The race to advance conversational AI in the living room is heating up, with YouTube being the latest to expand its tool to smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming devices. This experimental feature, previously limited to mobile devices and the web, now brings conversational AI directly to the largest screen in the home, allowing users to ask questions about content without leaving the video they're watching.
If you're familiar with the world of SEO, I probably don't have to tell you there's been a serious shift in its landscape. Marketers are no longer just optimizing content for Google's traditional blue links; we're now optimizing for AI. The shift is called Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. Some practitioners also refer to it as AI engine optimization, and both terms are used interchangeably. But what does it mean to optimize your content for AI engines? I'll explain.
Panos Panay, Amazon's head of devices and services, believes the reign of the smartphone screen may be nearing a tipping point. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco, he suggested that a growing fatigue with social media "doom scrolling" is paving the way for a new era of "ambient intelligence"-one driven by a generation that interacts with technology in fundamentally different ways,.
OpenAI overtook Elon Musk's SpaceX to become the world's most valuable private company this week, after a deal that valued it at $500 billion. One of the ways the ChatGPT maker is seeking to justify the price tag is a push into hardware. The goal is to improve the "smart speakers" of the past decade, such as Amazon's Echo speaker and its Alexa digital assistant, which are generally used for a limited set of functions such as listening to music and setting kitchen timers.
The release of the Google Pixel 10 phones with deeply integrated AI features that offer impressive new capabilities has revealed the biggest gaps the iPhone 17 needs to fill. Many of the smartest AI services in the world are already on the iPhone as apps, and so there's the possibility that Apple could partner with them for deeper integrations. The new AI camera features in the Pixel 10 could be the biggest differentiator between it and the iPhone 17.
ZDNET's key takeaways Fast-food chains are experimenting with AI in drive-thrus. Previous gen AI order-takers failed. AI voice tech is playing a larger role in customer service. Fast-food restaurants like Taco Bell and McDonald's tried to integrate AI into their daily operations, but rethought their decisions when customers complained. According to the , customers either griped about glitches and delays or the odd nature of the technology -- or, in some cases, chose to troll the AI employee by ordering 18,000 cups of water.
While the iPhone has virtually all of the smartest AI apps available from the latest AI trailblazers, it lacks the kind of deep integration of AI features that are only available at the intersection of the operating system and the latest hardware. That's what we've seen with the rollout of Google's Pixel 10 lineup. Here are seven features from AI leaders that would make a huge impact if they were seamlessly embedded at the system level in the iPhone 17.
Open the Claude app on your mobile device. If voice mode has arrived on your end, you'll see a new sound-wave symbol next to the microphone icon. The first time you tap that symbol, you can choose from different voices and options to customize your chat partner.
