Google

For better or worse, Amazon Alexa and Google Home’s smart voice assistants have been imbued with new generative AI powers.

The company’s lawyers are telling the judge in Epic Games v. Google that developers need around 10 more days to make the fixes he ordered. Judge Donato was not happy with the original way it looked, calling out Google for adding unnecessary “anticompetitive friction”.

Senior reviewer Victoria Song leads a Vergecast roundtable with editors Dominic Preston and Cameron Faulkner to talk about the Pixel 11/Pro/Fold and the Pixel Watch 5. We discuss if HiLight is a LowLight, whether we miss the temperature sensor, and if the Watch 5’s GPS truly beats Garmin and Apple. And stay tuned for more camera discussion on Friday’s Vergecast.

Subscribers, head to our AMA page and leave any question that’s on your mind about Google’s new Pixel 11 phones, be it the plain 11, the 11 Pro, or the 11 Pro Fold. Oh yeah, the Pixel Watch 5, too. We’ll be answering them at 3PM ET.

The company calls it the world’s first state-backed trial aimed at mitigating warming contrails across an entire flight corridor — specifically the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, which accounts for around 5 percent of global contrail warming.

It’s been a few months since Google revealed its Chromebook successor / sibling, and all’s been quiet since — at least officially, with leaks of laptops from Lenovo and Asus. We’ll know more soon: Google invited outlets including The Verge to a media event in September where we’ll get to “test out the laptops and new features.”

A pair of announcements from Anthropic today include the word that access to Claude Cowork on mobile and web interfaces has rolled out to all paid accounts, so you can keep an eye on what it’s doing for you in more places.

Google’s Mishaal Rahman took to r/Android to announce the process, which will eventually be the only way to install apps from unverified Android developers. Verification enforcement kicks in globally in 2027, though in some countries begins next month. Enabling the one-time advanced flow now gets the mandatory 24-hour cooldown out of the way.

After starting to roll out to “select devices” in June, Google’s AI Chrome assistant is now available to all Android users in the US. It adds a Gemini icon to the top-right of your toolbar that opens the familiar chatbot window, allowing Gemini to summarize web pages, answer questions, generate images, and more.

Google won a $10 million bankruptcy auction to acquire a hefty collection of business data from the now defunct Spirit Airlines, which it plans to use for AI training. The data, which includes calendar info, documents, spreadsheets, emails, and employee chats will be “deidentified,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Axios:

Most of Google’s products are still manufactured in the country, but Nikkei Asia reports that all production of Pixel phones, watches and earbuds will leave China starting in 2027. Google started this exodus in 2019, shifting to building production capacity in Vietnam and India instead, as have Apple and Microsoft in recent years.

Find Hub on Google-powered smartwatches now includes a separate Find People app. As 9to5Google notes, it’s barebones: it shows a list of everyone you’re sharing location with, but to actually change any settings or see their location on a map, you have to open your phone. Perhaps there’s more to come.

The new AI Ads tracking data set for ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews pulls insights from anonymized web usage data provided by a panel of Similarweb users, instead of relying on synthetic prompts. Similarweb reports that 26 percent of ChatGPT responses and nearly 30 percent of ad-eligible Google AI Mode queries include a sponsored ad.

The newly-announced Gemini 3.7 Flash is rolling out today as an option for AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. The updated model is better at following instructions and “understanding your intent, so you get even more helpful responses,” says Search VP of product Robby Stein.

A new “take notes” button is rolling out now for paid Workspace accounts that records audio from your mic so Gemini can generate notes for in-person meetings. Just like the virtual version of the feature, it also generates a transcript and “action items” and saves them to a Google Doc in your Drive account.

The new Gemini 3.7 Flash makes the Spark AI agent “more efficient for knowledge work with improved tool use for Google Workspace apps, delivering improved accuracy and output quality for complex, multi-skill workflows,” Google says. The AI model itself also offers “substantial” improvements in software engineering and web development workflows, according to the company.

We live blogged almost 90 minutes of a show that was, honestly, better than expected. Our video team cut it down to eight.

Anthropic updated its Chrome extension so using the side panel bot now saves chats to your history, where you can continue them outside in the browser in Claude’s desktop, web, or mobile apps.

The Made By Google keynote, hosted by Trevor Noah, kicks off at 6PM ET. Stay tuned to this website starting at 5:30PM for our live blog. Victoria Song will be there live, with Jay Peters, Jake Kastrenakes, and myself following remotely. Let’s see what happens.

The Vergecast crew will be live in 30(ish) minutes, at 1PM ET, running down all the details on the new Pixel phones, Pixel Watch, Pixel Tag, and everything else. We’re going to have a lot of feelings about photos, how we capture them, and what they even are anymore. Hope to see you there!

Samsung’s online-exclusive “Pistachio” version of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 looks great, and has apparently been selling well. But I’m a much bigger fan of Google’s Pixel 11 finish by the same name. It looks a lot closer to the color of a good pistachio gelato, unlike whatever minty nonsense Samsung is up to.