This week, Amazon will launch new Echo hardware designed to supercharge Alexa Plus, the AI-powered upgrade to its voice assistant. I've been using Alexa Plus for the last few months as part of its Early Access program, and while the new assistant is off to a promising start, it's still clearly a work in progress. […]

Amazon’s October Prime Day (officially called Prime Big Deal Days) starts on October 7th, but waiting a week won’t be necessary to score a great deal. Amazon has already discounted the Kindle Kids, Kindle Paperwhite Kids, and Kindle Colorsoft Kids e-readers to their lowest prices ever. All of the kid-friendly Kindles have 16GB of storage […]

Keychron is one of the biggest names in mechanical keyboards (but certainly far from the only maker worthy of your attention). If you’re interested in an upgrade for your desk, or just an additional keyboard to use during gaming or intensive typing, Woot has great deals running on a fleet of wired and wireless models, […]

OpenAI has rolled out some long-awaited parental controls for ChatGPT to all web users, with mobile coming “soon,” according to the company.  The controls, announced last month, allow for reducing or removing certain content — like sexual roleplay and the ability to generate images — and reducing the level of personalization on ChatGPT conversations by […]

Over the past weekend at the Tokyo Game Show, GameSir demonstrated a new controller that turns your smartphone into a Game Boy. Unlike the company’s GameSir G8 Plus that offers similar functionality by clamping on to the top and bottom of a phone turned sideways recreating the ergonomics of the Nintendo Switch, this new controller […]

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Nilay Patel’s show about big ideas and other problems. I am not Nilay Patel, though I have long wanted to be him.  I am Joanna Stern, the senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, author of the upcoming book I AM NOT A ROBOT (releasing spring […]

The list of car companies looking askance at Apple’s newly release, all-encompassing version of CarPlay is growing longer. In an interview on Decoder, Ford CEO Jim Farley said he is taking a wait-and-see approach about whether to authorize Apple CarPlay Ultra in Ford’s vehicles. After years of teasing, Apple launched the CarPlay Ultra earlier this […]

Google is making the gradient “G” its new company-wide logo, according to an announcement on Monday. The new logo first began to surface across the Google app on Android and iOS in May, but soon, the design will begin to appear across all of the company’s platforms, marking Google’s first big logo change in 10 […]

You’ve probably heard of vibe coding — novices writing apps by creating a simple AI prompt — but now Microsoft wants to introduce a similar thing for its Office apps. The software maker is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word that can generate complex spreadsheets and documents with just a prompt. A […]

Just a few days after first teasing the upcoming launch of the OnePlus 15, the company is already showing off the phone in plenty of detail. Today OnePlus confirmed that the new flagship is getting a global launch, and over the weekend it dropped multiple photo sets on Chinese social media giving us a better […]