YouTube Music is moving into podcasts. YouTube proper hosts video versions of many podcasts, some of which accrue hundreds of thousands or even millions of views per episode. The audio service hasn't ventured into podcast territory just yet, but that's about to change, YouTube's podcast chief Kai Chuk announced at the Hot Pod Summit on Thursday.
"We will soon start to bring both audio and video-first podcasts to YouTube Music for users in the US, making podcasts more discoverable and accessible, with more regions to come," a YouTube spokesperson told Engadget. "This will help make the podcasts that users already love on YouTube, available in all the places they want to listen."
YouTube is focused on unifying the audio and video experience for the audience.
Start watching a podcast at home, listen during your commute (maybe finish watching at work).
Podcast creation tools are coming to YouTube Studio and, later this year, it'll be possible for creators to add audio podcasts to YouTube via RSS feeds. "Podcast playlists will be eligible for current and upcoming podcast features on YouTube, such as eligibility for youtube.com/podcasts, podcast badging and inclusion in the YouTube Music app," the spokesperson said.
Background podcast listening will be available for free, according to TechCrunch. However, there will be ads unless you subscribe to YouTube Music. It also seems that users will be able to switch between video and audio versions of podcast episodes.
At least for now, it doesn't seem that YouTube is planning to follow the likes of Spotify and Amazon by having exclusive and/or original podcasts. Whether YouTube Music can make a dent in Spotify and Apple's share of the market remains to be seen, but by blending audio and video podcasts together and taking advantage of YouTube's enormous reach, it can certainly make a play for listeners' attention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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. pic.twitter.com/LIcGgl2zdJ
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.
Almost every music streaming service on the market offers a radio feature, allowing you to create an automatically generated playlist around a song or artist you love. For the most part, however, those features don’t offer a lot of flexibility. You pick a single song or artist and the platform does the rest – as is the case with Spotify and Apple Music.
Google has begun rolling out a redesigned radio feature on YouTube Music the company claims provides users with a lot more control over their listening experience. Among the new features the refreshed experience includes is the ability to pick up to 30 artists when creating your own radio station. You can also decide how frequently those artists repeat and apply filters that change the mood of the resulting playlist. For instance, a few of the selections include “chill,” “downbeat” and “pump-up.”
It’s also possible to adjust the parameters you set after creating a station by tapping the “Tune” option that appears at the bottom of the interface once you’re listening to your new playlist. Naturally, you can save the station to revisit it later. Once the new experience is available on your device, you will see a prompt in the main interface that says “Create a radio.” As with many of Google’s rollouts, it may take some time before you see the feature on your client.
On its own, it’s fair to say the feature won’t be enough to convince some to ditch Spotify and Apple Music for YouTube Music, but if you’re among the 50 million subscribers Google says has access to the service, it may prompt you to use it more frequently or convert the free trial you got with your phone into a paid subscription.
Hey, if Twitter is making money from it, why not? Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced its own Twitter Blue-like subscription called Meta Verified on Sunday morning. Mark Zuckerberg took to his newly launched broadcast channel to share the news, saying the subscription service would give users a blue badge, additional impersonation protection and direct access to customer support. Meta plans to test the subscription first in Australia and New Zealand before rolling it out to other countries. When Meta Verified does come to the US, it will cost $15 per month through the company's apps on iOS and Android. On the web, where app store commissions don't apply, the service will be $12 per month.
The company told Engadget the subscription will only be available to users 18 years or older. Meta will also require a government-issued ID that matches the Facebook or Instagram account’s profile name and photo. Once you're verified, you’re locked in to that profile name, username, date of birth and photo. If you want to change, you’ll have to go through the verification process again.
The blue tick on Twitter does come with the cringe-inducing text of: “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue.” (And you know I click to check.) Will Meta take a similar approach? And can we stop our egos from chasing that Instagram blue tick? And by “we,” I mean… me.
– Mat Smith
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While tablets don’t always get the same level of attention as smartphones or laptops – landing right in the middle in size and specs – they’ve become an increasingly important device for many, particularly with the shift to working and learning from home. There are a lot of options, so it can be difficult to pick the right one. We’ve done a bunch of the hard work for you, and we’ve got our top picks across a range of categories and prices, smartly timed after the release of the latest slates from both Apple and Samsung.
Viz Media has put a lot of free anime up on its YouTube channel.
Viz Media has uploaded some of the most well-known anime series to YouTube, for free. You can watch Sailor Moon – the old series that aired in the ‘90s – Naruto, Death Note, Inuyasha, Hunter X Hunter and others on the publisher's account. Viz has organized the episodes into playlists. However, you’ll have to be in the correct region (North America, it seems) to get access. No free anime for us Brits at the moment.
