Author: TechBrunch

Most of the new camera features Google has introduced to its Pixel devices in recent years involve AI-based post-processing, but Made You Look, announced at its Made by Google 2024 event on Tuesday, is different: it reaches back through the history of photography to borrow from an old favorite technique: tricking a cranky child into smiling. Sure, there are plenty of AI features to help you out already, like Best Take, but that's not the most fun part. Following in the footsteps of generations of exhausted parents who vainly tried to make their kids laugh by waving around stuffed toys…

Google has been heavy on consumer hardware launches in August. Last week, the company unveiled the long-awaited new Nest Thermostat and the Google TV Streamer, which replaces its 11-year-old Chromecast line. And today at Made by Google 2024, the software giant refreshed its Pixel line, along with a slew of new smartphones and a host of Gemini AI announcements. You can find the details here. Previous Made by Google events were held in October on the East Coast, and this one was held at the company's Mountain View headquarters and began today, August 13, at 10am PST/1pm ET. As always,…

Coinciding with the launch of the new Pixel devices, the Pixel smartphone lineup will get its own new AI-powered weather app. Announced at its Made by Google 2024 event on Tuesday, the app offers custom AI weather forecasts created by Gemini Nano, a Google AI model designed to run on mobile devices, which the tech giant briefly showed off. The tech company touts that the new app will “free up users from having to scroll through a bunch of numbers to find out what the weather will be like for the day.” Instead, users will be able to customize the…

At Made by Google 2024 on Tuesday, the company unveiled its new Pixel 9 series of smartphones. These devices will come with Gemini as the default assistant as well as a host of other AI-powered features. In addition to photo editing features, the company is also adding a new app that lets you store and search screenshots on the device, as well as an AI-powered image generation studio. Add Me allows people who take group photos to become a part of it. The company uses a combination of AR and various machine learning models to ask the photographer to swap…

The Made by Google 2024 event has begun, and while rumors were flying ahead of the event, the first announcements and reveals have come from Google's biggest hardware event of the year. Notably, this year's event takes place ahead of Apple's usual September iPhone launch, and there's a strong focus on AI that will be familiar to anyone who's watched tech events over the past two years. The event is still airing as you read this, so you can watch the livestream, which began at 10am PST, here. But our team was able to get a look at some of…

Gemini Live is Google's answer to the recently released (limited alpha) Advanced Voice Mode for OpenAI's ChatGPT, and it launches on Tuesday, a few months after it was announced at the Google I/O 2024 developer conference. It was announced at Google's Made by Google 2024 event. Gemini Live allows users to have “in-depth” voice chats with Google's generative AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, on their smartphones. Thanks to an enhanced speech engine that Google claims delivers more coherent, emotive, and lifelike multi-turn interactions, users can interrupt Gemini to ask follow-up questions while the chatbot is talking, and Gemini will adapt to the…

The new Pixel 9 lineup took center stage at the Made by Google 2024 event on Tuesday morning. Alongside the unveiling of the Pixel 9 Fold Pro, the company also announced three additional size options: the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL. The Pro has the same 6.3-inch display as the base-model Pixel, but with a higher resolution (1280 x 2856 instead of 1080 x 2424). The new Pro XL model is essentially an updated version of last year's 8 Pro, with a 6.8-inch display (1344 x 2992 pixels). It's good to have another option. The…

Google's big hardware event, “Made by Google,” is taking place today, where the company will unveil its new Pixel phones, as well as a bigger role for Gemini AI. The flagship from Google is the Pixel 9 smartphone. The main Pixel lineup currently has three phones: the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL. Apparently the new Pro is similar in dimensions to the regular Pixel, so it can be thought of as the standard-sized option with better specs, while the Pro XL is more powerful and larger in size. If you're looking for a phone that…

At Tuesday's Made by Google event, Gemini solidified its place as the default assistant on Pixel devices. While the company has previously allowed users to choose to replace Google Assistant with its generative AI platform, the newly announced Pixel 9 smartphone will be the first device to ship that way by default. Google says that if users aren't happy with the as-yet-unfinished, hallucinogenic platform, they can revert their new devices to what it calls “legacy Assistant,” though that name isn't entirely apt: Google recently reaffirmed that Assistant will remain as part of its Nest/Home business. This side of Google's hardware…

The era of generative AI gadgets has been disappointing at best. Devices like Humane's AI Pin and Rabbit R1 underwhelmed at launch and fell victim to their own hype cycles. Generative AI has a future in consumer hardware, but you'd be hard pressed to believe it doesn't. The technology has been gaining traction in mobile phones, and headphones are a natural extension of that trend. The Pixel Buds Pro 2, announced at Tuesday's Made By Google event, is an attempt to take the next step. The earbuds arrive a little over two years after the company released its first-generation product,…