Latest Technology

Google Earth can display a Street View timeline of certain locations, like New York’s Vessel sculpture. Google Earth will now let you look at historical imagery from Street View. The update, which comes as part of the tool’s 20th anniversary, allows you to see how a location has changed over time. Google Earth already offers the ability to switch to Street View while viewing satellite imagery, but now you can look through images captured across different years — just like you can in Google Maps. Last year, Google launched the ability to view historical satellite and aerial imagery, which was previously only available in the Earth Pro desktop app. Google is also planning to roll out a new feature that gives professional users “AI-driven insights” about the planet. That includes information about tree canopy coverage, allowing users to see where an area is more heavily shaded and which places might benefit from cooling approaches. It will also offer access to land surface temperat...

At a pristine, multimillion-dollar lab on the Manhattan waterfront, just down the street from a men's homeless shelter and the medical examiner's office, a slice of summer plum is being converted into fragrance code. This is the work of Osmo, a fragrance tech startup claiming to build artificial olfactory intelligence. Osmo has parlayed this innovation into offering turnkey fragrance compounding that promises a 48-hour sample turnaround from initial client prompt. In the time it takes your Amazon Prime order to arrive, you may now order a custom perfume. Traditionally, creating a fragrance isn't fast. After a client provides a brief - usually a mood, memory, or concept - a perfumer begins weeks or months of formulation trials, compounding and revising dozens of modifications, or "mods." Each must settle before it can be evaluated for balance, projection, and drydown. Raw materials often need years of cultivation. Bottling, regulatory reviews, packaging, and tes...

Uber customers in Atlanta now have the option of hailing a driverless Waymo robotaxi, the company announced today. Atlanta is the second market, after Austin , to play host to Uber and Waymo’s burgeoning autonomous ridehail partnership . At launch, Waymo’s vehicles will be available exclusively on the Uber app in Atlanta. The two companies first announced a deal to put Waymo’s robotaxis on the Uber app back in 2023 , indicating that Austin would be first, followed by Atlanta. Waymo’s own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in Atlanta; customers who open Waymo One will be redirected to Uber’s app. Waymo’s vehicles will only operate within a 65-square-mile service area that includes Atlanta’s Downtown, Buckhead, and Capitol View neighborhoods. The vehicles don’t drive on highways yet, nor will they make trips to the airport. Another thing to consider: simply calling an Uber in Waymo’s service area doesn’t guarantee a robotaxi will show up. Like in Austin, the companies wi...

Verizon is trying to streamline its customer service experience by overhauling it with more chatbots and AI tools . The My Verizon app is being relaunched today with a new “AI-powered Verizon Assistant” that aims to help consumers “manage upgrades, add new lines, ask billing questions, take advantage of savings, and more,” according to the telecom giant’s announcement. The idea is that this chatbot service will be able to quickly complete tasks that typically need to be handled by human service reps, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for customers. Dory Butler, senior vice president of customer experience at Verizon, told The Verge that the Verizon AI assistant will transfer customers to a human agent either upon request or if it’s unable to handle the enquiry it’s been given. Butler says the company had “worked very closely with Google” to prevent the Verizon AI agent from hallucinating by creating small language models that are personalized to Verizon services an...

It took me a long time to appreciate Death Stranding . I'm not even sure I fully got it after my initial playthrough, which was equal parts mesmerizing and dull . The game, in which you play as a postapocalyptic delivery man in a world ravaged by a breach with the afterlife, demands a lot from players. The gameplay is fiddly and frustrating, and the storyline is often inscrutable, at times seeming to make no sense. While it borrows elements from walking sims and stealth games, there's nothing like Death Stranding , and so it's hard to calibrate your expectations accordingly. It really wasn't until the end of the game that I felt I finally understood what director Hideo Kojima and his team were going for. And with all of that out of the way, playing the sequel was a more rewarding experience. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a direct follow-up. You once again control Sam (played by Norman Reedus), who now is living in hiding with his adopted child, Lou, after previ...

Its certainly an aquired taste. | Image: nothing_fan_account While Nothing is gearing up to officially unveil its first over-ear headphones next week, leaked images and videos have given us a good idea of what they look like. The Nothing Headphone 1 sports an unusual design that appears consistently across leaks from multiple sources, featuring a squircle earcup with the company’s signature transparent elements and support for what looks like a 3.5mm audio cable. Nothing announced in a video last month that it would be launching over-ear headphones in “summer 2025,” but remained largely tight-lipped about what to expect. What little was teased — including Nothing’s Tom Ridley saying the company was making “a more interesting looking pair of headphones that say something about you,” and Adam Bates suggesting its buttons would feature distinct designs for each control function — appears to have been realized in these design leaks. View Link Images shared by Nothing_fan_blog on In...

