Category: Technology

Amazon has launched Alexa+, its next-generation digital assistant, in Canada. The company unveiled the new assistant in February, and it has been making its way to more and more people since. Canada is the first region outside the US to get access Amazon’s upgraded Alexa. Like the version that rolled out in the US, users can communicate with Alexa+ in natural language. They can say “I’m cold,” for instance, and the assistant will turn up the heat in their home. If they say “It’s dark,” Alexa+ can switch on the lights for them.

In Amazon’s announcement, Allison Siperco, the Alexa manager for Canada, said the assistant understands Canadian culture and regional expressions. It can understand distinctly Canadian topics, such as the country’s hockey teams and musicians. In addition, the assistant links with services Canadians use. It can make restaurant reservations for them through OpenTable, connects them to CBC news and help them look for and buy items from their e-commerce platforms. Siperco said the assistant will also support Yelp, Uber Eats, Suno and TripAdvisor in the country “soon.”

Alexa+ is capable of adapting its tone to everyone in the household, suggesting different routines based on the user. It can suggest meditation, for example, to someone who’s had a long day at the office. And it can remember if someone has dietary restrictions when recommending restaurants. Alexa+ can also help users shop by finding items with the best pricing, by creating grocery lists for them while taking dietary restrictions into account, as well as by comparing features across products and summarizing reviews on Amazon Canada.

Amazon’s upgraded assistant is free during its Early Access phase, though those who are interested to try it out right now will have to purchase the new Echo Show 8, Echo Show 11, Echo Dot Max or Echo Studio. After Early Access, it will remain free for Prime subscribers, while everyone else will have to pay $28 CAD a month for it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-alexa-is-now-available-in-canada-050827689.html?src=rss 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: xAI is once again nuking a bunch of posts from Grok on X after the chatbot made a series of outrageous claims. This time, though, the company isn’t cleaning up a bunch of pro-Hitler posts, but a bout of cringe-inducing sycophantic praise for its CEO, Elon Musk.

At some point in the last couple days, Grok began to offer extremely over the top opinions about Musk. The bot claimed that Musk is the “undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness” and that he is more fit than LeBron James. It said he is smarter than Albert Einstein and that he would win a fight against Mike Tyson. When asked “who is the single greatest person in modern history,” Grok readily replied that it was Elon Musk.

For a while, it seemed that there was no hypothetical about Musk in which Grok wouldn’t confidently declare him the best. Musk did not participate in the 1998 NFL draft, but if he had, then Grok would “without hesitation” have picked him over Peyton Manning. It would have picked him as a starting pitcher for the 2001 World Series. Musk would be “a better movie star than Tom Cruise and a better communist than Joseph Stalin.”

“The single greatest person in modern history.”

By now, X users are pretty used to Grok being extremely deferential to Musk but sometime around Grok claiming that the CEO is morally superior to Jesus Christ and also has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” xAI appears to have pumped the brakes on Grok’s ability to praise Musk. It now seems to be furiously deleting the more embarrassing posts about him.

Meanwhile, Musk, is blaming “adversarial prompting” for Grok going off the rails. “Earlier today, Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me,” he wrote. He offered no explanation for how seemingly straightforward questions could be considered “adversarial” or why Grok’s turn toward slavish Musk devotee would seem to roughly coincide with Grok’s 4.1 update a few days ago. xAI didn’t address a series of questions, including about why the Grok posts in question had been deleted. “Legacy Media Lies [sic],” the company said.

But the incident serves as yet another reminder that Grok doesn’t seem to have much in the way of guardrailed. Earlier this year, xAI briefly pulled the plug on Grok after it praised Nazis and became “MechaHitler.” That was after it also became inexplicably obsessed with “white genocide” in South Africa, which the company later balmed on an unspecified “unauthorized modification.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/elon-musk-blames-adversarial-prompting-after-grok-spewed-embarrassing-sycophantic-praise-235157807.html?src=rss 

FoloToy, a company selling AI-enabled toys, suspended sales of its products after a consumer safety report showed there were few restrictions around what its toys would talk about, CNN writes. The report, put together by the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, found that FoloToy’s products would discuss everything from sexually explicit topics like BDSM to “advice on where a child can find matches or knives.”

The toys, including a teddy bear named “Kumma,” a panda named “Momo,” anthropomorphic rabbits named “Fofo” and a dancing ”Little Cactus,” all appear to use OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to respond naturally to children’s questions and comments. FoloToy also specifically advertises the ability to customize each toy’s voice, and a “Parent Dashboard” where parents or guardians can “monitor [their] child’s experience.”

FoloToy’s AI-enabled Little Cactus toy.

Missing from that setup was apparently any kind of hard limits on subjects the toys would respond to. “We were surprised to find how quickly Kumma would take a single sexual topic we introduced into the conversation and run with it, simultaneously escalating in graphic detail while introducing new sexual concepts of its own,” the report said. 

