Author: Olivia Hartman
Olivia Hartman is GeekBlog's general technology reporter, covering the wider world of tech beyond smartphones: AI and software, laptops and PCs, gaming, streaming, space, science, consumer gadgets, deals and the policy stories shaping the industry. A versatile journalist with a nose for what actually matters, Olivia turns breaking news and product launches into accessible, no-hype reporting for everyday readers.
Google shipped two new Gemini text-to-speech models with over 2,000 voices and a tool that builds custom ones from a description. The pricing that makes them cheap expires December 31.
Instagram’s new Pixel effect uses Meta AI to blur anyone you describe in a text prompt. Instagram pitched it at relationship soft launches, and that framing is exactly what set the backlash off.
Ascendance director Takuro Hiraoka says Capcom underestimated how skilled Monster Hunter Wilds players had become, and the expansion’s Master Rank endgame is being retuned because of it.
Files in a new Xbox PC app update reveal the Mythic Achievement, Xbox’s answer to the PlayStation Platinum trophy. It unlocks on all base-game achievements, ignores DLC, is worth zero Gamerscore, and comes with a 15 second fanfare.
Xbox confirmed that Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas, now reports to Bethesda Game Studios instead of Xbox Game Studios. Here’s why it happened and what it means for the new Fallout game.
A Reddit user uploaded a screenshot of an Excel sheet and ChatGPT described a shirtless man in photographic detail, then defended the claim when challenged. Here is why vision models do this, and how to tell a hallucination from an actual data leak.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered goes free for every owner on September 29, bringing reworked skill trees, transmogrification, and new visuals. A paid third expansion, Songs of the Past, follows in 2027 from CD Projekt Red and Fool’s Theory.
At Amazon Accelerate, the company opened Seller Central’s APIs to outside AI agents, letting sellers manage inventory, pricing and listings through Claude or its own Quick assistant with no dashboard required. Amazon built a genuinely open agent surface for the seller side of the business, then drew a hard line at the one place agents still can’t go: the storefront a shopper actually sees.
Meta’s Muse agent rolled out nationwide this month with access to email, calendars, payments and smart home devices, and Zuckerberg just doubled down on it at Connect 2026 with a holiday hardware launch. The catch is convincing people to hand that much control to a company with an $18 billion privacy settlement still fresh on the books.
Miami has approved building wraps and banners turning downtown into Vice City for the GTA 6 launch. Ordinance 19783 caps it at six banners inside a tightly drawn event area, with a $208,000 fee on the biggest ones and everything down by December 31.