One of the best features of Amazon's new Alexa Plus is that I don't have to "speak Alexa" anymore. I've been testing the voice assistant for about a week now, and it understands what I say, regardless of how I say it - there's no more need for precise phrasing to get Alexa to do what I want. This big shift underpins another headline feature of the revamped generative AI-powered assistant that I've been testing: agentic AI. But this one needs work.

The idea is I can talk to Alexa Plus as I would to a real personal assistant and ask it to do tasks, such as reserving a restaurant for my friend's birthday, finding an electrician to fix my brok …

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Earlier this week, xAI added what can only be described as an AI anime girlfriend named Ani to its Grok chatbot. Which is how I ended up on a virtual starry beach as an AI waifu avatar tried to give me a "spicy" kiss.

You've probably seen screenshots, videos, and various writeups about Ani spread across social media. If you haven't, hoo boy. Ani is officially labeled as a "Companion" in the Grok app. You need a $30-per-month SuperGrok subscription to access it, but functionally, it appears as a 3D model of a busty young anime woman with blonde pigtails, blue eyes, thigh-high fishnets, and a skimpy Gothic Lolita minidress. Ani is a dead rin …

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I've waited two years to try out the new Alexa, which was first announced way back in 2023, and this week I finally got access to Alexa Plus. I've now spent 24 hours with Amazon's generative AI-powered voice assistant, and it's not just an improvement on the original; it's an entirely new assistant.

Alexa Plus knows more, can do more, and is easier to interact with because it understands more. I can ramble, pause, sigh, cough, change my request mid-sentence, and it can adapt and respond appropriately. No more, "Sorry, I'm not sure about that." Miraculous.

I'm impressed, but I found a few flaws. It's no secret that Amazon has been strugglin …

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After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I've amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there's one part I've come to loathe: AI summaries.

Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence, pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in "plain English." Whoop has Whoop Coach, an AI chatbot that gives you a "Daily Outlook" report summarizing the weather, your recent activity and recovery metrics, and workout suggestions. Oura added Oura Advisor, another chatbot that summarizes data and pulls out long-term trends. Even my bed greets me with summaries every morning of how its AI helped keep me asleep every night.

Each platform's AI has its nuances, but the typical morning summary goes a bit like this:

Good morning! You slept 7 hours last night with a resting heart rate of 60 bpm. That's in line with your weekly average, but your slightly elevated heart rate suggests you may not be fully recovered. If you feel tired, try going to bed earlier tonight. Health is …

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At WWDC, Apple announced its new Liquid Glass design language, which is coming to all of its devices, including Macs. I've been tinkering with the macOS Tahoe 26 developer beta on the M4 MacBook Air for about a day. So far, the aesthetic changes range from slick to slightly overwrought, but the new Spotlight search features are nifty and useful.

There are new touches of glassy transparency all over macOS 26, including the Dock, Finder, widgets, and built-in apps. It's more subtle than on the iPhone, mostly because the Mac's much larger screen real estate makes the Liquid Glass elements more like accents than whatever this mess is supposed to be. I'm not very fond of it just yet, but maybe it will grow on me, like UI changes tend to.

The Dock now has a frosted background that's more translucent than Sequoia's flatter design. The hazy, frozen glass aesthetic also extends to widgets, like the calendar and weather, and drop-down menus - though the latter have much higher opacity. The pop-ups for volume and brightness now use this distorted glass look as well, though they've moved to the top-right corner of the screen instead of being centered above the dock. Frankly, they're ugly, …

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If you took Pinterest, mashed it together with everything annoying about Threads, and sprinkled generative AI prompts on top - that'd pretty much sum up the newly launched Meta AI site's social feed.

So far, prompting AI chatbots - those are the questions or requests you make - has primarily been a private affair. You pull up ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, type in your prompt, and whatever it spits out is for your eyes only - unless you take a screenshot and terrorize the world by posting your AI experiments online. But not with the Meta AI site. Here, you can share your AI results with just two clicks.

The result is a fascinating microcosm of the human-AI experience and, specifically, how so few people know what to do with generative AI. The irony is that Meta VP of product Connor Hayes told The Verge the company added the whole social aspect to show AI newbies what they can use it for.

Scroll the feed, and you'll find an odd assortment of Pinterest-like cards. The vast majority are experiments with image generation, some are simple queries, and a few feature folks experimenting with AI gotchas (e.g., how many letter Rs are there in the word strawberry?). Browse for a bit, and yo …

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