A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, US, on Sunday, June 22, 2025. Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in. But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised . The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service. The rides are limited to a geofenced area of the city that has been thoroughly mapped by the company. And in ...

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware. OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory. The announcement blog post and a nine-minute video featuring Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are no longer available. The blog post from Ive and Altman announcing the deal said, “The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco.” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood: This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the...

Andru Marino is an audio and video producer at The Verge . “I make videos on our YouTube / TikTok / Instagram channels, and have produced our podcasts like Vergecast , Decoder , and Why’d You Push That Button? ” He also keeps a lot of notes, and his latest favorite places to keep them are the Triangle and Sidekick notebooks. I asked him about them. Where did you first hear about these notebooks? I don’t really remember when I first saw the Triangle Notebook. It was probably an Instagram ad. I had kept a link to the notebook’s website in a browser tab on my phone for a few months and kept thinking about it.  When did you buy it, and what went into the decision? I bought it in April, and what really attracted me was how weird it was. Why does the notebook need to be a triangle? Oh, it opens up into a square! Wow, I love that! The main reason I use paper is to doodle, and I thought this shape would inspire me to doodle differently.  And then I saw this company also made...

Monotype is keen for you to know what AI might do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans - among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant's 2025 Re:Vision trends report , published in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to how AI will result in a reactive typography that will "leverage emotional and psychological data" to tailor itself to the reader. It might bring text into focus when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could shift typefaces depending on the time of day and light level. It could even adapt to reading speeds and emphasize the important portions of online text for greater engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through "intelligent agents and chatbots" and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn't certain, possibly as part of proprietarily tra...

Amazon’s mega sale is nearly upon us. This year, Prime Day will kick off on July 8th and run through July 11th, which, for those counting, is twice as long as previous years . Most everything else will likely be the same — well, aside from Amazon’s so-called “Today’s Big Deals” feature — making it a great time to stock up on essentials and save ahead of tentpole shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As usual, we’ll be here to highlight all the discounts, limited-time promos, and Prime-exclusive deals worth picking up. We’ll also be pulling together any early deals we stumble upon in the run-up to the main event, along with a selection of tips so you can stretch your dollar that much further on robot vacuums, OLED TVs, noise-canceling headphones, and a variety of other Verge -approved gadgets. After all, every little bit counts, right? Amazon Prime Day stretches to four days of deals this year How to sign up for Amazon Prime Here are the price-matching policies fo...

I wouldn't have preordered a Nintendo Switch 2 just for myself. The price is high, there's no new Smash Bros. or Metroid Prime ( yet ), and I've got a perfectly good original Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck that keep me plenty busy. At first, I could only justify the $450 because I write about gaming tech for The Verge. But two weeks in, I can almost justify the cost one additional way: the Switch 2 is turning out to be an upgrade for my whole family. I'm not primarily talking about hand-me-downs, though yes, you could absolutely hand your original Switch down to a kid while basking in the glory of the Switch 2's larger, faster screen. Mom and dad always get the best seats in the house, right? But no: I'm talking about how Nintendo's new features are helping me share the delight of gaming with my 8-year-old kid like never before. We bought my daughter a Switch Lite last Christmas, with Animal Crossing and Let's Go Pikachu , and that's pretty...

The E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, DC. The future of the internet will be determined in one building in Washington, DC - and for six weeks, I watched it unfold. For much of this spring, the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in downtown Washington, DC, was buzzing with lawyers, reporters, and interested onlookers jostling between dimly lit courtrooms that hosted everyone from the richest men in Silicon Valley to fired federal workers and the DOGE-aligned officials who terminated them. The sprawling courthouse, with an airy atrium in the middle and long, dark halls that spring from it, is where cases involving government agencies often land, and that meant it was hosting two of the most consequential tech cases in the country, all while fielding a flurry of unprecedented lawsuits against President Donald Trump's administration. Between mid-April and late May, Judges James Boasberg and Amit Mehta respectively oversaw FTC v. Meta and US v. Google , a pair of long-ru...

Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or watch any YouTube video, and listen carefully. Past the content and inside the linguistic patterns, you'll find the creeping uniformity of AI voice. Words like "prowess" and "tapestry," which are favored by ChatGPT, are creeping into our vocabulary, while words like "bolster," "unearth," and "nuance," words less favored by ChatGPT, have declined in use. Researchers are already documenting shifts in the way we speak and communicate as a result of ChatGPT - and they see this linguistic influence accelerating into something much larger. In the 18 months after ChatGPT was released, speakers used words like "meticulous," "delve," "realm," and "adept" up to 51 percent more frequently than in the three years prior, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who analyzed close to 280,000 YouTube videos from academic...

Last week, a Tesla Model Y with the word "ROBOTAXI" scratched into its side and no one in the driver seat made a turn off Austin's bustling South Congress Avenue. Another Tesla, described by autonomous vehicle experts as a "chase vehicle," followed closely behind. Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the clip, seemingly confirming that the lead car was one of roughly 10 vehicles comprising the company's robotaxi fleet, expected to make their official debut sometime next week. If that does occur, it will come nearly nine years after Musk first pitched the idea of a "Tesla Network" in which Tesla owners could add their vehicles to an autonomous ridehail fleet. And it will also be made possible, in no small part, by the state of Texas' laissez-faire, AV-friendly regulatory environment. View Link "In Texas, pretty much anyone can get a [autonomous vehicles] permit who shows up and does a few administrative things," Carnegie Mellon prof...

At a recent exhibition in Copenhagen, visitors stepped into a dark room and were met by an unusual host: a jaguar that watched the crowd, selected individuals, and began to share stories about her daughter, her rainforest, and the fires that once threatened her home - the Bolivian Amazon. The live interaction with Huk, an AI-driven creature, is tailored to each visitor based on visual cues. Bolivian Australian artist Violeta Ayala created the piece during an arts residency at Mila , one of the world's leading AI research centers. These residencies, usually hosted by tech labs, museums, or academic centers, offer artists access to tools, compute, and collaborators to support creative experimentation with AI. "My goal was to build a robot that could represent something more than human; something incorruptible," Ayala says. Ayala's jaguar is a clever use of early AI, but it is also emblematic of a wider movement: a fast-growing crop of artist residencies that put AI t...

Summer Game Fest 2025 was definitely a weird one, but even with everything going on outside , the games on display were still immaculate. My favorites, the ones that I live for, are small, unique, and made for pure love of expression. Being able to see that love so clearly on display, expressed through such painstaking and often thankless work, and also being able to show them to our audience who might not otherwise encounter them, is the defining privilege of my job. That's what I love about Summer Game Fest, weirdness and all, and hopefully when these games come out, you'll check 'em out too. Escape Academy 2 - TBD I loved the first Escape Academy and vibrated through my chair seeing that Coin Crew Games had returned to Summer Game Fest with a bigger, more expansive sequel . Instead of selecting levels, now you can explore an open world, solving puzzles as you discover them in a college campus setup. I love this new direction: the open-world exploration better melds...

Switch 2 owners will soon have another big Nintendo game to play. During its latest Direct presentation , the company showed off plenty more of Donkey Kong Bananza , a 3D platformer that launches as a Switch 2 exclusive on July 17th — and it’s looking like a surprisingly robust experience. In the new game DK teams up with a younger version of the singer Pauline — who apparently has been hidden inside of a rock for some time — and travels to an underground realm that seems kind of like Nintendo’s take on Hollow Earth. Despite being below ground, the game takes place in a varied and diverse world, with beaches, mountains, and icy locales. There are even giant elder characters and Breath of the Wild -style ancient ruins with unique challenges. The Direct was primarily focused on gameplay, which in Bananza is built around destruction. DK can smash up the environment, tear of chunks of terrain to use as a weapon, and also, uh, turn into a number of different animals. The game’s “banana...

Starting in summer 2026, Netflix subscribers in France will be able to watch commercially broadcast TV content “without ever having to leave the service.” The streaming giant has announced a distribution deal with French media company TF1 Group to make TF1’s free-to-air live TV channels and on-demand TF1 Plus streaming content available to French Netflix users as part of their existing subscription plan. “This is a first-of-its-kind partnership that plays to our strengths of giving audiences the best entertainment alongside the best discovery experience,” Netflix CEO Greg Peters said in a statement. “By teaming up with France’s leading broadcaster we will provide French consumers with even more reasons to come to Netflix every day and to stay with us for all their entertainment.” The carriage deal will enable French Netflix subscribers to watch major live sports matches, scripted dramas like Broceliande and Erica , soap operas such as Demain nous appartient, and unscripted shows ...

