On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free.
But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.
Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect.
With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month.
The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required.
Google is rolling out the April update to ChromeOS users with features like the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts and mouse button actions.
The update also brings improved offline text-to-speech voice support.
The ChromeOS M123 update is rolling out to users over the next few days.
The main new feature is a way to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to actions.
The company said that the keyboard customization shortcut will be enabled by default with the next ChromeOS update M124.
Spotify announced on Tuesday that it’s bringing its free audiobooks perk to Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Users in these markets will be able to access 15 hours of free monthly audiobook listening time.
Spotify says users have listened to more than 150,000 titles since the free service’s launch last November.
If you run out of listening hours, you can purchase additional 10-hour allocations for CAD $14.99, IRE €12.99, and NZD $19.99.
Spotify recently launched a $9.99 per month plan that allows its free users to access its audiobooks collection in the U.S.
Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand.
At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — and the promise of brand safety — at its center.
Adobe wants GenStudio, which it first previewed last September, to be an end-to-end solution to help marketers tailor their content to different channels and audience segments.
That, of course, is where generative AI comes in, since it can speed up content creation dramatically.
The tools also continuously checks that anything a user creates in GenStudio is within a brand’s guidelines.
Thankfully, there’s a new wave of startups entering the arena: UK startup Anima is a “care enablement” platform that operates almost like a combination of Slack, Salesforce and Figma, but for healthcare clinics and hospitals.
Anima, a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, launched in September 2022 and is now used in 150 NHS clinics in England.
The startup’s software lets clinic staff process and file healthcare documents, but adds in a higher degree of automation compared to legacy systems.
In the U.S., Memora Health has raised $80.5 million, and NexHealth, which is post-Series C, has raised $177.2 million to date.
I trained as a doctor at Cambridge, and I’m a self-taught software engineer who wrote a lot of the code for Anima.
Mindfulness and meditation apps have tremendous potential in the world of extended reality.
The full immersion created by headsets like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro offer great potential to kickstart such practices, which are notoriously difficult to both begin and maintain.
As such, partnership between leading meditation app Headspace and Quest-maker Meta is a no-brainer.
At the very least, the experience seems engaging in a way not normally associated with meditation apps.
The app is available now for Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro.
If you didn’t know legendary tennis player and seven-time Grand Slam winner Venus Williams had an eye for interior design, consider this your heads up.
Walmart announced in October 2023 that it was developing an interior design assistant that leverages generative AI and AR technology.
Palazzo has ambitious plans for its platform and wants to expand beyond generative AI-powered offerings.
The company will bring on retail partners to include inventory on the platform for Vinci to suggest to potential customers.
Most notably, Palazzo is bringing in notable interior design companies (like V Starr) to contribute designs on the platform and be compensated for their work.
The launch partner for this is Google, which will use Stack Overflow’s data to enrich Gemini for Google Cloud and provide validated Stack Overflow answers in the Google Cloud console.
Google and Stack Overflow plan to preview these integrations at Google’s Cloud Next conference in April.
It’s no secret that content-driven services like Stack Overflow (but also Reddit, publishing houses etc.)
While Google and Stack Overflow aren’t discussing the financial terms of this partnership, it’s worth noting that this is not an exclusive partnership.
Google will also bring Stack Overflow right into the Google Cloud console and will allow developers to see answers and ask questions right from there.
Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for the inspiration around Communities.
In addition, Newsmast offers a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server with a selection of communities they’ve curated.
Users could then connect to that server in place of the Newsmast server within the Newsmast app.
Later this week, Newsmast will also open up its API to developers, which means your preferred Mastodon app could integrate with Newsmast’s Communities, too, for a more seamless experience.
(In fact, some Mastodon users were confused why Newsmast’s accounts were following them and boosting their content, without understanding the larger purpose.)
Out of the box, Apple’s Vision Pro doubles as a 4K Mac virtual display, allowing you to extend an existing Mac desktop to the device’s spatial computing environment.
A new app called Splitscreen takes things a step further, by allowing you to add a second macOS display to your Vision Pro — even if it uses a different Apple ID.
Such an app could prove valuable for multitaskers who want to use more than one Mac computer with their Mac Virtual Display in the Vision Pro — for instance, one for work and one for personal use.
With Splitscreen, you can effectively create the feeling of having a multiple monitor setup, but inside the VR/AR environment.
However, the approach the app takes will allow the team behind Splitscreen to add more displays, settings, and other features soon after launching.
