Last August, SoundCloud cut its workforce by 20 percent, citing "the challenging economic climate" for the layoffs. That's been a common refrain among companies reducing staff in recent years — with companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and more framing layoffs as restructuring or cost cutting measures. Now, SoundCloud says it will be cutting staff by an additional 8 percent, telling staff that the reduction is a "challenging but essential decision to ensure the health of our business and get SoundCloud to profitability this year."

That goal was baked into the company's last round of layoffs too, with the 2022 cuts being positioned as putting SoundCloud on "a path to sustained profitability." This new "headcount reduction" seems to be the next step in that plan, with sources telling Billboard that the company hopes to be profitable by Q4. SoundCloud leadership has also reportedly said that it's courting new investors.

Although SoundCloud's layoffs follow the same gruesome pattern we've seen across different tech brands recently, the company has actually been slowly reducing staff for some time. In addition to last year's cuts, the company slashed its workforce by 40 percent back in 2017.

Check out Engadget's look at the biggest tech layoffs of 2023 for more details.

It'll be some time before we have a full picture of what the next version of Windows looks like, but that's not stopping Microsoft from rolling out a few updates to Windows 11 amid this year's Build developer conference. Today the company announced a list of feature updates for the operating system focusing on privacy, security and accessibility. Although most of the new tools are aimed at businesses and IT departments, there are some handy features average users may want to know about.

To start, Microsoft says that Bluetooth Low Energy Audio is coming to compatible devices, starting with the May 2023 non-security preview release. The company said its working with Intel and Samsung to bring the audio standard to the PC ecosystem for the first time, specifically calling out the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro as a potentially compatible set of earbuds.

Speaking of audio content, you'll be able to understand more of it than ever. Starting this week, live captions for Windows 11 will support 10 new languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portugueses and Spanish.

Most of the update focuses on "new and improved features for businesses," but there's still one last item you might want to pay attention to: the glanceable VPN icon. This feature will be available in the quick settings menu, and enables a new shield icon that will hover over the active network connection in the taskbar to help users check to see if they're connected to a recognized VPN service.

Other new features hitting Windows soon include a larger widget page, a Windows 365 boot feature that automatically logs users into Cloud PCs, new privacy controls for managing presence sensor data, QR code verification for document printing, autopatch updates and new messaging tools for IT teams. You can check out the full rundown of the new features on the Microsoft Blog.

Doing your taxes in the United States can be famously convoluted. It can also be expensive: on top of paying their tax bills, Americans who have more complicated finances often have to pay for software to help them navigate the US tax code. That might change soon: a report from the Washington Post says that the Internal Revenue Services is preparing to roll out a free direct filing system that will allow Americans to complete their taxes digitally.

The first version of the direct filing system could be available as soon as next year, according to the report, with a pilot program launching for a small group of taxpayers in January of 2024. That would arrive just a year after the IRS publicly started exploring the option, when the tax agency tapped the New America think tank to help explore the feasibility of an agency-run filing program. That effort was kicked off in February of this year, after the Inflation Reduction Act earmarked $15 million to the IRS to research a "multi-lingual and mobile-friendly" free direct e-file system.

That focus on a user-friendly system might be the point. The IRS already offers a Free File Online tool, but according to the Government Accountability Offices, it's used by less than 3% of eligible taxpayers. If the program is a success, it could make filing taxes easier and more affordable for millions of Americans. If not? Well, TurboTax and H&R Block probably aren't going anywhere. After all, the US tax prep and filing industry is still worth about $14 billion.

Watching the Olympics in 2021 was a little complicated, requiring viewers to juggle NBC Broadcasts, the company's Peacock Streaming service and a dedicated NBCOlympics.com website. Today the company announced that watching the Paris games in 2024 will be a lot easier — declaring Peacock the "streaming home" of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

"In a Summer Games first, the service will stream every sport and event, including all 329 medal events." NBC says it will also broadcast at least nine hours of daytime coverage on the network, which will then be made available for streaming on Peacock. The streaming service will also host full-event replays, curated video clips, original commentary and more.

NBC is heralding the coverage as the Olympic Games return to its "true glory, with full stadiums and the world's greatest athletes" since 2018, but the expanded programming is almost certainly a response to backlash over the network's limited coverage of the last summer Olympics. Although the network did make every event available to watch 2021, most of it could only be accessed on NBCOlympics.com, with NBC television and Peacock playing host to limited key events.

