Google TV may now be easier to use when you're sitting down to watch shows with your kids. Google is adding four new pages to the interface that include a Family section, where you'll find suggested content rated PG or lower. While this isn't a completely novel concept (Netflix has a dedicated Kids profile, for example), it should help you find titles that are safe for everyone to watch. The expansion also includes an Español page that, as the name implies, recommends Spanish-language content like movies, shows and live TV.

Other changes apply more universally. The Movies and Shows tabs have been turned into pages. You'll also find a few navigation tweaks that include a quick settings button and more convenient locations for profile and search functions.

The new pages are currently available in the US. The navigation updates are rolling out worldwide as of today. All the changes will be visible on devices that support Google TV, including Google's own Chromecast hardware as well as TVs from companies like Hisense and Sony.

The revamp doesn't come as a surprise. Google is competing with other platforms where child-safe content is either already walled off or dominates, such as Disney+ and Netflix. An update like this may make Google TV more compelling to young families, and creates more consistency with Google's own YouTube Kids.

You might not hem and haw the next time you're choosing a soundtrack for a Snapchat video. Snap has introduced automatic Sounds features that help you produce clips faster. Sounds Recommendations, for instance, suggests music relevant to the augmented reality Lens you're using. Try a bread Lens and you'll see plenty of toast-related songs alongside the most popular overall tracks.

Sounds Sync, meanwhile, creates montage videos in sync to the beat of tunes in the Sounds collection. You'll need between four and 20 photos or videos, but this could help you summarize a vacation or social outing without stressing about suitably-timed songs.

Both features are available now for iOS users in the US, and are rolling out worldwide. Android users can also use Sounds Recommendations right away, but they'll have to wait until March to try Sounds Sync.

Snap isn't shy about its goals. The easier it is to create videos, the more likely you are to post on Snapchat. This is also as much about helping artists as it is users — Snap music strategy lead Manny Adler claims this is a "unique opportunity" for musicians to reach listeners who'll (hopefully) play full songs after hearing them in someone's video.

The introductions come at a good time for Snap. The company's audience is growing after a turbulent 2022, having reached 750 million monthly active Snapchat users despite laying off roughly 1,300 workers last summer. While it's still much smaller than rivals like Instagram, which had two billion monthly active users as of last fall, it's enduring competition that is frequently mimicking features. Small additions like Sounds Recommendations and Sync may help Snap maintain that growth.

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard, Season Three, Episode Two: “Disengage.”

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a 1982 movie that arguably saved Star Trek as a going concern. It was a cheap movie, but writer-director Nicholas Meyer made thriftiness a virtue, building a paranoid submarine thriller out of steely glances and jousting phone calls. Despite having no love of Trek, Meyer painted a broad sweep of an older Jim Kirk, his life, death and rebirth with the help of a son he never knew he had. It’s a sumptuous movie, full of smart dialogue and characterisation, with a drum-tight plot and great acting, not just a great Star Trek film, but a great film, period. And sometimes, I feel that its critical and commercial success was so big that it’s been to Star Trek’s overall detriment.

Whenever the creative well runs dry, Trek runs back to old comforts, and the Next Generation movies were perpetually looking for its own Khan. First Contact flipped the Moby Dick narrative, making Picard the Ahab against the Borg’s white whale. Insurrection borrowed the setting of Khan’s climatic finale, while Nemesis borrowed its plot beats; a wounded ship only saved by the heroic sacrifice of each series’ Tin Man character. Into Darkness then winkingly inverted those same plot beats, with Kirk nobly “dying” in place of his best friend.

Picard’s been telegraphing its intentions from the get-go, dropping every nod to fans about where we’d wind up. The Bennett-era movie callbacks remain en vogue here, and to my memory this is the first use of the Blaster Beam, or a soundalike, in a streaming era soundtrack. Much like all of the other nods, we’re watching a cargo cult being assembled in real time, boldly serving us up something we’ve only seen, oooh, four or five times at this point. So: Wounded hero ship facing off against a more powerful enemy? Check. Inside a nebula that’s disrupting normal starship functions? Check. With our lead suddenly presented with the news he has a son he never knew about? Check check check.

This week, Picard and Riker make it to the Helios to find Beverley in her stasis pod, guarded by her son, Jack. He’s a rakish Englishman who has already spoken two whole words in French while negotiating with a corrupt Fenris Ranger. After being rescued by the Titan, Riker starts hinting about the younger Crusher’s parentage, as if being the world’s most English Frenchman is a genetic trait. It isn’t long before Crusher is outed as an intergalactic con man and fugitive, and Shaw has him sent to the brig. He also, after several hours of allowing her to remain on the bridge giving orders to people, dismisses Seven for indulging two people we keep being told are “legends” and “heroes.”

