, I unfortunately couldn’t get the Powerbeats Pro 2 to connect with the treadmills or bikes at my local gym (because it’s hard to get any peripherals to connect to the ancient machines there). Regardless, it’s counterintuitive to make users choose between heart rate and music on gym equipment. The whole draw of adding hear...

Disney Plus will begin exclusively airing a bite-sized version of ESPN’s SportsCenter , the company announced on Thursday . The show, called SC Plus, will feature a “fast-paced” update with the day’s most important moments in sports. It debuts on March 3rd. SC Plus will be based on SportsCenter’s top 10 format, offering a quick rundown of notable plays and other highlights. SportsCenter ’s Gary Striewski and Randy Scott will host the show weekdays at 9AM ET, while Hannah Storm and Jay Harris will take over on weekends. Each episode will run for around 15 minutes, according to Variety , and will be aimed at more casual sports fans. Get ready for SC+ @garystriewski & @RandyScottESPN are bringing you the Top-10, Insider access & more – all with the signature @SportsCenter energy Streaming exclusively on @DisneyPlus starting Monday, March 3 at 9a ET Details: https://t.co/SDY4IXB9kH pic.twitter.com/e168tDGwJE — ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) February 27, 2025 The move continu...

DoorDash is paying restitution after keeping tips from as many as 63,000 of its New York delivery workers thanks to a settlement with the New York Attorney General’s office, The New York Times reports. Attorney General Letitia James announced on Monday that DoorDash will pay $16.8 million, which will be spread across workers who were subjected to the company’s “guaranteed pay” model that subsidized payments against customer tips. DoorDash will additionally pay up to $1 million in administrator costs to help make the payments happen. Some workers are expected to get several thousand dollars, others as much as $14,000, a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told The New York Times . The Office of the Attorney General will determine which workers are eligible and how much they’re repaid. DoorDash also made similar settlements with Illinois for $11.3 million in November and with Washington DC for $2.5 million in 2020. From May 2017 through September 2019 , DoorDas...

Amazon’s Panos Panay on stage introducing Alexa Plus. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge Amazon announced a new version of its smart assistant today . Alexa Plus comes with expanded capabilities, the company appeared to demonstrate, like finding concert tickets on your behalf or ordering an Uber to pick up someone at the airport. The upgraded smart assistant will also make it easier to have more natural conversations with it, but Amazon will be charging users for those new abilities for the first time. Early access to Alexa Plus will begin in late March 2025 in the United States, and the roll out will continue in subsequent waves. Subscriptions for Alexa Plus start at $19.99 per month, but it’s free for Prime users. Given that Prime costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year, it’s hard to imagine anyone opting to pay for Alexa Plus on its own. Many of the smart assistant’s new capabilities, such as jumping to the part of a movie where a specific song is playing, will also be dependent ...

The Victrola Stream Onyx lets you play vinyl records via your Sonos speakers without the need for additional equipment. It’s shaping up to be a good week to be a Sonos fan. First, Sonos launched a sale for existing customers that includes steep discounts on soundbars , speakers , and headphones , and now the Sonos-ready Victrola Stream Onyx  is more than 50 percent off. Now through February 28th, you can buy the two-speed, belt-driven turntable at Woot for just $249.99 ($350 off), which is a new low price. The Onyx is the entry-level model in Victrola’s Works with Sonos turntable lineup. Like its pricier siblings — specifically the  $799.99 Stream Carbon , $799.99 Stream Pearl , and $1,299.99 Stream Sapphire — it lets you play your vinyl records over your Sonos speaker without requiring you to install any extra equipment. It looks nearly as sleek as the more premium models, too, thanks to a relatively compact design, a metal platter, and a charming illuminated knob foun...

Loss of Pulse Detection is already available in the EU, but needed FDA clearance to launch in the US. Google just announced it’s received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s Loss of Pulse Detection feature. It will start rolling out to US devices sometime at the end of March. The Loss of Pulse Detection feature is exactly what it sounds like: if the Pixel Watch 3 senses that you’ve lost your pulse through an event like a heart attack or an overdose, it’ll send you a prompt. If you don’t respond, it’ll automatically call emergency services on your behalf. Back in August, Sandeep Waraich, Google’s senior director of product manager for Pixel wearables, told The Verge that the Pixel Watch 3 is capable of differentiating between a genuine loss-of-pulse event and a person simply taking the watch off. This feature has been available in the European Union since September 2024. However, high-stakes health features like Loss of Pulse Detection require regulatory clearance, and each co...

Amazon is launching an alexa.com website and a new mobile app where Alexa Plus subscribers will be able to use the AI-powered voice assistant. We don’t have many details beyond that, but the website and the app could be handy new ways to interact with the revamped Alexa, which was announced at an event this morning. At the event, Amazon showed how you’ll be able to have conversations with Alexa Plus for things like ordering groceries, controlling smart home devices, and even telling you if someone in your house has recently walked the dog by looking at your home camera footage. Amazon also demoed how Alexa Plus could analyze and summarize documents, and perhaps the new website and app will be used to upload that information. Right now Alexa.com just takes you to a page to learn more about Alexa and to access the Alexa mobile apps. It seems like we’ll have to wait a little bit for the new website and app to be available widely, though. Amazon says that Alexa Plus will initially ro...