With any luck, NBC's new plans will make watching the games easier than ever. You'll have to wait about a year to find out, though: NBC and Peacock will kick off Olympic Games coverage on Friday, July 26 2024.

Generative AI really is everywhere. It's used to make social media avatars. It can help debug code. It can even ask nosey neighbors to be a little more polite to each other. Now, Google is hoping to use it to encourage app developers to expand their use of custom store listings on the Google Play store. New features announced at Google I/O will give developers will access to AI-powered tools that will help them create new listings and convert their existing app listings into multiple languages.

App developers could already create up to 50 custom store listings, but Google hopes these new tools will make managing them easier. To start, it's introducing a store listing groups feature that allows developers to craft a base listing for their app, and then modify specific elements to tailor it to a specific audience demographic or event. Potential users visiting your app's store listing from YouTube might see one set of screenshots, while visitors from another country might see a different series of images, as well as an app description in their native language.

The new AI-powered features seem designed to make that easier. The AI helper, for example, can take developer prompts highlighting a key feature or marketing theme, and spit out ready-made text to help a user craft a targeted Google Play Store listing. There's also a new machine translation tool that can help developers quickly list their app in 10 different languages.

Although most of these new features were built to help developers find and expand their audience, there's at least one new tool being rolled out to average users: AI-powered review summaries. Google says the feature should "help users learn from each other" about what makes an app "special at a glance." Even this is designed to help apps gain more reach, however: at launch it will only help summarize positive reviews in English.

Years before everyone was being impressed with the human-like text output of ChatGPT and other generative AI systems, IBM's Watson was blowing our minds on Jeopardy. IBM's cognitive computing project famously dominated its human opponents, but the company had much larger long-term goals, such as using Watson's ability to simulate a human thought process to help doctors diagnose patients and recommend treatments. That didn't work out. Now, IBM is pivoting its supercomputer platform into Watsonx, an AI development studio packed with foundation and open-source models companies can use to train their own AI platforms.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because NVIDIA recently announced a similar service with its AI Foundations program. Both platforms are designed to give enterprises a way to build, train, scale and deploy an AI platform. IBM says Watsonx will provide AI builders with a robust series of training models with an auditable data lineage — ranging from datasets focused on automatically generating code for developers or for handling industry-specific databases to climate datasets designed to help organizations plan for natural disasters.

IBM has already built an example of what the platform can do with that latter dataset in collaboration with NASA, using the geospatial foundation model to convert satellite images into maps that track changes from natural disasters and climate change.

Reimagining Watson as an AI development studio might lack the pizazz of a headline-grabbing supercomputer that can beat humans on a TV quiz show — but the original vision of Watson was out of reach for the average person. Depending on how companies use IBM's new AI training program, you may find yourself interacting with a part of Watson yourself sometime in the near future.

Watsonx is expected to be available in stages, starting with the Watsonx.ai studio in July, and expanding with new features debuting later this year.

If you were hoping to avoid spoilers before playing Nintendo's highly anticipated follow-up to Breath of the Wild, that goal just got a lot harder: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been leaked. Physical copies of the game appeared on sites over the weekend, apparently selling for up to $300 each. Now, digital copies of the game have shown up online. Some who have downloaded the pirated files have streamed footage of the game's intro and gameplay.

How this all happened still isn't completely clear. According to a thread on the GamingLeaksAndRumors subreddit, players who received the physical game early posted scattered images. One person allegedly dumped the game from a physical cart to a computer and started streaming it on a Discord sever via PC emulation. Eventually, admins on that server said the files were being uploaded to filesharing websites.

These kinds of leaks are becoming more common. Back in 2018, Kingdom Hearts 3 made it to some players six weeks before the title's planned launch. More recently, a hacker acquired a test build of the next Grand Theft Auto game and released more than an hour of footage from the build. And indeed, this has happened to Nintendo before: The Wii U version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was leaked before launch back in 2017.