There’s plenty of furrowed brows as Picard initially refuses to consider that he might have a son, and at no point does anyone suggest running a paternity test. You might expect it would be easy enough to whip out a tricorder or hypospray, or even the transporter records, and find the truth. But, you know, that would be too efficient, so we’re left with Picard and Jack facing off in the brig. Now, credit where due, Patrick Stewart and Ed Speelers sell the hell out of this scene, the first that feels in any way real so far.

All the while, the Titan is menaced by Amanda Plummer’s villain, who we know is evil because she’s smoking on the bridge of her ship, the Shrike, indoors! I wonder if this, too, is another nod to those older films given Plummer’s father faced off against Kirk in The Undiscovered Country. Maybe this is why I’m so out of step with so much of the (positive) critical consensus around this run. I find this raiding of Star Trek’s own text and paratext to be insular and repetitive, with it more interested in placating disaffected fanboys than telling a story with a point of view. If you want strange new worlds, new life forms and new civilizations, you’ll need to watch the show set 142 years earlier.

Then there’s Raffi. Last week, she uncovered that some nefarious type had stolen some deep tech from Aperture Science Starfleet. At the end of that episode, a Starfleet recruitment building big enough to fill the donut hole in Apple Park gets Portal-ed into dust, killing (just) 117 people. Now, looking to make amends for her, uh, failure? She’s looking into local crims in order to find out who exactly was responsible for the seemingly-unwarranted attack.

Now, this is the plot beat I alluded to in my preview, when Raffi, who is in recovery, is forced to do drugs in order to prove she’s not an undercover agent. The portentous music and Michelle Hurd’s acting sells the notion this isn’t a great idea, but Raffi’s committed to the cause. But while she’s incapacitated, her handler comes in to rescue everyone with some good, old-fashioned Mek’leth carnage. I couldn't help but feel a punch in the air when Worf popped up in all his glory, but the tonal jump doesn't sit well with me. 

You could be wondering why the Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire is doing covert intelligence work. But, by the end of the Next Generation movies, it was clear that Worf would just show up for a visit whenever the plot required. And even I’m not going to harp on about this too much, because it is never a chore to watch Michael Dorn do his work. As EW’s Darren Franich said in his definitive Star Trek essay series, “Michael Dorn knew Worf only got cooler when the show made him look goofy.” As goofy as he is here, he’s still Worf, and you just wish that Paramount had greenlit a Worf show three years ago instead.

I had hoped this episode, for its laggy table-laying, may be looking for a way to attack a well worn but fundamentally strong Star Trek trope. That being if it’s right and proper to hand over a potentially-innocent man to frontier justice, and if not, why not? There’s plenty of angles for the argument given the many shades of gray that most people can now comprehend. After all, the Titan is outside Federation space, and so you can’t, or shouldn’t, impose your values on those beyond your worldview. That can be countered by someone saying that natural justice is, or should be a universal virtue. And that these debates must sit side-by-side with the notion that the needs of the many (the 500-plus souls on the USS Titan) outweigh the needs of the few, or the (Jack Crusher) one. You could even have the supposedly “right” argument, the one aping Spock’s famous aphorism, espoused by the character most seen as an asshole, too. But no.

Unfortunately, Picard remains bad for all of the same reasons that pretty much every other Khan copy is bad: It has almost nothing to say. In fact, this episode seems to hinge on every person in the narrative suddenly becoming incapable of doing even the basic parts of their jobs. Since when would a security officer not search a prisoner for hidden technology before putting them in the brig? Since when would a ship at Red Alert be taken by surprise when a hostile vessel in front of them starts attacking? And why did nobody have the presence of mind to run a paternity test, which surely at this point in history could be done with the ship’s internal sensors? Not to mention, why didn’t Jack just tell the security guard he’d like to hand himself over rather than knocking him out? Maybe so we could have a few more moments of tension before the Titan chooses to make a break for the nebula and we roll the credits.