Garmin’s Index Sleep Monitor is worn on the upper arm, not the wrist. | Image: Garmin Garmin has announced a new sleep-tracking band that can be strapped to your upper arm, which could make it more comfortable to wear overnight. The Index Sleep Monitor tracks sleep stages, heart rate, and even your breathing to create a “comprehensive view of overall fitness and recovery,” with a personalized sleep score delivered every morning so you know how well you slept, according to Garmin . The Index Sleep Monitor is now available through Garmin’s online store in S-M and L-XL sizes for $169.99. The tracking is handled by a small, removable electronic module that features motion sensors and an optical heart rate sensor that Garmin says will run for up to seven days between charges. In addition to tracking your light, deep, and REM sleep stages throughout the night, the Index can also measure your respiration rates, and, when paired with blood oxygen saturation measurements (a feature not ava...

Nissan revealed new details about the upcoming 2026 Leaf , which will return as a crossover SUV with up to 303 miles of estimated range, dual charge ports, and Google’s software built-in. The reborn Leaf will reach dealerships in the US starting this fall at a yet-to-be-announced price. The first-gen Leaf was somewhat charming — in a ugly kind of way. The second gen was not much better , with bland styling and an outdated CHAdeMO charging port that practically screamed “obsolete.” The 2026 Leaf is a significant improvement over previous generations in almost every way. Gone is the frumpy hatchback, replaced by a sleek, stylish crossover with improved aerodynamics (0.26 drag coefficient, down from 0.29) and an estimated range between 259 and 303 miles ( up dramatically over the current maximum range of 212 miles). The new Leaf will also set itself apart with dual charge ports, one a standard CCS-compatible port and an additional NACS port that allows access to Tesla’s...

Daily puzzle games are seemingly everywhere right now, and starting today, you’ll be able to add a new stop to your puzzle rotation: The Atlantic . The publication is launching a new hub for its growing game offerings , including already available games like Bracket City and Caleb’s Inferno Crossword Puzzle, as well as some new puzzles. You’ll be able to access the hub on both the web and in The Atlantic’s app. Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s director of games, gave The Verge a demo of most of the games available in the hub ahead of today’s launch: Bracket City , which The Atlantic licensed earlier this year , requires you to solve clues nested in brackets that eventually resolve into a fun fact about that day in history. Stacks , a new game, is kind of like Tetris meets Wordle , Madison says. You have a bank of words that you have to place in the correct order, on top of letters already on the board, to form other words.  In Fluxis , another new game, you try to figure...

The contract is estimated to complete in July 2026. OpenAI is officially on the Pentagon’s payroll. The Department of Defence announced a $200 million contract with OpenAI to provide the US government with new artificial intelligence tools, including those used for proactive cyber defense. In a post outlining its latest contracts, the DoD said that OpenAI “will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.” The work will primarily be completed in the Washington, DC region with an estimated completion date of July 2026. OpenAI said in a new blog post that the DoD contract is its first partnership under a new initiative to provide its AI technology to workers across federal, state, and local governments. The company is offering custom models for national security on “a limited basis,” according to the announcement, with OpenAI saying that all use cases must comply with its policies and guidel...

Have you seen this phone before? No, really, I need to know. Here is a roughly complete list of all the things we know for sure about the first phone made for the new Trump Mobile wireless provider : it's called the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version). It costs $499, and you can reserve one now with a $100 down payment. It is, according to the website, coming in September. That's about all I feel confident saying. Beyond that, all we have is a website that was clearly put together quickly and somewhat sloppily, a promise that the phone is "designed and built in the USA" that I absolutely do not believe, a picture that appears to be nearly 100 percent Photoshopped, and a list of specs that don't make a lot of sense together. The existence of a "gold version" of the phone implies a not-gold version, but the Trump Mobile website doesn't say anything more about that. Here are the salient specs, according to the site: 6.78-inch AMOLED display, with a punc...

Meta is also adding sponsored channels and subscriptions. WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature. The status feature lives within WhatsApp’s “Updates” tab and allows users to share disappearing text, photo, voice notes, or video messages. But now, you might see sponsored content in addition to the updates shared by friends or family members. Meta had been considering bringing advertising to WhatsApp for years now , an idea its founders were entirely against . Though Meta reversed plans to roll out in-app ads in 2020, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart confirmed in 2023 that the company was still working on an implementation. Last year, Meta made more than $160 billion in ad revenue. Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platfo...