Amazon just unveiled its new “Alexa+” upgrade for its long-running voice assistant which brings AI upgrades and a $20 price tag, but you don’t have to pay that if you have Prime, which is a much bigger, yet cheaper service.
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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 on services like Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Video. So to fully take advantage of Alexa Plus, a Prime membership almost seems mandatory.
There were no hardware announcements made at today’s Amazon event, but the company has confirmed that Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far. However, the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21, which all feature touchscreen interfaces, will be prioritized during early access.
Google announced on Wednesday that it has received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s “Loss of Pulse Detection” feature and will be launching it in the U.S. at the end of March. The feature can detect when a user’s heart stops beating due to an event like primary cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, […]
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Dating app Hinge launched a new feature called “Match Note” on Wednesday, allowing users to privately share information with matches that they haven’t shared publicly on their profile. Users can add a Match Note by going to their profile, similar to how they can add a text prompt. The note is always visible to new […]
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Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
“A Bluesky account you control (@marisakabas.bsky.social) posted content or shared a link that contains non-consensual explicit material, which is in violation of our Community Guidelines. As a result of this violation, we have taken down your post,” an email Kabas received from Bluesky moderation reads. “We trust that you will understand the necessity of these measures and the gravity of the situation. Bluesky explicitly prohibits the sharing of non-consensual sexual media. You cannot use Bluesky to break the law or cause harm to others. All users must be treated with respect.”
Kabas is challenging the deletion.
“Hello—the post you have taken down was a video broadcast inside a government building to protest a fascist regime,” Kabas wrote in an email back to Bluesky seen by 404 Media. “It is in the public interest and it is legitimate news. Taking it down is an attempt to bury the story and an alarming form of censorship. I love this platform but I’m shocked by this decision. I ask you to reconsider it.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
More importantly, the video Kabas posted was not a video Kabas made herself or that was totally devoid of context. As Kabas notes in her email back to Bluesky, the video was being played on television screens within a federal government office building, an obvious act of protest that she was reporting on, and an obviously newsworthy video when considering the context that the federal government is currently being gutted by these two men. (For what it's worth, Kabas has been doing some of the best reporting on Musk's dismantling of the federal government on her website The Handbasket.)
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
Bluesky did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year, YouTube became the “most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S.” and it’s now seeing “1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content.”
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Amazon just announced its AI-powered update for Alexa, which delivers a host of new features and capabilties including the ability to read and remember your documents among many other things.
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We are still tracking big-time savings opportunities on the Samsung Galaxy S10+ at $400 off with an S25 Ultra purchase (as well as the Galaxy Watch Ultra at $372 off), but today’s highlight deals are focused on Google gear and some laptops. You can now score the Google Pixel Tablet at $100 off in brand-new condition or open-box units with 1-year warranties down at $231 alongside some serious PC offers – Acer’s 2024 Chromebook Plus 516 GE Steam-ready Gaming Laptop is $230 off and Microsoft’s originally $1,600 Snapdragon X Elite Surface Laptop 7 with 16GB RAM/1TB SSD just hit the $999 all-time low. All of that and more awaits below.
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Alongside ongoing rare price drops on the Nomad iPhone 16 cases and Apple Watch bands, today’s collection of deals is kicking off with some deep discounts on Apple Watch Series 10. You’ll now find open-box units with full Apple warranties at as much as $168 off the going rates – these are some of the best prices ever and they might not last long. From there, we move over to the return of $150 price drops on the mid-ranger 512GB M4 iPad Pro alongside deals on Belkin’s wireless auto-tracking Apple DockKit 15W MagSafe charging stand and Apple’s latest blue Trail Loop with the black titanium finish, not mention some trade-in discounts on the new Powerbeats Pro 2. All of that and more awaits below.
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Welcome to Neural. AI moves fast. We help you keep up. Much has unfolded in AI Land since we last spoke. Amazon has officially announced Alexa+, OpenAI has made a feature cheaper that used to cost $200/month, Anthropic unveiled and released Claude 3.7, and Perplexity has previewed its new AI-driven Comet browser for agentic search.
more…Apple Intelligence is an umbrella term for Apple’s vast suite of AI-powered features across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and soon Vision Pro. New features have rolled out across several releases of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS and changed many aspects of how our devices work. Here is a full list of every current Apple Intelligence feature, plus a look at what’s coming next.
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