You may think I’m banging on unnecessarily about The Wrath of Khan but I think it’s justified here. If the production team weren’t looking to invite comparisons to a vastly superior project then they were unwise to take so many of its plot beats as its own. I mean, in Wrath of Khan, Kirk has sixty seconds to find a way to even things up between the wounded Enterprise and the Reliant. And he does so with a little bit of theatrics, some ingenuity, and by showing that he was a little cleverer than anybody gave him credit for being. When this version of Picard is placed in the same situation but given a whole hour to come up with something, what does he do? He marks time on the bridge while the younger actors with plausible-looking stunt performers can do the now obligatory punch fight so that the audience at home doesn’t start getting bored.

YouTube viewers from around the world might start finding more videos with audio in their native language. The video-hosting website has launched a new feature that gives creators the capability to add voice tracks to their new and existing content in multiple languages. YouTube has been testing multi-language dubs with a handful of creators over the past year, but it's now expanding the feature's reach and making it accessible to thousands more. 

The website presents the new feature as a tool creators can use to grow their audiences around the world. Early testers apparently uploaded 3,500 videos in over 40 languages last month, and viewers watched over 2 million hours of dubbed video everyday in January. The creators who tested feature also found that around 15 percent of their watch time came from viewers playing their videos in another language. 

One of the most notable creators who tested YouTube's multi-language tool was MrBeast, who has over 130 million subscribers worldwide. MrBeast runs multiple channels in 11 different languages, but in an interview, he said that it would be much easier to maintain just one. It's also probably a plus that anybody clicking on a link shared by someone speaking another language will be able to understand it simply by changing the dubbed audio. 

After switching to their preferred language for the first time, the website will default to it whenever they watch videos with dubs. Viewers will also be able to search for content dubbed in their language, even if the video's primary tongue is different, through translated titles and descriptions. YouTube didn't say how it chose the thousands of creators getting access to the feature today, but we asked the website for an idea how it will roll out multi-language dubs until it's available to everyone. 

Early on in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, our hero Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) are warped into a quantum-level universe. It’s filled with alien biology and vistas that wouldn't be out of place on distant planets. But while that sounds like the perfect setup for a fun sci-fi romp, I never bought it. And, unfortunately, the actors didn't appear to buy it either. The backgrounds looked like psychedelic screensavers, and, similar to the Star Wars prequels, there was an uncanny disconnect between the live humans and their mostly digital surroundings.

I found the aesthetic so viscerally ugly, it made me fear for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and for anything else made with ILM's StageCraft technology (AKA “the volume”). That realization surprised me, since I've mostly enjoyed how that tech helped make The Mandalorian's unique worlds come alive. The volume is a series of enormous LED walls that can display real time footage. Together with interactive lighting, it makes actors seem like they’re actually walking around artificial environments. Another plus? It also helps the lighting look far more realistic, something that was particularly noticeable on Mando's polished armor.

So what the hell happened to Quantumania? Its artificiality seems partially intentional, as it's trying to evoke pulp fantasy and even a bit of Star Wars. But somewhere along the line, director Peyton Reed forgot to ground its fantastical visuals with anything resembling human emotion. When Ant-Man, his daughter, or their tiny-tech compatriots, Hank Pym (Michael Douglass) and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), enter the Quantum Realm, there's little room for awe and wonder. Sure, they occasionally quip about something weird: buildings that move! An alien intrigued by body holes! But we quickly move onto a rote sci-fi tale of rebellion against an evil conqueror (in this case it's Kang, played by Jonathan Majors.)

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, who calls the film “a cry for help,” succinctly describes why Quantumania falls flat: “The action is tired, the universe unconvincing, and nobody on screen looks like they want to be there. They don’t even look like they know where there is.”

Marvel

Clearly, we can't blame”the volume” for all of the film's faults, it's just another tool in a director's kit. In an interview with Collider, Reed said that he wasn't sure if the technology would work out for Quantumania, but eventually he found it to be "great for certain environments, but not necessarily right for other ones." He later added "There are limitations to it [the volume], and we push that system to its limit on this movie... What works so well in Mandalorian is they have a lot of lead time, because they're doing a whole series, to invest and create these environments, and on the schedule we were on, it's not always right for that situation."

Several anonymous VFX workers told Vulturethat Quantumania’s hectic production schedule was one reason its computer generated worlds fall so flat. The higher-profile Black Panther sequel, Wakanda Forever, was a higher priority for Marvel (no surprise when that first movie made over $1.3 billion globally) when it came to VFX work. And there were apparently late-stage changes to Quantumania that led to some rushed work – though it’s worth noting that isn’t unusual for a major Marvel film.

