<p>Meta, X, and Snap are celebrating a new Utah law that will require Apple and Google to take responsibility for verifying users&#8217; ages on their app stores and obtain parental consent for minors. The tech giants have been battling to determine which party should be responsible for age verification on the app stores. Companies like [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is rolling out a slew of new features — some powered by AI — across Search, Maps, and Gemini that are designed to help people plan their summer vacations. The new features arrive as users have been turning to tools like OpenAI&#8217;s ChatGPT for help with planning trips. Google Search&#8217;s AI Overviews, which display [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Sez Us, a social app founded by Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, is trying to build a platform without rage-bait. Rage-bait refers to any posts that are intended to stoke controversy. This might be an intentionally controversial political take, or it can be a wholly fabricated scenario designed to farm engagement (e.g., a satirical creator got [&hellip;]</p>

<p>YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give creators a deeper understanding of how their short-form content is performing, the company announced on Wednesday. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator&#8217;s Short starts to play or replay. In the past, a view had been counted after a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Since the integration of Google Assistant for Waze on iOS in 2020, iPhone users have faced ongoing issues that the company has struggled to resolve for &#8220;over a year,&#8221; Waze wrote in a post, apologizing for the “prolonged inconvenience.”  On Wednesday, the navigation app officially discontinued the feature. Many users had reported on Reddit that [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Audio startup Krisp on Wednesday said it is launching a new feature that uses AI to change a user&#8217;s accent during calls. The company is initially rolling out support for changing Indian English accents to U.S. English. The startup says the accent conversion process preserves the speaker&#8217;s voice and only switches phonemes to match American [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Instagram on Tuesday announced a new school partnership program aimed at expediting the handling of moderation reports submitted by verified school accounts. The program is currently available to all middle and high schools in the U.S. It allows schools to report posts or student accounts that may violate the app&#8217;s guidelines directly to Instagram. These [&hellip;]</p>

<p>During a livestream on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the first major upgrade to ChatGPT&#8217;s image-generation capabilities in over a year. ChatGPT can now leverage the company&#8217;s GPT-4o model to natively create and modify images and photos. GPT-4o has long underpinned the AI-powered chatbot platform, but until now, the model has been able to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Apple has announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will kick off on June 9 and run through June 13. The tech giant&#8217;s event is where it offers a look at its upcoming versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, as well as new tools for its developers. As in past years, the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Poe, Quora&#8217;s chatbot app, launched one of its most affordable subscription options on Tuesday, priced at just $5 per month.  In addition, the company introduced its highest-priced plan at $250 per month, designed for users who need to send a large volume of messages on Poe. Poe allows users to utilize several AI-powered bots &#8212; [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Apple said today it is opening its catalog to let users build mix sets by integrating the platform with a number of tools. These tools include Algoriddim&#8217;s djay Pro software, hardware platforms AlphaTheta, Serato, inMusic’s Engine DJ, Denon DJ, Numark, and RANE DJ. This will possibly attract DJs to explore Apple Music&#8217;s catalog of over 100 million songs and also give [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Following a string of lawsuits and criticism for allegedly failing to protect its underage users from harm, Character AI, the startup that lets users create different AI characters and talk to them over calls and texts, said on Tuesday that it is rolling out a new set of parental supervision tools to increase safety for [&hellip;]</p>

<p>In recent years, Meta has introduced many AI features and capabilities to its apps, even going so far as experimenting with AI-generated characters complete with unique profiles and personalities, before scrapping them after they were deemed creepy and unnecessary. In yet another move that may not be received well among users, Meta wants to use [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google is rolling out a new Gmail update that is designed to help you find the email you&#8217;re looking for more quickly. The company announced on Thursday that it will now use AI to consider factors like recency, most-clicked emails, and frequent contacts when surfacing emails based on your search query. Up until now, Gmail [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Anthropic&#8217;s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it. Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said in its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon. Users can toggle on web search in their profile [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta&#8217;s social network Threads, an X competitor with more than 320 million monthly active users, is now rolling out new features related to topics, reply controls, and video playback in the app, among other things. It&#8217;s also making political content suggestions more personalized to the user, the company says. Combined, the features aim to make [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Social network Bluesky, an open source X rival, has made a change that will allow publishers to better track the referral traffic originating from posts on its platform. According to a comment from Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the company is now sending referral traffic through Bluesky&#8217;s &#8220;go&#8221; subdomain to make it easier for publishers to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>On Wednesday, Spotify launched a new personalized playlist designed to help listeners discover upcoming concerts in their area. The playlist, titled “Concerts Near You,” is updated every Wednesday with 30 songs from artists performing nearby, along with full event details and ticket links. Spotify partners with ticketing platforms like AXS, DICE, Eventbrite, and Ticketmaster.&nbsp; Like [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Over the last few years, developers have increasingly complained about paying fees to Apple or Google for App Store or Play Store distributions. App makers have often said that both companies make it difficult for them to earn money outside of their systems. New York-based app revenue management platform Adapty wants to change that with [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Newsletter platform Ghost, an open source competitor to Substack, is now connected to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Federated apps run on the protocol ActivityPub, which powers apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Flipboard, and others, allowing posts published on one app to be seen and engaged with by those on other [&hellip;]</p>