Kalakshar US

Google has been rapidly expanding the availability of AI Mode in Search ever since it previewed the feature with testers in its Labs program in the beginning of March this year. Now, the company has announced that it has started rolling out the dedicated AI chatbot within Search to 40 new regions and has made it available in 35 new languages. The newly supported languages include Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, German, Greek, French, Malay, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese and more. Google says the advanced reasoning and multimodal understanding of its custom Gemini model for Search allow it to grasp the subtleties of local languages, so it doesn’t misunderstand inquiries or generate stilted answers. 

In May, two months after Google started testing the feature, the company rolled it out to everyone in the US. At the time, it said that it will “graduate many features and capabilities from AI Mode right into the core search experience in AI Overviews” as it gets more feedback. In early September, Google opened up AI Mode to more languages, namely Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese. More and more users in the new regions will see AI Mode responses in their Search page and will be able to interact with the feature in their preferred language over the coming weeks. 

The company plans to add more capabilities to AI Mode and recently released an update that made it better at understanding visual prompts. It’s worth noting that, while AI Mode results could be useful for quick inquiries, online publishers attribute declining web traffic to the summaries. A Pew Research Center study found that users are less likely to click on website links and are more likely to end their browsing session if they see an AI Mode summary at the top of their results page. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-search-ai-mode-is-now-available-in-more-languages-and-regions-043540278.html?src=rss 

Believe it or not, October Prime Day is actually a good time to save on Dyson devices. Plenty of cordless vacuums are on sale this year, as well as a few viral hair stylers. But, none of those top my trusty AM09. Dyson’s Hot+Cool AM09 heater and fan is on sale for $300 right now — that’s 40 percent off and one of the best prices I’ve seen.

My love for the AM09 is well documented. At this point, I’ve had it for more than five years and I bought it when it was $280 on super-sale at QVC. Previously, I had a Dyson tower fan that worked well until it kicked the bucket after a few years of use. I took the plunge with the AM09 because I generally had a great experience with the tower fan, and at the time, I had been living in apartments that were consistently chilly during wintertime and downright stifling during the summer months.

Now, my house is not all that much different than my apartments of yesteryear — and my original AM09 is still kicking. It does a great job circulating air in the summer (it’s not an air conditioner, to be clear) and it cuts the chill in my particularly icy office during the winter. I love its handy fan, which attaches magnetically to the top of the fan so you don’t lose it and lets you control the fan speed and heater temperature with just a few presses of a button.

But the real kicker with the AM09 is how lightweight it is: at just under six pounds, it’s incredibly easy to pick up and tote upstairs, downstairs or in the other room, wherever you need it the most. It has literally gone from my home office upstairs down to the main floor of my house and down again into our basement all in the same day for different purposes. Am I a little miffed that, in my impatience, I bought a discounted Dyson heater/fan/air purifier over the summer because I desperately wanted another AM09 and it wasn’t on sale at the time? Yes — but at least you, dear reader, can learn from my shopping woes and get the AM09 instead.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/my-beloved-dyson-am09-heater-and-fan-is-40-percent-off-for-prime-day-223428328.html?src=rss 

Tesla has been promising less expensive versions of its electric vehicles for several months, and today the company introduced two ‘standard’ models. The Standard Model 3 sedan will retail starting at $36,990 and the Standard Model Y SUV will start at $39,990. While these price tags make Tesla EVs available for less than $40,000, the cost is still not down to the $35,000 level that the company once briefly had for the Model 3. 

Although the price tags seem lower, the US ended its federal tax incentive for EVs on September 30. That offered buyers a savings of $7,500 on purchases of electric vehicles. These Standard models effectively cost about $2,000 more than the old spec, now called ‘Premium,’ would have retailed for last week.

Both have an EPA estimated range of 321 miles on a full battery. However, these Standard versions will also have fewer features than their counterparts. They’re only available with rear-wheel drive, and they won’t offer the Autopilot or the Autosteer driver assistance programs. The trims have also been stripped back, with only the first row of seats containing heaters, no second-row touchscreen and no AM/FM radio. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tesla updated the higher-end Performance version of its Model Y last week.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/teslas-stripped-back-standard-models-bring-the-model-3-and-y-back-under-40k-205012564.html?src=rss 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Google’s Chief Scientist of Quantum Hardware the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside former Google employee John Martinis, and University of California, Berkeley professor John Clarke. This is the second year in a row that current or former Google employees have been awarded the prestigious prize: In 2024, a  former Google vice president was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by researchers from Google DeepMind.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded in recognition of “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.” Google puts it more plainly in its blog, writing that Devoret, Martinis and Clarke “created a superconducting electrical circuit” with a feature called a Josephson Junction “that can be used to create and manipulate… quantum phenomena.”

Google says the group’s experiments with Josephson Junctions in 1984 and 1985 were important, not just for the field of physics, but also its current research into quantum computing. The work of the company’s Quantum AI team is occasionally trotted out as a glimpse of a future where major scientific discoveries are driven by hyperefficient computers. See, for example, the Willow quantum chip the company announced last year. Google is ultimately still working on creating the fundamental components that will power these computers, though. And “Josephson Junctions form the basis for today’s superconducting quantum bits (qubits),” an enabler of many of the quantum computing milestones it’s hit in the last few years.

“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises,” Olle Eriksson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, shared in a press release announcing the winners. “It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/googles-michel-devoret-is-one-of-the-2025-winners-of-the-nobel-prize-in-physics-192226450.html?src=rss 

Mastodon, the federated social network built on ActivityPub, is taking cues from Bluesky and introducing its own version of the social platform’s “Starter Packs.” The hope is that Mastodon’s “Packs” will make it easier to find people to follow when you first join a server, a sometimes daunting task given the distributed nature of decentralized social networks.

In comparison to Starter Packs, which let Bluesky users curate a list of accounts that you can follow in one foul swoop, Packs will come with some modifications and improvements. For one thing, Mastodon’s nonprofit developer Mastodon gGmbH says that users will have a say in whether they appear in Packs. Packs will be incorporated in the discovery features Mastodon already has, so if you don’t want to be included in a Pack, you can just toggle off the existing “Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms” setting.

The developer also says that there will be a more “neutral” way to remove yourself from a Pack once you’re added. On Bluesky, to be removed from a Starter Pack you have to either report the pack or block its creator. According to Mastodon gGmbH, once you’re notified you’ve been added to a Pack, you’ll be able to remove yourself in a similar fashion to the way Mastodon lets you remove yourself from Quote Posts.

Mastodon gGmbH says it’s collaborating with other Fediverse developers on a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP), that once completed, will allow the feature to be used by any developer building an app on ActivityPub. Bluesky’s feature is one of its better additions to the microblogging format, so it makes sense Mastodon would want to adopt it. In fact it’s so good that Meta added a clone of it to Threads late last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mastodon-is-adding-bluesky-like-starter-packs-182014446.html?src=rss