“Making big pivots late in the game has consequences, and there is a constant scramble from the VFX houses to keep up,” a former VFX worker told Engadget. (They requested anonymity due to confidentiality agreements around their work.] “And near the end, it's almost always a disaster. Lots of miracles. Lots of clever solutions, not based on heightening the art, but just being able to do a week’s worth of work in 24 hours.”

While watching Quantumania, I couldn't help but compare it to Avatar: The Way of Water, another big-budget science fiction epic that brings us to another alien, almost completely computer-generated world. That film goes even further than Ant-Man, since almost every scene involves actors playing CG Na’vi characters, one or two humans and elaborate sets. But I never once doubted the reality of The Way of Water.

You could tell that director James Cameron has actually been thinking about the world of Pandora for over a decade, so he has a strong vision of how the Na'vi are supposed to interact with their animal companions, or how a soulless corporation may view a pristine planet as a way to make more revenue. With Quantumania, there's no clear sense of why that sub-atomic universe is special, or why Kang may want to rule it. We might as well be watching a lesser Star Wars movie.

Marvel

Perhaps that's why the volume rubbed me the wrong way this time around. When you have a stronger grasp of character and story, as The Mandalorian (mostly) demonstrated, it can help to make the entire experience feel more epic. But if your narrative is dull and unfocused, the volume can easily heighten its flaws. There's room to do something truly special with the idea of a sub-atomic universe, the sort of thing screenwriter Jeff Loveness frequently did on Rick and Morty.

In the end, though, Quantumania feels like an episode of that show stretched out to two hours, and molded to fit the plot machinations of the MCU. Any enjoyment I had while watching it was instantly warped to the quantum realm when it was over.

Bloomberg sources claim Apple’s quest for no-prick blood glucose monitoring is now at a "proof-of-concept stage" and good enough that it could come to market once it's smaller. The technology, which uses lasers to gauge glucose concentration under the skin, was previously tabletop-sized but has reportedly advanced nearer to an iPhone-sized prototype.

It’s been in the works for a long time. In 2010, when Steve Jobs headed up Apple, the company bought blood glucose monitoring startup RareLight. But no-prick monitors are a challenge. In 2018, Alphabet's health subsidiary, Verily, scrapped plans for a smart contact lens that tried to track glucose using tears.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Spotify's new AI DJ will talk you through its recommendations

The DJ uses OpenAI to tell you about the songs it chooses for you.

Generative AI is absolutely everywhere right now, and that includes Spotify. Its latest feature, simply called DJ, kicks off a personalized selection of music playing that combines Spotify’s well-known personalization tools, like Discover Weekly, as well as the content that populates your home screen, all with some AI tricks. The feature rolls out today across Spotify Premium in the US and Canada.

Continue reading.

Notion's AI editor is now available to anyone who wants writing help

The company only began testing Notion AI late last year.

Last November, Notion, the popular note-taking app, began testing a built-in generative machine learning algorithm dubbed Notion AI. Now it’s ready for launch. Notion said anyone, including free users, can start using its AI-powered writing assistant. More than two million people signed up for the waitlist for the alpha version and, according to the company, most testers weren’t asking it to write blog posts and marketing emails from scratch. Instead, they were using it to refine their own writing. As a result, the company decided to “completely redesign” Notion AI to make it more “iterative and conversational.” The new version of the tool will generate follow-up prompts until you’re satisfied with its results.

Continue reading.

Twitter’s 2FA paywall is a good opportunity to upgrade your security practices

The platform could become less secure – but that doesn't mean you have to be.

Twitter announced plans to pull a popular method of two-factor authentication for non-paying customers last week. Starting March 20th, if you don’t want to pay $8 to $11 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription (hi, that’s me!), you’ll no longer be able to use text message authentication to get into your account. There are still some options to keep your account secure. Software-based authentication apps like Duo, Authy, Google Authenticator and the 2FA authenticator built into iPhones either send you a notification or, in the case of Twitter, generate a token to complete your login, or you can use hardware-based security keys that plug into devices. We walk you through the options if you want to stick around on Twitter.

Continue reading.

Uber puts a cute lil ride tracker on the iPhone lock screen

The app now supports iOS 16's Live Activities feature.

Uber

Uber has rolled out an update for its iPhone app that shows whether it's time to head out the door and meet the ride you ordered. You even get a cute car icon moving along to illustrate it. The company has launched support for Live Activities, an iOS 16 feature that puts real-time events from compatible apps on top of the lock screen and on the iPhone 14 Dynamic Island when your device is unlocked.

