Google will save your Lens photos, Search Live recordings, and Translate audio for AI training
The Verge AI4 days agoEthicsGoogle has notified users via email that it will begin saving multimedia inputs—images from Google Lens, real-time recordings from Search Live, and audio from Translate—under a new 'Search Services History' setting. This data will be retained and potentially used to train and improve Google's AI models. Users concerned about privacy should review their account settings to manage or disable this data collection.
Apple’s AI pitch will live or die by its privacy promise
The Verge AI5 days agoCommentaryThe Verge argues Apple’s WWDC 2026 AI strategy centers on privacy rather than raw capability. Apple says Siri AI and Apple Intelligence will run on-device when possible and use Private Cloud Compute only when needed. But reliance on Google Gemini, Google Cloud, Nvidia, Intel, and Google Titan hardware complicates Apple’s original privacy story, even if its default data collection remains more limited than rivals.
Gemini's new AI agent is about as good as Google's demo
The Verge AI13 days agoNew ToolGoogle's new 24/7 AI agent, Gemini Spark, can take on tasks for users and continue working on them. After receiving access last week, The Verge's reviewer found that Spark can perform surprisingly well, roughly matching Google's demo. The remaining question is whether that capability justifies the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs.
Reachy Mini goes fully local
Hugging Face Blog19 days agoHardwareHugging Face published a tutorial for running Reachy Mini conversations without cloud audio processing or API keys. The setup uses its speech-to-speech library as a cascaded VAD, STT, LLM, and TTS pipeline exposed through a Realtime API-compatible WebSocket. Recommended defaults include llama.cpp with Gemma 4, Silero VAD, Parakeet-TDT, and Qwen3-TTS, while allowing swaps to vLLM, MLX, Transformers, or hosted Responses API providers.