Gadget Lab: Weekly Tech News from WIRED

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WIRED’s Gadget Lab podcast breaks down which gadgets, apps, and services you need to know about, and which ones you can move to the virtual trash bin. Learn how today’s tech shapes our lives—plus get your hosts’ personal recommendations at the end of each episode.
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Alexa Gets an AI Makeover

09.21.2023

Alexa was due for an upgrade, and now it has gotten one. This week, Amazon held its annual media event where it debuted a slate of new hardware, software, and services. The company reserved the spot at center stage for ...

Gadget Lab: Weekly Tech News from WIRED episodes:

09.21.2023 Alexa Gets an AI Makeover Alexa was due for an upgrade, and now it has gotten one. This week, Amazon held its annual media event where it debuted a slate of new hardware, software, and services. The company reserved the spot at center stage for ...
09.14.2023 Your Life, Your iPhone It's September, which means Apple has announced yet another round of new iPhones. During a typically bombastic media event at the company’s headquarters on Tuesday, Apple showed off regular and Pro versions of the iPhone 15, as well as a ...
09.08.2023 We Robloxed So You Don’t Have To If you want to see what the future of the internet looks like, peek over your kid’s shoulder while they’re using Roblox. The online platform is filled with free games, experiences, and social hangouts that are designed and built by ...
08.31.2023 I Love You, I Hate You, Don’t Call Me Our smartphones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact ...
08.24.2023 The Case of the Not-Stolen AirPods Most of us who went to school in the United States have been threatened with detention for minor infractions like uttering a curse word or showing up to class five minutes late. But in Illinois, such behavior was landing students ...
08.17.2023 The Cruelest Summer Summer isn’t even over here in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s already been a brutal few months. This year’s summer heat waves have been more frequent, more intense, and longer than any we’ve seen before. We’ve suffered through extreme weather ...
08.10.2023 Nobody’s Driving That Car! Tech companies have been touting self-driving cars as the future of transportation for over a decade now. Companies like Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox all have active programs testing their autonomous vehicles in US cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin. ...
08.03.2023 Farm-to-Table Internet Cloud computing has streamlined our hyper-mobile digital lives. We upload files, images, and globs of data to the cloud. Once all of our stuff is stored there, we can access it from anywhere and edit things collaboratively with our friends ...
07.27.2023 The Future of Hollywood Back in May, the Writers Guild of America went on strike—partly over disputes about compensation, and partly over fears that studios could use generative artificial intelligence tools to replace human writers and creators. This month, when the actor’s union SAG-AFTRA ...
07.20.2023 Elon Musk’s Grand xAI Plans Elon Musk is back in the news again. (Really, does he ever leave the news?) Last week, Musk announced a new artificial intelligence venture called xAI. The timing of the launch is odd considering Musk still runs Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, ...
07.13.2023 Stop Trying to Make New Twitter Happen Hey look, there's a new Twitter alternative. The text-based Instagram offshoot Threads launched a week ago, and in the days since, the platform racked up over a hundred million users. It's a huge showing for parent company Meta that has ...
07.06.2023 Have a Nice Future: Don't Worry, It Gets Worse We're off this week, so instead of our usual show, we're sharing an episode of WIRED's other podcast, Have a Nice Future. It's hosted by Gadget Lab cohost Lauren Goode and WIRED editor in chief Gideon Litchfield. The show features ...
06.29.2023 Our Clothes Are Making Us Sick Have you ever put on a new shirt and then discovered that it makes you feel itchy? Or have you ever taken off a new pair of pants at the end of the day to find that the fabric has ...
06.22.2023 Shop Talk Nearly every one of us in the US and Canada has bought something from either Walmart or Amazon. Not only are these two retailers ubiquitous, but they have forever altered the way we buy things through their experiments with things ...
06.15.2023 What the Truck, Elon? Hey, remember the Cybertruck? Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company’s futuristic electric vehicle way back in 2019. At the launch event, Tesla tried to show off the Cybertruck's "unbreakable windows" by hurling a metal ball at them. It promptly ...