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Andrew Ferguson urging the FTC to require that companies admit when you’re not really buying an ebook or video game.  Wyden’s letter, shared with The Verge , requests guidance to “ensure that consumers who purchase or license digital goods can make informed decisions and understand what ownership rights they are obtaining.” Wyden wants the guidance to include how long a license lasts, what circumstances might expire or revoke the license, and if a consumer can transfer or resell the license. The letter also calls for the information “before and at the point of sale” in a way that’s easily understandable. “To put it simply, prior to agreeing to any transaction, consumers should understand what they are paying for and what is guaranteed after the sale,” Wyden says. Frequently, when you buy digital copies of things like movies, games, music, or books, you don’t actually own that thing — just a license...

Google is planning to move away from sending six-digit authentication codes through SMS messages as a two-factor authentication tool for Gmail, Forbes reports . Instead, over the next few months, QR codes will be rolled out as a replacement for SMS codes in an attempt to “reduce the impact of rampant, global SMS abuse,” Gmail spokesperson Ross Richendrfer told Forbes . Google uses SMS codes to both verify that it’s dealing with the same person who created or owns a Gmail account, and as a deterrent to prevent criminals from creating “thousands of Gmail accounts in order to distribute spam and malware,” Richendrfer says. But while SMS codes are better than using no two-factor authentication at all, the approach comes with its own security risks. Criminals can trick or force users into sharing a code that’s been sent over SMS messaging, and users may not have immediate access to the device receiving the codes. It’s also dependent on each carrier’s own security practices, and how dili...

Dan Bongino at the 2022 Fox Nation Patriot Awards. | Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images President Donald Trump announced Sunday night he has named conservative podcaster Dan Bongino as the FBI’s new deputy director. Bongino has worked as a New York police officer and US Secret Service agent, but has no FBI experience. Bongino is well-known in conservative media, thanks to credits like having hosted a Fox News show and contributed to conspiracy website InfoWars . (Another one-time Fox News presenter, Pete Hegseth, serves as the US Secretary of Defense.) He was also among the right-wing commentators whose popularity sparked a fight over Facebook’s CrowdTangle analytics tool, ultimately resulting in its shutdown. His outsized online influence saw him named one of the top election conspiracy “misinformation superspreaders” in research by global human rights group Avaaz, The New York Times reported in 2020 . The new acting director currently hosts Rumble podcast The Dan Bongino ...

US President Donald Trump speaks with Tim Cook in 2019. Apple has announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including hiring 20,000 new employees and launching a new server factory in Texas. The announcement was teased after a meeting last week between CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump, and comes as the company tries to mitigate the business impact of Trump’s trade tariffs, with a 10 percent tariff already in effect on goods imported from China, and a 25 percent tariff threatened for chips. The announcement echoes one Apple made in early 2018 , during the first Trump administration. At that point Apple also promised 20,000 new jobs as part of a $350 billion spend in the US, alongside a new campus in Austin which is still under construction . The company successfully appealed for tariff exemptions for some of its products, and a new US investment may be a way to secure further protection from Trump’s new charges. Apple has not c...

Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” according to xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok users noticed that the chatbot had been given instructions to not respond with those results, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI employee at xAI for updating Grok’s system prompt without approval. In response to questions on X, Babuschkin said that Grok’s system prompt (the internal rules that govern how an AI responds to queries) is publicly visible “because we believe users should be able to see what it is we’re asking Grok.” He said “an employee pushed the change” to the system prompt “because they thought it would help, but this is obviously not in line with our values.” Musk likes to call Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI with the mission to “understand the universe.” Since the latest Grok-3 model was released , the chatbot has said that President Trump, Musk...

On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse†of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage†during its December 2023 launch. The Space Force says it snapped the photo during experimental “first-of-kind†aerobraking maneuvers “to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel.†The Air Force said in October this would involve “a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere,†and that once complete, it would resume its other experiments before de-orbiting. An X-37B onboard camera, used to ensure the health and safety of the vehicle, captures an image of Earth while conducting experiments in HEO in 2024.The X-37B executed a series of first-of-kind maneuvers, called aerobraking, to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel. pic.twitter.com/ccisgl493P — United States Space For...

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times , the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for response by 11:59PM ET on Monday.  However, the message lacked a detail from Musk’s tweet, according to the Times , where he said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which a number of lawyers have said would be illegal.  The Washington Post reports that experts said it “may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws,” and Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor quoted by the Times , said, “There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.”  House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Sunday that “Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children...

You can get a great device for less than $500 these days if you know how to pick your priorities. | Image: The Verge Some of us take a kind of “I eat to live” rather than an “I live to eat” approach to gadgets. They’re tools that help you get things done, not something you want to invest a lot of time or money in. If that’s you — and there’s no judgment here from a certifiable gadget nerd — then you can probably think of more worthwhile ways to spend $1,000 than on a phone. Budget phones to the rescue. These devices are roughly $500 or under, and they’re more capable than ever before. You won’t get all the bells and whistles, but you will save a little money to spend on, I don’t know, actual bells and whistles. It’s your world. Strong software support At least a couple of years of OS upgrades and, ideally, three years of security updates. There’s no point in buying even a cheap phone if you have to replace it after just a couple of years because it stopped getting security pa...