GoKawiil
Tech News
Sony has introduced the Bravia 6, a lower-cost OLED television line built to compete directly with entry-level OLED sets like the LG B6. Pricing starts at $1,300, with the 65-inch model at $2,000, well below the $2,800 Bravia 8 II. The set uses a 4K OLED panel with Sony's Triluminos Pro processing, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X support, and runs Google TV with Gemini integration.
Barret Zoph, who co-founded Thinking Machines with Mira Murati after leaving OpenAI in 2024, returned to OpenAI in January but departed again after just five months leading enterprise AI sales. He has now joined Google as vice president of research, where he previously worked, to apply his reinforcement learning and post-training expertise to Gemini.
Google has acknowledged a bug in its Messages app that causes existing group conversations to unexpectedly split into multiple separate threads with the same participants, often erasing prior message history. The company is asking affected users to submit feedback tagged #splittingthreads to help its engineers investigate. Some users also report similar duplication happening in one-on-one RCS chats, though Google hasn't confirmed a link between the two issues.
Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer charged with insider trading over Polymarket wagers, has filed a motion to dismiss the case. His attorneys don't dispute he profited using internal Google information, but argue his bets—including one on singer D4vd becoming Google's most-searched person of 2025—were unregulated gambling, not financial instruments covered by the Commodities Exchange Act.
Google has released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, a new speech-to-text model that converts raw audio into clean, formatted text while handling background noise, jargon, and disfluencies better than prior systems. It's available to developers via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, split into a real-time streaming option and a pre-recorded audio processing option.
Google is rolling out a feature letting users personalize individual conversations in Google Messages with custom wallpapers and matching bubble colors. Users can pick from preset image categories like Animals or Space, upload their own photos, or select a simple color scheme, with a preview and reset option available. The customization requires RCS to be enabled and only appears on the user's own device, not for other chat participants.
Multiple Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro XL users say their videos contain repeated bursts of static noise, appearing roughly every five seconds when Video Boost is active. The glitch seems tied to the Audio Zoom feature, and some affected users say clearing the camera app's cache and turning off Audio Zoom stops the noise. Google has not yet issued an official response to the reports.
More than 100 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Okta and Fortinet, signed an open letter calling for coordinated action between industry and governments to counter AI-driven cyberattacks. The letter warns that increasingly capable AI models will soon enable more widespread and sophisticated attacks on critical infrastructure like hospitals and utilities, and urges new defensive partnerships across local, national and international levels.
Pixel 10 owners attempting to trade in their phones for the new Pixel 11 on the Google Store are reporting broken trade-in workflows, according to complaints on Reddit's Pixel community. Users describe receiving conflicting confirmations about whether their trade-in was accepted, only to have their cards charged the full price anyway, with Google reportedly unable to retroactively apply the promised credit.
Anthropic is embedding its own browser directly within Claude Cowork, removing the requirement for a separate Chrome extension to handle many everyday browsing tasks. This lets Claude operate web pages and complete tasks natively inside its own app environment rather than relying on Google's browser infrastructure.
Google has released Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, adding creative controls and generative video features aimed at developers building media and editing tools through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio. The update introduces scene extension, letting users continue existing videos using up to 10 seconds of prior context instead of just the final second, and extend clips in 10-second increments up to 40 seconds total.
Google unveiled a special-edition Fitbit Air designed to integrate with the Pokémon Sleep app, timed to Pokémon's 30th anniversary. The device tracks daytime activity metrics like heart rate and movement alongside nighttime sleep data, syncing with both Google Health and Pokémon Sleep. It's priced at $129 and available for preorder now, shipping September 15 through Google Store and Target.