Amazon is adding a new feature to Alexa for Shopping that allows customers to purchase items by texting the AI shopping assistant. Users can describe the products they're looking to buy and/or provide a photograph of the item, and Alexa for Shopping will search for matching results in Amazon listings, text back with recommendations, and order the item on the users' behalf.

This launch builds on the existing Alexa for Shopping experience that launched in May, allowing users to place orders during moments where texting is more convenient than using Amazon's app or website. The contact will appear in your phone as "Amazon Alexa," and can be us …

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Tesla is getting the Cybertruck ready for retirement in an effort to ramp up its robotaxi output. In an X post on Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company will be "winding down" Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory sometime around the middle of next year, "to make room for increased Cybercab production."

The production plant in Austin, Texas, is the only Tesla facility that's known to assemble the Cybertruck, and that's equipped to make the specialized components required to build the vehicles. Musk hasn't mentioned if Cybertruck production will be moved elsewhere, but doing so would be arduous, especially for a car that' …

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Anthropic has a new pitch for managing your personal finances: let Claude do it instead, with a new Personal Finance feature that connects it to your bank and card accounts via the Plaid bank bridging platform. You can ask the chatbot "where did my money go this month," for example, and it'll create an overview with a breakdown of spending by category, including rent and utilities, shopping, and food. Claude can also answer broader questions around what bills are left before your next payday, if you can afford big purchases like holiday trips, and how much money you could be saving each month.

Its access is read-only, and with Plaid facilit …

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Sony is enjoying a sharp profit spike in its latest quarterly financials, largely driven by its PlayStation business and the blockbuster success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. According to the company's September earnings, Sony's net profits climbed to 449.60 billion yen (about $2.84 billion) for the three months ended September - a 44 percent increase compared to the 311.4 billion yen ($1.96 billion) it reported for the same period last year.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day was a notable contributor, which released in July and became the third-highest grossing movie in history by earning $2.52 billion at the global box office. That's a huge boost …

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X, Threads, and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved look, which in Bezos' case appears to be very freshly transplanted. It's all just photo editing fakery, AI or otherwise.

It's unclear how viral these posts are, but they're prevalent enough that a few members of the Verge team have encountered them in their social media feeds. Some people who shared them claimed …

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Almost 22 years after it was launched, NASA's Swift Observatory is now about to fall back to Earth on Wednesday after attempts to push it back into a higher orbit failed. NASA announced that the aging space telescope is anticipated to re-enter Earth's atmosphere at approximately 3:30AM ET (give or take 11 hours) and that it expects most of the spacecraft to burn up, but some components will likely survive re-entry.

The observatory weighs around 3,200 pounds and measures in at 5.6 meters (18.4 feet) high and 5.4 meters (17.7 feet) wide, though much of the latter includes the observatory's deployable solar arrays. The risk of surviving compon …

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Adobe is teaming up with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group to add a library of licensed music clips to the Premiere mobile video editing app. No specific musicians have been announced with this partnership, but Adobe said it will include "popular songs" from "leading artists," and enable Premiere mobile users to quickly jump on "the latest trend."

"By bringing licensed music from UMG artists into Adobe Premiere mobile, we're giving creators new ways to build their stories around the songs they love for the first time, while helping our artists and songwriters reach new audiences," Universal Music Group's Bryan Stone said in the a …

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Apple will soon start asking developers to provide more details about their apps to enforce new App Store age rating requirements for dating and location-sharing features. The upcoming content descriptors announced on Monday will require developers to declare if their apps allow users to share their real-world location with others, or include features that enable dating, relationship, or sexual behaviour between real people or virtual companions.

Apps that include dating and relationships features will receive a minimum age rating of 18, while those with location sharing will see an impact to their minimum age rating in some regions, depend …

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Canva is giving digital creatives a new way to design, illustrate, and edit photos on their iPads, and it doesn't have to cost them a thing. After relaunching the Affinity creative suite as an all-in-one desktop app last year, Canva has now introduced Affinity for iPad, which provides the same pro-grade tools for vector graphics, photo editing, illustration, and page layouts in a format optimized for Apple Pencil and touchscreens.

Affinity for iPad has a new Sketch Studio that's designed for freehand drawing and simplifying sketch-to-vector workflows, including optimized tools for masking and automatically converting rough sketches into cle …

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Grocery stores across Europe have been hit by another wave of suspected cyberattacks, reporting sudden changes in the temperatures of their fridges and freezers. Major supermarket chains across Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Estonia were affected, according to local reports shared by Bloomberg and Reuters.

One Ica Kvantum store in Sweden said on its Facebook page that its fridges and freezers had been hacked overnight, with temperatures remotely raised to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). In a statement to Business Insider, a spokesperson at Swedish supermarket chain Coop also confirmed that "unauthorized actors were able to access and …

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