Nintendo hasn't commented on the situation yet, but it's likely they'll pursue legal action if they can identify the leaker. The company recently subpoenaed Discord for information on users who leaked a Tears of the Kingdom art book earlier this year. There's also the case of Gary Bowser, a hacker for Team Xecuter who developed and sold devices that enabled people to play pirated games on the Nintendo Switch — he was jailed in 2022, and has been ordered to pay 25-30% of his monthly gross income to Nintendo in restitution for the rest of his life.

Curious what to expect from the new game without having to delve into leaks and spoilers? You can read Engadget's own preview of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom right here. 

Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What looks like a bottle of sunscreen and feels like it belongs in a 1990s fever dream? Microsoft's new Xbox x OPI controller collaboration. The 'Sunkissed Vibes' OPI special edition Xbox Wireless controller is inspired by the nail polish brand's Summer Make the Rules collection. These kinds of fashion collaborations aren't new, and this particular controller doesn't have any special features you won't find in a standard gamepad, save from the fact that it's really, really ridiculously good looking.

Borrowing hues from the OPI makeup collection gives the controller a distinct pop, splashing its back with a pastel blue and adorning its front with a burst of soft, but bright orange. These unique hues are what makes these kinds of collaborations so unique — you may be able to create a custom gamepad using Xbox Design Lab, but those controllers don't have access to the custom colors mixed by the nail polish brand's designers. I even tried to design a similar controller using the app, and it just didn't have the same vibes, sunkissed or otherwise.

The controller's landing page doesn't say which OPI colors Microsoft borrowed for the gamepad, but at a glance, it looks like it's painted in "Dancing in Stilettos" and "Surf Naked." The polish collection has 51 whimsically named colors to choose from — just in case the bright controller inspires you to head to the beach.

Pit Stops in Formula E racing have always been a little complicated. For the electric racing series' first few seasons, divers had to swap cars halfway through the race due to battery limitations. That issue was fixed with a newer, higher capacity car design in 2018, but that eliminated and excitement of having a functional pitstop. Now, the fast battery charging system designed to bring pitstops back to Formula E racing is being delayed until next season.

"The technology is there," Formula E cofounder Alberto Longo told Motorsport Total. "It's working and at the moment many of the people are suffering with the supply chain, and that's the main issue why we haven't been able to put it in work this season." The updated pit stops were planned to debut halfway through the 2023 season with the new Gen3 Formula E cars, but at this point it would only be ready for the last few races of the season.

It's more than just a logistical problem: the new system could drastically change how drivers approach the race. In addition to reintroducing mandatory pit stops, each time a driver uses one of the quick charging stations, they will earn two "attack charges" that would give their vehicle a temporary boost in power for a limited time. The current rules already have an attack mode, but this change in how it is earned and used could have a profound effect on performance partway through the season.

"It will have a big impact on the sporting format and to do that only in the three or four races at the end the season, even though if we are capable of doing it, maybe it's not the right decision," Longo said. "We would love to have it this season, but I don't think at the moment it's totally viable to implement it."

Workers at Sega of America have announced plans to form a union. A supermajority of workers based out of the company's headquarters in Irvine CA say they are forming a union with the Communication Workers of America — calling themselves the Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega, or AEGIS-CWA. 

“Working for Sega is a passion for many of us and it’s been so exciting to see that through organizing, we can make this work a sustainable long-term career," Sega QA lead and AEGIS member Mohammad Saman said in a statement. "By creating our union, AEGIS-CWA, we’ll have a say in the decisions that shape our working conditions and ensure the job security and working conditions we deserve. We’re excited to protect what already makes Sega great, and help build an even stronger company, together." 

The fledgling union hopes that Sega will recognize the AEGIS-CWA voluntarily, but have also filed for a union representation election with the National Labor Relations Board. If the unionization goes forward, the group hopes to push for a higher base pay, improved benefits and measures that will help prevent "patterns of overwork" through better staffing. 

Although the proposed union isn't the largest in the industry by numbers, it's among the most board, covering 144 workers across Sega of America's localization, marketing, product development games as a service and quality assurance teams. Although it's the latest group of game workers to announce the formation of a union, it's also far from the first. In 2021, Vodeo Games became the first studio in North America to form a union before unfortunately shutting down the following year. Since then, multiple groups with Activision Blizzard voted to unionize. Microsoft is the home to the largest union in the video game industry today, with ZeniMax Workers United CWA representing about 300 employees.