Google has announced “Continued Conversation” for its Gemini for Home AI system, which allows for follow-up questions and commands to Nest speakers and smart displays without the need to repeat the wake word each time.

In an announcement on April 21, the company said it had already started rolling out the feature.

When Google began replacing Google Assistant with Gemini back in early 2024, it felt like a technological regression for many power users.

Before the update, they could have back-and-forth conversations with their smart speakers without having to speak the wake word. That changed with Gemini. In principle, there was more that the AI-powered smart assistant could do — write a poem about their refrigerator, for instance. Yet it failed at what many would consider a basic task: handling follow-up commands without being prompted again. Continue reading “Gemini’s ‘Continued Conversation’ Feature Makes Google’s AI More Practical for Smart Homes” →

On May 20, Amazon will end support for the earliest Kindle e-readers, pulling the plug on connectivity for all models released in 2012 or earlier.

Affected Kindles will no longer be able to connect to Amazon services. For users, that means no more buying, borrowing, or downloading new books directly to their devices after the effective date.

When many of us purchased a Kindle, there was a certain expectation that the slim electronic slate would hold our forever library, an archive that would never yellow, tear, or take up space on a physical shelf.

Continue reading “Amazon Ending Support for Older Kindles Next Month, Showing the Hidden Cost of “Forever” Tech” →

The Wayback Machine is under threat as major publishers and social media platforms increasingly block its crawlers.

For more than 30 years, the Internet Archive, the nonprofit behind the Wayback Machine, has quietly served as the unofficial chronicler of all things on the web. Since it got its start, it has archived over a trillion pages.

It works by using web crawlers, specifically ia_archiverbot, to scour the web and capture snapshots of sites at different points in time, saving them as a record that internet users can return to.

According to a recent report from WIRED, several legacy and social media companies have begun restricting the Internet Archive’s crawler. That automated retrieval mechanism allows the Wayback Machine to function as the Internet’s memory bank. Organizations named by WIRED include The New York Times and Reddit. Continue reading “Media Companies’ Efforts to Block the Wayback Machine Spur Calls for a Transparent Internet” →

For the better part of three decades, we’ve used web browsers as passive windows into the online world, but Google envisions a more dynamic and collaborative future.

From early Netscape adopters in 1995 to the billions using Chrome in 2025, the routine has remained basically the same. We open a website, read what’s there, compare tabs, and ultimately need to piece everything together ourselves.

Most importantly, we’ve always been left to our own devices to figure out what matters and what to do next.

Continue reading “Google Chrome’s New “Skills” Feature Shows Where Web Browsers Are Headed Next” →