06.08.2023 Apple’s Vision Quest After years of rumor and speculation, Apple finally took the wraps off its virtual reality headset this week. The Apple Vision Pro made its debut at the company’s big developer conference in Cupertino, California. The new headset lets the viewer ...
06.01.2023 AI Won’t Wipe Out Humanity (Yet) The idea that machine intelligence will one day take over the world has long been a staple of science fiction. But given the rapid advances in consumer-level artificial intelligence tools, the fear has felt closer to reality these past few ...
05.25.2023 How to Get Started Biking For a lot of people, riding a bike through a crowded city—or even on suburban avenues—might feel daunting. Should you get an electric or acoustic bicycle? What gear do you need while you ride? How do you avoid getting hit ...
05.18.2023 Let’s Get Swole The weather is warming up in our part of the world, which means people are starting to think a little more about getting outside and being active, and maybe doing so in a little less clothing than usual. So we’re ...
05.12.2023 Google Disrupts Itself Google would like you to know that it has been at the forefront of machine intelligence for decades, actually. Never mind that it was beaten to the generative AI hype party by the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft Bing, because ...
05.04.2023 Nothin’ but Bluesky In the months since Elon Musk took over Twitter and started making all kinds of unpopular changes, people have been looking for other places online where they can hang out instead. Of all the Twitter-like social platforms to emerge as ...
04.27.2023 This Episode Is Nuts The most successful industries out there are the ones that play to consumers' insecurities. Many self-care companies prey on people’s anxieties about how they look and smell, offering products that purport to make the wearer more appealing to romantic prospects ...
04.20.2023 I Know What You Did With That Bitcoin If you’ve committed any internet crimes lately, you probably shouldn’t have paid for them with Bitcoin. While many crypto-evangelists have long thought of digital currency as a means of buying legal and illicit goods on the web with total anonymity, ...
04.13.2023 Send in the Clones Artificial intelligence continues to seep into every aspect of our lives: search results, chatbots, images on social media, viral videos, documentaries about dead celebrities. Of course, it’s also seeping into our ears through our podcast clients. A new class of ...
04.13.2023 Introducing Have A Nice Future Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to the Mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, about how she plans to address the city’s problems, from homelessness to crime to abandoned downtowns, and how the changes she's proposing could shape not just ...
04.06.2023 Like, Follow, Subscribe to Cars It used to be that when you bought a car, you just picked out the model and color you wanted and selected the optional extras. When the dealer rang up the total, that’s all you had to pay. Now, it’s ...
03.30.2023 Sidewalk Surfin’ Amazon has sold a lot of connected devices, and now it’s putting those devices to work. Millions of Ring cameras and Echo speakers sitting in homes across the US have the potential to share a little bit of their internet ...
03.23.2023 The Sacred Mountain of Chip-Making If you're reading this, you can thank a semiconductor. Phones, tablets, computers—really any device more digital than pen and paper—all depend on the tiny chips inside them to function. The semiconductor industry is massive, and at the center of it ...
03.16.2023 I Love You, I Hate You, Don’t Call Me Our smartphones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact ...
03.09.2023 ChatGPT in Schools The worst part of going to school is all the homework. Nothing strikes dread in a student’s heart quite like facing down a deadline on a seven-page essay. That’s why some of them may find it tempting to turn those ...
03.02.2023 We Really Recommend This Episode The modern internet is powered by recommendation algorithms. They're everywhere from Facebook to YouTube, from search engines to shopping websites. These systems track your online consumption and use that data to suggest the next piece of content for you to ...
02.23.2023 Netflix Is No Longer Chill The promise of streaming TV was that you could watch whatever you wanted, when you wanted. And for a while, that was mostly true. But recently, streaming services have started to dial back the nice-guy stuff and reel in the ...
02.16.2023 Real Humans Chat About Chatbots The unstoppable march of artificial intelligence carries on. In mere weeks, AI has oozed into nearly everything we interact with on the internet, from conversations, to journalism, to how we look stuff up online. It's even got Google scrambling to ...