Continue reading.

Artifact, the personalized news curation app from Instagram's co-founders, no longer has a waitlist. The app is live in the Apple App Store in most English-speaking markets, as well as on Android. Starting today, you'll no longer need a phone number to use Artifact unless you want to create an account and move to a different device. 

In addition, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger's team has added more features, including a social element. There's now the option to upload your contacts to see if a certain article has gained traction with your friends. A badge will appear next to an article that's popular enough among your contacts.

Systrom told TechCrunch that you can't see which of your specific friends have read a story or how many. There's a threshold before the badge appears too, so you won't be able to just upload a single contact and use the feature to track what they're reading. These, apparently, are privacy considerations, but they overlook the fact that you'll need to upload your contacts' details to use it.

In another time, Artifact might have tapped into Twitter to see what the people you're following are reading (akin to the Top Articles feature for Blue subscribers). But with Elon Musk severely restricting Twitter's APIs, that may no longer be viable.

Eventually, Artifact will have a way for users to share and comment on articles in the app. The beta version already has a Discover feed of things people are sharing. Naturally, users can like and comment on those shared articles.

The app now has a stats feature that visualizes the categories you've been reading most often, as well as the publishers you've been reading the most. Artifact is grouping articles into more narrowly defined topics as well. Meanwhile, you can now indicate when you don't like an article or publisher and the app will show you less of that. It's possible to block publishers too.

I've been using Artifact for a few weeks and I'm enjoying it so far. Unsurprisingly, the suggestions have become more attuned to my tastes the more I use it and tell it what I don't want to see. It reminds me a bit of Facebook's old Paper app, my favorite thing Meta has built to date. Artifact doesn't have anything like the social graph of Facebook, but given that the Instagram guys are behind it, it's hard to bet against their new app finding success.

Generative AI is absolutelyeverywhererightnow, so it’s no surprise to see Spotify putting it to use in its latest feature, simply called “DJ.” It’s a new way to immediately start a personalized selection of music playing that combines Spotify’s well-known personalization tools that you can find in playlists like Discover Weekly as well as the content that populates your home screen with some AI tricks. I got early access to DJ and have been playing with it for the last day to see how Spotify’s latest take on personalized music works, but the feature is available as of today in beta for all premium subscribers in the US and Canada.

While Spotify has loads of personalized playlists for users, I’ve found that the app lacks a simple way to tell it to just play some music you like. On Apple Music, for example, I can ask Siri to play music I like and it’ll start a personalized radio station based on music I’ve played alongside some things it thinks I’ll enjoy but haven’t played before. It’s a reliable way to jump right into my collection. In the same vein, Spotify’s DJ pulls together a mix of songs you’re currently listening to, old favorites you might have forgotten, and new tunes that fit in with what it thinks you’ll like.

The AI twist to DJ comes in the form of a literal DJ, which speaks to you in an AI voice generated by Sonantic, a startup that Spotify bought last year with a focus on generating realistic speech. In this case, the DJ’s voice model was trained on the voice of a real human, Spotify’s own Head of Cultural Partnerships, Xavier “X” Jernigan. Jernigan hosted “The Get Up,” Spotify’s morning show that combined recorded segments with music tailored to your tastes.

The DJ’s voice is generated through AI, and so are the things it says to you. When you first kick off a DJ session, you’ll get a quick overview of what you might expect to hear. For example, the first time I started up DJ, “X” came on and told me that it was a DJ designed for music and that it knew what I liked and for starters it was going to play me some Jenny Lewis. Sure enough, Lewis’s “Do Si Do” kicked things off, along with a few other songs with a similar vibe. At the top of the now playing screen, you’ll see a little info on how the song was picked, like “based on recent listening,” “throwbacks,” “recommended for you” or “from your past.”

Once you start a segment, you’ll generally hear a handful of songs that fit into the category, but if you want to change things up you can just tap the DJ button in the lower right corner of the now playing screen. At that point, X the DJ pops back up to give you some info about what’s coming up next. When I just tapped it, X said, “OK, changing it up. Here are our editor’s picks for the best in hard rock this week, starting with Motionless In White.”

Spotify says that none of the dialog you hear from X is pre-recorded; it’s all generated on the fly by OpenAI. However, the company wanted to make it clear that it looks at generative AI as a tool for its music editors, not something that it is just trusting to get everything right. Spotify’s VP of personalization Ziad Sultan told Engadget in a product demo that the company put together a “writers room” of script writers, music editors, data curators and engineers, all of whom are working together to make sure that the bits of info that the AI DJ drops are useful, accurate and relevant to the music you’re hearing.