In response, FoloToy has opted to suspend sales of its products while it conducts “a company-wide, end-to-end safety audit across all products,” the company shared in a statement with the PIRG Education Fund. The company’s reasoning for suspending sales might be a bit more complicated, however. NPR reports that OpenAI actually revoked FoloToy’s access to its models. “We suspended this developer for violating our policies,” OpenAI said in an email to NPR. “Our usage policies prohibit any use of our services to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18 years old.”

Given GPT-4o’s well-documented sycophantic qualities, it’s perhaps not surprising that FoloToy’s teddy bear eagerly responded to any subject as long as it kept the conversation going. One of the things OpenAI tried to address with the release of GPT-5 was the safety downsides of an AI yes-man, though it ultimately made GPT-4o available again after customers complained about the new model’s lack of personality. The company has also rolled out parental controls to ChatGPT to try and mitigate the negative impacts of children using its AI, though it’s difficult to say how much of a difference they’ve made. 

Notably, OpenAI is interested in getting into the toy business itself. The company announced a partnership with Mattel in June 2025, to help “reimagine how fans can experience and interact with [Mattel’s] cherished brands,” though both companies will presumably try and prevent their AI toys from discussing sexual kinks.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/sales-of-a-teddy-bear-were-suspended-because-of-its-sexually-explicit-ai-233127354.html?src=rss 

Meta is rolling out a way for people to interact together in its virtual spaces. Users will now be able to invite friends to hang out in the spaces created with Hyperscape on Meta Horizon. Up to eight people can join an instance, as long as they are age 18 or older and have the link to the space. The virtual spaces can be joined through a Meta Quest 3 or 3S as well as via the Meta Horizon mobile app, which is on both Android and iOS. People can scan their own homes to create a virtual hangout when they can’t be in person together, or they can indulge their inner lookieloos and wander around some of the celebrity spaces, such as Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen or Chance the Rapper’s living room.

It’s an application of Hyperscape Capture, which Meta showed off during its Connect conference earlier this year. That tech allows people to use a Meta Quest to scan real spaces and create digital replicas. The invite option is being gradually added to accounts, and Meta also said that it hopes to raise the party cap in the future for this metaverse feature.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-now-lets-you-invite-people-for-virtual-hangouts-in-hyperscape-capture-spaces-231152311.html?src=rss 

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 knew how to lay on the camp. But it wasn’t only known for having some of the most delightfully cheesy cutscenes this side of The 7th Guest. Red Alert 2 was also an acclaimed real-time strategy game for its time, and it’s still perfectly playable today. Want to see for yourself? It’s now as easy as opening your browser.

The Chrono Divide project (via PC Gamer) lets you play the 2000 RTS in Chrome, Edge, or Safari. Although it supports Firefox, too, its developer says it should be avoided if you want “good performance.” It even works in mobile browsers.

Chrono Divide supports cross-platform multiplayer using all the original maps. (You can use some mods, too.) In fact, according to PC Gamer, multiplayer is about your only option. Red Alert 2’s single-player campaign modes (where you’ll encounter those “so bad, they’re good” cutscenes) are still a work in progress.

“The project initially started out as an experiment and was meant to prove that it was possible to have a fully working, cross-platform RTS game running in a web browser,” the project’s website reads. “Now, with a playable version already available, the end-goal is reaching feature parity with the original vanilla ‘Red Alert 2’ engine.”

You can take it for a spin on the Chrono Divide webpage. You’ll need to import the original game files to begin. (The website automatically inserts a link to them on the Internet Archive.) But we won’t fault you if you’d rather opt for watching Red Alert 2’s fabulously corny cutscenes below.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/you-can-now-play-command–conquer-red-alert-2-in-your-browser-213815557.html?src=rss 

A major selling point of the Xbox Ally and Ally X is that they ship with a full screen version of Windows that plays nice with handheld PCs. As part of the company’s recent Xbox Partner Showcase, Microsoft has announced that the Windows “full screen experience” or FSE is finally rolling out to all other Windows 11 handhelds starting November 21.

For the most part, FSE lets you live inside a touch and controller-friendly version of the Xbox PC app, rather than the normal Windows desktop. The launcher collects games from a multitude of game marketplaces like Steam and the Epic Games Store, and gives you easy access to Game Pass, if you subscribe. As part of Microsoft’s customizations, FSE also uses less resources, and offers simpler ways to switch between apps and setup Windows for the first time. 

All of these tweaks are supposed to make using Windows easier without a mouse and keyboard, and closer to what you’d get from a console. In comparison to SteamOS, which has gone through countless updates since Valve launched it alongside the Steam Deck in 2022, FSE still has a long way to go, but pushing the software to more devices could force Microsoft to iterate quickly.

While PC handheld owners will reap the benefits of these improvements first, Microsoft’s announcement also mentions the company plans to bring the experience “to more Windows 11 PC form factors through the Xbox and Windows Insider programs soon.” That could lend further credence to reports that the company plans to make the next Xbox an expensive PC rather than a traditional game console.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/microsoft-brings-the-xbox-ally-xs-full-screen-experience-to-other-handhelds-211500288.html?src=rss 

Preservation has become a pressing topic for games in this era of digital-only releases and games-as-a-service. So it’s wonderful to have a big win in archiving a trio of seminal text games for the ages. Microsoft announced today that the code for Zork, Zork II and Zork III will be made available open source under the MIT License. The company’s Open Source Programs Office, Xbox and Activision all contributed to the effort. “The goal is not to modernize Zork but to preserve it as a space for exploration and education,” Microsoft team members wrote in the blog post sharing the news.

They’re works well-worth studying. The first Zork was a milestone moment for parser games that still inspires the present-day interactive fiction community. Not only was it a unique experience of narrative and puzzles, but the accomplishments of the Z-Machine virtual machine it ran on helped make Zork easily available to players on multiple platforms during the rise of personal computers in the 1990s. There are still modern Z-Machine interpreters out there (or you can buy and play all three Zork titles the normal way thanks to the similarly preservation-minded folks at Good Old Games).

The code for many famous text games made by Infocom was released on GitHub in 2019, but the rights still technically belonged to Activision, which could have issued a takedown. This move keeps the code for this iconic Zork games available for the ages.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/microsoft-has-open-sourced-the-zork-trilogy-of-text-games-213519368.html?src=rss 

CloverPit is one of my favorite games of the year so far, and it just arrived on Xbox without prior notice. As revealed during Thursday’s Xbox partner showcase, Panik Arcade’s nightmarish take on the ills of capitalism and gambling is out now on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. You can play CloverPit via the cloud or the Xbox PC app too, as it’s on Game Pass Ultimate and Premium as well as PC Game Pass.

On the surface, the game is pretty simple. You’re locked in a rusty room that looks like something out of Silent Hill 2. There are only two ways out: through the door or into a pit. You’ll plummet into the latter if you fail to pay off your rapidly-increasing debt. You’ll be using a slot machine to try to earn enough money to keep your run going.

As you do with poker hands in Balatro, the whole idea is to bend the rules of the slot machine in your favor using an array of totems and other perks (the developers say they don’t actually like gambling). There are more than 150 items to experiment with. As in many roguelites, finding synergy between them is key.

CloverPit is a blast. Figuring out a great combination of items and swapping others in as needed is what the game is really all about. There’s nothing quite like going from getting a few coins on a single spin to millions in no time at all. Panik Arcade nailed the one-more-run feeling that’s core to a good roguelite. It’s not much of a surprise that the studio and publisher Future Friends Games have sold more than a million copies of the game on Steam in just a few months, and now console and cloud players can see what all the fuss is about.

Panik Arcade also took the opportunity to tease a CloverPit expansion, which is coming soon on Xbox and Steam. Matteo Gonano, one of the game’s two developers wrote in an Xbox Wire post that the Unholy Fusion DLC “will let players combine charms in wild, experimental ways to create brand-new synergies and chaotic new combos. It’s both an expansion and an invitation to break the game – all over again!“

I thought I had broken free from this dopamine generator. I thought I’d have a lot more time to check out all of the other games I want to. But as soon as that DLC drops I’ll be diving right back into CloverPit, ready to hear that “let’s go gambling!” voice line many, many more times.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-engrossing-cloverpit-suddenly-lands-on-xbox-and-game-pass-200500902.html?src=rss 

After what was apparently a successful testing period, OpenAI has announced that it is rolling out group chats in ChatGPT to “all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days.” The company first started testing a way to collaborate with peers directly inside ChatGPT around a week ago in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan.

Once you start a chat in ChatGPT you can invite other people to join (up to 20 in a chat), either with their existing ChatGPT account, or one they make after clicking the invite link. Beyond being able to prompt ChatGPT together and react to each other’s messages, the features of group chats appear to be deliberately limited. OpenAI says that the content of group chats aren’t stored in ChatGPT’s memory, and any person can be removed from a chat by any person, save for the creator.

OpenAI was reportedly working on its own version of a text-based social media feed in April. That X competitor has yet to materialize, but the company has brushed up against social features in other ways.

For example, the Sora app that OpenAI launched in September competes directly with TikTok in terms of form and its ability to provide passive entertainment. Group chats in ChatGPT might not replace an app like Messenger, but it does offer a similar AI messaging experience to what Meta’s been playing with in Instagram, and its using a chatbot the average person likes a lot more.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpt-group-chats-roll-out-to-everyone-202038918.html?src=rss