The company will test the feature on Messenger and Facebook as well.
Meta has set its sights on copying a new messaging app: Telegram. Mark Zuckerberg just showed off “broadcast channels,” a new Instagram feature that brings one-way messaging to the app. The company is testing the feature with a handful of creators and plans to bring the Telegram-like functionality to Facebook and Messenger as well. Broadcast channels allow creators to stream updates to their followers’ inboxes, much like channels on Telegram. Those who join the channels can react to messages and vote in polls, but can’t participate in the conversation directly.
He plugged EthereumMax on Twitter without disclosing payments he received.
NBA Hall of Famer Paul “The Truth” Pierce agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission over a cryptocurrency he promoted on Twitter. The government agency found Pierce violated anti-touting and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws. Pierce’s case echoes Kim Kardashian’s $1.26 million settlement in October for plugging the same currency. Pierce and Kardashian were also sued last year for their involvement in the scheme.
The rumors were true: Facebook parent company Meta is preparing to launch a Twitter Blue-like subscription called Meta Verified. On Sunday morning, Mark Zuckerberg took to his newly launched broadcast channel to share the news. He said the subscription service would give users a blue badge, additional impersonation protection and direct access to customer support. "This feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services," Zuckerberg said, adding Meta would test the subscription first in Australia and New Zealand before rolling it out to other countries. Meta Verified will cost $15 per month when users subscribe through the company's apps on iOS. On the web, where Apple's up to 30 percent commission on in-app purchases doesn't apply, the service will cost $12 per month. The subscription will cover both Instagram and Facebook accounts.
12 bucks a month to be verified on Facebook... I wonder if people will keep that same Twitter Blue outrage energy 😅 pic.twitter.com/ZPJsIHBerO
Rumors that Meta was preparing to trial a paid verification service started to swirl at the beginning of February when reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi discovered code referencing "paid blue badge" and "identity verification."
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has announced that she's stepping down from the helm of the streaming video service. Wojcicki, who joined Alphabet nearly 25 years ago, said she's starting "a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about."
In her farewell letter, Wojcicki said Neal Mohan is taking over as the new chief. Mohan arrived at the company when Google bought DoubleClick in 2007. He went on to become YouTube's Chief Product Officer in 2015 and helped to launch YouTube TV, YouTube Music, Premium and Shorts. Mohan has also led the service's trust and safety team.
Intriguingly, Wojcicki wrote that Mohan will be senior vice-president and head of YouTube, rather than CEO. "With all we’re doing across Shorts, streaming and subscriptions, together with the promises of AI, YouTube’s most exciting opportunities are ahead, and Neal is the right person to lead us," Wojcicki said.
She won't be leaving YouTube immediately. "In the short term, I plan to support Neal and help with the transition, which will include continuing to work with some YouTube teams, coaching team members, and meeting with creators," she wrote. Wojcicki will still be involved with the company after that as she'll serve as an advisor to Google and Alphabet. "This will allow me to call on my different experiences over the years to offer counsel and guidance across Google and the portfolio of Alphabet companies," she noted.
Wojcicki has been involved with Google practically since the beginning. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set up office in her parents' garage soon after they incorporated Google in 1998. Wojcicki became Google's first marketing manager the following year and played a role in the earliest Google Doodles. In 2006, she encouraged Google to buy YouTube, which launched a year earlier.
Great news everyone, we’re pivoting to chatbots! Little did OpenAI realize when it released ChatGPT last November that the advanced LLM (large language model) designed to uncannily mimic human writing would become the fastest growing app to date with more than 100 million users signing up over the past three months. Its success — helped along by a $10 billion, multi-year investment from Microsoft — largely caught the company’s competition flat-footed, in turn spurring a frenetic and frantic response from Google, Baidu and Alibaba. But as these enhanced search engines come online in the coming days, the ways and whys of how we search are sure to evolve alongside them.
“I'm pretty excited about the technology. You know, we've been building NLP systems for a while and we've been looking every year at incremental growth,” Dr. Sameer Singh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), told Engadget. “For the public, it seems like suddenly out of the blue, that's where we are. I've seen things getting better over the years and it's good for all of this stuff to be available everywhere and for people to be using it.”
As to the recent public success of large language models, “I think it's partly that technology has gotten to a place where it's not completely embarrassing to put the output of these models in front of people — and it does look really good most of the time,” Singh continued. “I think that that’s good enough.”
JASON REDMOND via Getty Images
“I think it has less to do with technology but more to do with the public perception,” he continued. “If GPT hadn't been released publicly… Once something like that is out there and it's really resonating with so many people, the usage is off the charts.”