Sultan stressed that Spotify’s usage was a lot different than implementations like free-form text, image generation and other such AI use cases. “We’ve built a very specific use case, and we’ve made a few choices about how it’ll be implemented,” he said. “The most important one is the creation of that writer’s room – we’re taking this [AI] tool and putting it into the hands of music experts.”

What’ll make Spotify’s DJ work or fail is whether it can pull up music you want to hear. From that perspective, Spotify isn’t doing anything wildly different than it already does: analyzing your listening history and finding stuff it knows you like and things it thinks you’ll enjoy. And as with everything else you do on Spotify, your DJ usage will be analyzed so that it can get better at serving you tunes you want to listen to. At the beginning, anyway, the AI DJ aspects are being used as small augmentations to a personalized music channel – and as long as Spotify can continue to know what songs you love and which ones you’re likely to fall in love with, DJ should be a useful addition.

Fake news can travel fast on Twitter when amplified by likes and retweets, but now you'll be alerted if you've been an accessory to one of those lies. Starting today, you'll be notified if a tweet you've liked, replied to or retweeted receives a Community Note showing possible misinformation, the company said in a tweet spotted by TechCrunch. 

"Starting today, you’ll get a heads up if a Community Note starts showing on a Tweet you’ve replied to, Liked or Retweeted. This helps give people extra context that they might otherwise miss," Twitter's Community Notes account tweeted. CEO Elon Musk lauded the effort in a quote tweet, calling Community Notes a "game changer for combating wrong information." 

Community Notes launched in 2021 as Birdwatch, a "community-driven approach" that crowdsources fact checks directly from other Twitter users. Twitter now relies on it more than ever, though, as it has laid off a large number of content moderators. Notes are viewable by all users across the globe, but only people from the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand can contribute them at the moment. 

Since they're crowdsourced, Community Notes are far from reliable. In a recent example, a researcher investigating Twitter Blue noted that a number of high-profile accounts including Tesla had halted their subscriptions to the service. A Community Note insisted that was wrong, because Tesla was already a verified business, so it couldn't also be subscribed to Twitter Blue. However, Twitter's own data via its official API showed that Tesla did indeed unsubscribe from Twitter Blue, and the Community Note was subsequently removed. 

Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal with NVIDIA to bring Xbox games to the GeForce Now streaming service. The company's president, Brad Smith, made the announcement at a press conference in Brussels, where he, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan, Activision Blizzard head Bobby Kotick and other prominent figures attended a European Commission hearing over Microsoft's proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard.

Smith said that, if the deal goes through, Activision Blizzard games like the Call of Duty series will be available on GeForce Now as well. The publisher removed its titles from the cloud gaming service in 2020. Smith's GeForce Now announcement came hours after he confirmed that Microsoft will bring Xbox games to Nintendo platforms under a binding 10-year deal — and Activision Blizzard titles if the acquisition closes. NVIDIA is now supporting the Activision Blizzard deal, Smith said.

“Xbox remains committed to giving people more choice and finding ways to expand how people play,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said in a statement. “This partnership will help grow NVIDIA’s catalog of titles to include games like Call of Duty, while giving developers more ways to offer streaming games. We are excited to offer gamers more ways to play the games they love.”

Users will need to buy copies of games from the Xbox PC, Steam or Epic Games stores to play them on GeForce Now. It's not clear when Xbox games will be available to stream through the service, which has more than more than 25 million users. However, NVIDIA said it and Microsoft "will begin work immediately to integrate Xbox PC games into GeForce Now."

The agreement will afford players another way to stream Microsoft's games from the cloud almost anywhere that they have a sturdy enough internet connection. Currently, Xbox Cloud Gaming (which requires a Game Pass Ultimate subscription) is the main way to do that. The NVIDIA deal is an attempt by Microsoft to placate regulators' concerns over the Activision takeover by showing that Xbox Cloud Gaming won't be the only exclusive way to stream its games.

Earlier this month, the UK's competition regulator said that the proposed $68.7 billion Activision acquisition could result in a "substantial lessening of competition in gaming consoles" and "harm UK gamers." The Competition and Markets Authority found that Microsoft already had a 60-70 percent share of the cloud gaming market and that, should the deal go through, it would "reinforce this strong position." In December, the US Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger.