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Instagram is rolling out a feature that could help users have more fun with Stories. Starting today, you’ll have the ability to create Add Yours templates. “People will be able to develop and share their own custom, meme-able Add Yours templates by pinning GIFs, text and gallery images to a Story template,” Instagram says. 

To create an Add Yours template, add GIFs, text and images that you want to include to your story. Then, go to your Sticker Tray and select Add Yours templates. After that, pick the elements (text, images and GIFs) that you want to include in the template. Here’s the kicker: once you share an Add Yours template in a Story, anyone else can use it and add their own touches.

If you want to riff on someone else’s template, tap on the Add Yours prompt when you see one in their Story. This will take you to the Camera, where you can see all the elements that are part of the template and play around with them, add your own and so on. If you tap the faces that appear on the left side of the sticker, you can see who else has put their own spin on a template.

As for what you can do with the Add Yours templates, it’s really your call. You might create an either/or quiz, start a trend of showing followers around your workspace or encourage folks to share the most ridiculous photos they have of their pets. Livening such prompts up with images and GIFs could help them stand out and get your template seen and riffed on by thousands of other users. Instagram rolled out templates for Reels last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-rolls-out-new-customizable-story-templates-150246935.html?src=rss 

So long E3, we knew you weren’t long for this world. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra are joined by Engadget Senior Editor Jessica Conditt to talk about the death of E3 and what it means for the gaming industry. We also explore some of the highlights (and low points) of last week’s Game Awards, which couldn’t quite balance celebrating video games and functioning as a marketing tool. We’re particularly excited for Light No Fire, the next ambitious game from the folks behind No Man’s Sky, as well as Arkane Lyon’s Blade.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

We mourn E3 and break down everything announced at the Game Awards with Jess Conditt – 00:40

Beeper Mini, Sunbird, and the endless quest to spoof iMessage – 37:57

Apple ads theft protection in iOS 17.2 beta – 54:12

EU set to hand Apple a huge loss in its legal fight with Spotify – 58:04

Google loses antitrust trial against Epic games – 59:30

Executives fired after Sports Illustrated tries to publish generative AI articles (with fake writers behind them) – 1:06:32

Netflix engagement report reveals its most popular shows and movies of the first half of 2023 – 1:07:23

Working on – 1:09:25

Pop culture picks – 1:10:24

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Credits
Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Jessica Conditt
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-rip-e3-133046611.html?src=rss 

The Hugo Award-winning The Murderbot Diaries books from Martha Wells are becoming a 10-episode Apple TV+ series starring Alexander Skarsgård, Apple announced. It will follow a self-aware “SecUnit” robot that must hide its free will in order to complete a dangerous assignment and comes from About a Boy creators Chris and Paul Weitz. 

“Murderbot is an action-packed sci-fi series, based on the award-winning books by Wells, about a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable ‘clients,'” Apple wrote. “Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.”

The Weitz brothers will write, direct and produce the series, while Skarsgård will also serve as executive producer. Apple TV+ currently offers other sci-fi series including Silo, For All Mankind, Invasion and others. The streaming service needs to keep the content flowing as it has doubled Apple TV+ prices in just over a year. At the same time, Apple is looking for the right kind of content as it aims to avoid hot-button topics following the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart. 

Several Murderbot chapters have made Engadget’s gift guides and recommended reading lists. We called the Fugitive Telemetry novella a “banger” with “space intrigue and robotic mysteries” and recommended the earlier novella series in our 2019 holiday guide. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-is-adapting-the-hugo-award-winning-sci-fi-book-series-murderbot-115559433.html?src=rss 

Space lasers, once a mere futuristic joke, have become a real tool in building technology up there and making improvements for all of us down here. There’s been NASA’s use of space lasers to study plankton, plans to blast space junk and, now, a satellite network courtesy of Amazon. The company has announced that its Project Kuiper has built up its optical inter-satellite links (OISLs) capabilities to create a substantial mesh network of high-speed laser cross-links. This technology could result in faster data transmission to even the most remote places back on earth. 

In October, Amazon launched two prototype satellites and reported successful tests one month later, with the pair dispatching and retrieving data at speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second. “These tests demonstrated our ability to establish a single bi-directional link between two satellites, and initial data indicates that our design will be able to maintain cross-links between multiple satellites at once—the critical feature of a next-generation mesh network in space,” the company stated. 

To successfully use OISLs, laser links had to maintain contact at a distance up to 1,616 miles while also contending with spacecrafts moving at a speed of 15,534 miles per hour. Plus, Amazon had to minimize light spreading in order to maintain the signal and account for any additional dynamics of all these moving pieces — something it says has been successfully done.

Amazon also claims the mesh network moves data about 30 percent faster than terrestrial fiber optic cables can. “Amazon’s optical mesh network will provide multiple paths to route data through space, creating resiliency and redundancy for customers who need to securely transport information around the world,” Ricky Freeman, vice president of Kuiper Government Solutions, explained in a statement. “This is especially important for those looking to avoid communications architectures that can be intercepted or jammed, and we look to forward to making these capabilities available to public sector customers looking to move and land data from remote locations to their desired destination.” Basically, anyone from a cruise ship passenger to a multi-day hiker should be able to get a connection if this is successful. 

Project Kuiper started in 2019 but has seen a real boost in the last few months. With these successful tests completed, Amazon states that Project Kuiper is starting satellite production, with “full-scale deployment” beginning in the first half of 2024. It also predicts that early customer pilots will begin in the second half of the year. Notably, Amazon signed a deal with SpaceX to launch more Project Kuiper satellites at a faster rate. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-boosts-its-satellite-internet-network-with-the-help-of-space-lasers-123535946.html?src=rss 

Google is creating a new, more sophisticated Android AI assistant called Pixie set to arrive with its Pixel 9 phone, according to a report from The Information. Based on the company’s new Gemini large language model (LLM), it’ll be able to perform “complex and multimodal tasks” like giving you directions to the nearest store to buy a product you photographed on your smartphone. 

The assistant will be exclusive to Google’s Pixel devices and use data from Google products like Gmail and Maps. That would help it “evolve into a far more personalized version of the Google Assistant,” the report states. It appears to be a separate product from Google’s Assistant with Bard showed off at Made By Google in October. 

If accurate, the report on the update shows Google making whiplash changes to its AI roadmap to keep rival OpenAI in its sights. Google only just revealed its Gemini AI last week as an answer to GPT-4, calling it “the most capable model we’ve ever built.” It also announced that Gemini would come to Android via a new product called Nano, giving your phone the capability to do things like summarize conversations and calls without the need to be online. 

As a reminder, Gemini launched last week as an integrated multimodal AI, rather than multiple models stacked together (parts of Google’s Gemini demo were reportedly staged, however). That will supposedly allow it to “seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models.” With Pixie powered by Gemini, it could be a far more sophisticated personal assistant than, say, Google Assistant. Gemini will also power the next generation of Bard, Google’s AI chat assistant. 

As with past Google products, though, it’s going to be hard for consumers to grok (see what I did there) all the different AI offerings. We’ve now got Pixie, Bard, Gemini, Gemini Nano (for smartphones), Gemini Pro (for Chrome, API calls and more) and Gemini Ultra, coming in 2024. By contrast, OpenAI has kept things relatively simple with GPT-4 being its LLM, ChatGPT being the chat assistant, and DALL-E the image generator. Most savvy consumers have at least heard of those things, but Google has once again made it hard for people to keep up with its own product family. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-pixel-9-could-arrive-with-a-sophisticated-pixie-ai-assistant-094448458.html?src=rss