Search providers have big, big ideas for how the artificial intelligence-enhanced web crawlers and search engines might work and damned if they aren’t going to break stuff and move fast to get there. Microsoft envisions its Bing AI to serve as the user’s “copilot” in their web browsing, following them from page to page answering questions and even writing social media posts on their behalf.
This is a fundamental change from the process we use today. Depending on the complexity of the question users may have to visit multiple websites, then sift through that collected information and stitch it together into a cohesive idea before evaluating it.
“That's more work than having a model that hopefully has read these pages already and can synthesize this into something that doesn't currently exist on the web,” Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at NYU Tandon, told Engadget. “The information is still out there. It's still verifiable, and hopefully correct. But it's not all in place.”
For its part, Google’s vision of the AI-powered future has users hanging around its search page rather than clicking through to destination sites. Information relevant to the user’s query would be collected from the web, stitched together by the language model, then regurgitated as an answer with reference to the originating website displayed as footnotes.
This all sounds great, and was all going great, right up to the very first opportunity for something to go wrong. When it did. In its inaugural Twitter ad — less than 24 hours after debuting — Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, confidently declared, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.” You will be shocked to learn that the James Webb Space Telescope did not, in fact, discover the first exoplanet in history. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope holds that honor from 2004. Bard just sorta made it up. Hallucinated it out of the digital ether.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
Of course this isn’t the first time that we’ve been lied to by machines. Search has always been a bit of a crapshoot, ever since the early days of Lycos and Altavista. “When search was released, we thought it was ‘good enough’ though it wasn't perfect,” Singh recalled. “It would give all kinds of results. Over time, those have improved a lot. We played with it, and we realized when we should trust it and when we shouldn’t — when we should go to the second page of results, and when we shouldn't.”
The subsequent generation of voice AI assistants evolved through the same base issues that their text-based predecessors did. “When Siri and Google Assistant and all of these came out and Alexa,” Singh said, “they were not the assistants that they were being sold to us as.”
The performance of today’s LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT, are likely to improve along similar paths through their public use, as well as through further specialization into specific technical and knowledge-based roles such as medicine, business analysis and law. “I think there are definitely reasons it becomes much better once you start specializing it. I don't think Google and Microsoft specifically are going to be specializing it too much — their market is as general as possible,” Singh noted.
In many ways, what Google and Bing are offering by interposing their services in front of the wider internet — much as AOL did with the America Online service in the ‘90s — is a logical conclusion to the challenges facing today’s internet users.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
“Nobody's doing the search as the end goal. We are seeking some information, eventually to act on that information,” Singh argues. “If we think about that as the role of search, and not just search in the literal sense of literally searching for something, you can imagine something that actually acts on top of search results can be very useful.”
Singh characterizes this centralization of power as, “a very valid concern. Simply put, if you have these chat capabilities, you are much less inclined to actually go to the websites where this information resides,” he said.
It’s bad enough that chatbots have a habit of making broad intellectual leaps in their summarizations, but the practice may also “incentivize users not go to the website, not read the whole source, to just get the version that the chat interface gives you and sort of start relying on it more and more,” Singh warned.
In this, Singh and Dolan-Gavitt agree. “If you’re cannibalizing from the visits that a site would have gotten, and are no longer directing people there, but using the same information, there's an argument that these sites won't have much incentive to keep posting new content.” Dolan-Gavitt told Engadget. “On the other hand the need for clicks also is one of the reasons we get lots of spam and is one of the reasons why search has sort of become less useful recently. I think [the shortcomings of search are] a big part of why people are responding more positively to these chatbot products.”
That demand, combined with a nascent marketplace, is resulting in a scramble among the industry’s major players to get their products out yesterday, ready or not, underwhelming or not. That rush for market share is decidedly hazardous for consumers. Microsoft’s previous foray into AI chatbots, 2014’s Taye, ended poorly (to put it without the white hoods and goose stepping). Today, Redditors are already jailbreaking OpenAI to generate racist content. These are two of the more innocuous challenges we will face as LLMs expand in use but even they have proven difficult to stamp out in part, because they require coordination amongst an industry of viscous competitors.
“The kinds of things that I tend to worry about are, on the software side, whether this puts malicious capabilities into more hands, makes it easier for people to write malware and viruses,” Dolan-Gavitt said. “This is not as extreme as things like misinformation but certainly, I think it'll make it a lot easier for people to make spam.”
“A lot of the thinking around safety so far has been predicated on this idea that there would be just a couple kinds of central companies that, if you could get them all to agree, we could have some safety standards.” Dolan-Gavitt continued. “I think the more competition there is, the more you get this open environment where you can download an unrestricted model, set it up on your server and have it generate whatever you want. The kinds of approaches that relied on this more centralized model will start to fall apart.”
