Apple announced at WWDC on Monday that iPadOS 18 will include a new “Smart Script” feature that will clean up your handwriting when using an Apple Pencil to write in Notes.
With Smart Script, Apple says it’s making handwriting your notes even smoother and straighter.
The feature improves the appearance of your writing as you write by using on-device machine learning to recreate your handwriting from your notes.
If you need to add to something you have already written, you can tap and hold with your Apple Pencil to create more space.
Apple says Smart Script makes your handwritten notes more effective, fluid and easer to read.
Spotify isn’t the only one to dabble with AI playlists — on Tuesday, Amazon announced it would do the same.
Amazon Music is now testing Maestro, an AI playlist generator, allowing U.S. customers on both iOS and Android to create playlists using spoken or written prompts, which can even contain emojis.
Amazon suggests that in addition to emojis, customers can write prompts that include activities, sounds, or emotions.
While Spotify’s AI generator is starting its tests in the U.K. and Australia, Amazon’s product is launching to a “subset” of free Amazon Music users, as well as Prime customers and Unlimited Amazon Music subscribers on iOS and Android in the U.S. for the time being.
To access Maestro, users will need the latest version of the Amazon Music mobile app and will tap on the option for Maestro on their home screen.
By default, children will be able to read, but not write, comments under both of these content settings modes.
(This option is generally the first step into the main YouTube experience, after using the dedicated YouTube Kids app as a younger child.)
Parents can view and change their child’s settings from the parent settings on YouTube or via Google’s Family Link parental controls app, YouTube notes.
More recently, however, the Kids Online Safety Act has gained steam, demanding more robust parental controls from platform makers.
After launching parental controls in 2021, YouTube rolled out a handful of product updates to make YouTube safer for teens in November 2023.
Google Chrome is getting a new AI writing generator today.
At its core, this Gemin-powered tool is essentially the existing “Help me write” feature from Gmail, but extended to the entire web and powered by one of Google’s latest Gemini AI models.
To get started, head to the Chrome settings menu and look for the ‘Experimental AI’ page.
From there, you can easily enable the new writing feature, as well as Google’s new automatic tab organizer (which I haven’t found particularly useful or smart so far) and the new Chrome theme manager).
If you’re subscribed to Gemini Advanced, this new tool will not give you access to an enhanced writing model, a Google spokesperson told us.
Welcome, folks, to TechCrunch Week in Review (WiR), a digest of the past few days in tech happenings.
As I write this, snow’s gracing New York City — an increasingly rare treat thanks to our changing climate.
Notion launches a calendar app: Notion, the incredibly popular note-taking and project management service, has launched a stand-alone calendar service.
AnalysisCES chases off sex tech: Despite being an industry that caters to a universal human experience, sex tech has always had an uneasy association with CES, Haje writes.
And this year, the conference effectively managed to chase the sex tech industry off its show floors — for better or worse.
A recent study co-authored by researchers at Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, investigated whether models can be trained to deceive, like injecting exploits into otherwise secure computer code.
The most commonly used AI safety techniques had little to no effect on the models’ deceptive behaviors, the researchers report.
Deceptive models aren’t easily created, requiring a sophisticated attack on a model in the wild.
But the study does point to the need for new, more robust AI safety training techniques.
“Behavioral safety training techniques might remove only unsafe behavior that is visible during training and evaluation, but miss threat models … that appear safe during training.
The first is when your friends won’t stop talking about it.
The second is when your friends want you to stop talking about it.
But in the last decade or so, blockchain-based technology has managed to not go away.
All that in hand, I think that 2024 is going be a good year for blockchain-based products and services, but not because I expect that 2021-era venture enthusiasm to rear its head again.
Bullish 2024 signals for cryptoFully anticipating texts from friends who are crypto-negative in response to this story, I think it’s important to write down here that I do not hold any material crypto assets.
Launching the first extension for a startup that made its name from its AI-based translation tools, DeepL revealed their new language product called Prodigy. Designed to streamline the process of…