02.09.2023 I Know What You Did With That Bitcoin If you’ve committed any internet crimes lately, you probably shouldn’t have paid for them with Bitcoin. While many crypto-evangelists have long thought of digital currency as a means of buying legal and illicit goods on the web with total anonymity, ...
02.02.2023 Have We Reached Peak Smartphone? Phones have been pretty boring for a long time. Don’t get us wrong—phones are still amazing little devices! It just feels like we haven’t seen any truly innovative phone designs or new standout features in a long while. This year’s ...
01.26.2023 Why the Kids Love TikTok Search TikTok’s influence is expanding well beyond the social sphere. The app is increasingly being used for the types of internet searches one would normally rely on a web search engine for. The video-based social app might not seem like the ...
01.19.2023 We Need to Talk About Your Stove Gas stoves are so hot right now. A recent report found that emissions from gas cooktops are worsening both the environmental crisis and the health of the humans who use them. This knowledge has stoked a heated cultural debate in ...
01.12.2023 Oh, Deere! The tractor company John Deere has faced a lot of criticism for the tight hold it keeps over its products. If someone needs to repair their tractor, they’ve got to do it through John Deere’s official channels, which farmers say ...
01.05.2023 CES 2023: We Live Here Now In the world of consumer tech, there’s no palette-cleanser for the new year quite like the annual CES, the giant electronics show. What better way to kick off 2023 than to find your way through the maze of metal and ...
12.29.2022 Is It 2023 Yet? Keeping on theme with the roaring ‘20s, this year has been a doozy. Social media sites are aflame, all that hype over the metaverse has fizzled, the cryptocurrency economy has all but collapsed, and you can't always tell if a ...
12.22.2022 Plastic Rap Plastic waste never really breaks down. It just splits into tinier and tinier pieces until it becomes trillions of microscopic bits scattered across the world. Microplastics are everywhere: In the air we breathe and the water we drink, atop the ...
12.15.2022 The iPod of Crypto Even if you own no Bitcoin, no Ether, and no NFTs, crypto wallets—pocket-friendly hardware lockers that store digital assets—will be a part of your future. They’re essential tools for securing not only coins and digital tokens, but also the next ...
12.08.2022 ChatGPT for You and Me Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than ever, with a new crop of generative AI programs that are creating art, videos, humor, fake news, and plenty of controversy. The technologies powering this latest slate of tools have been in the works ...
12.01.2022 What the Hell is BNPL? Money is tight these days. Holiday shopping, ballooning inflation, and a looming recession have forced people to more carefully consider their finances. Those factors might help explain the explosion of Buy Now, Pay Later services. BNPL plans offered by companies ...
11.24.2022 The State of the Smart Kitchen Companies love sticking chips in everything. That's how you get a feast of connected kitchen tech: app-controlled Instant Pots, $400 touchscreen toasters, and Wi-Fi enabled fridges that let you check Twitter while you wait for some crushed ice. It's all ...
11.17.2022 What Happens if Twitter Gets Hacked? Twitter doesn't work like it used to. Under new ownership, the site is operating with half its usual staff and an entirely new set of executive pressures. As a result, Twitter has become a more unstable platform. As features break, ...
11.10.2022 Demystifying Mastodon Amid all the Twitter hubbub, the lesser known social site Mastodon has seen a surge of new users. Mastodon is a loosely connected network of individually run servers, which all play by their own rules and answer to their own ...
11.03.2022 Tweelon If you've been on Twitter in the past week, you may have noticed that the platform has been emanating some slightly different vibes. Mostly because everybody on there is talking about how Elon Musk just bought the place. There's no ...
10.27.2022 Plastic Rap Plastic waste never really breaks down. It just splits into tinier and tinier pieces until it becomes trillions of microscopic bits scattered across the world. Microplastics are everywhere: In the air we breathe and the water we drink, atop the ...
10.20.2022 OK, Car Computer Modern cars are giant computers. They're packed full of chips and bits, all working toward the goal of making your ride smoother, safer, and more comfortable. But when it comes time to take these technical marvels in for repairs, all ...

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