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 Apple on Wednesday updated the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro with its next-generation M5 chip, but previous rumors have indicated that the company still plans to announce at least a few additional products before the end of the year.
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In the months ahead, the company will add AI-powered voice search for its smart TVs and streaming players. While Roku's existing voice search can find specific programs, actors, or genres, the upgrade will allow for more conversational queries, such as "What's the Barbie movie about?" or "How scary is The Shining." It will also support follow-up questions.
Other forthcoming Roku features include a "What do you like to watch?" feature to tweak Roku's home screen recommendations, live scores in the Sports section, and a search function in Roku's live TV guide. Roku is also updating its recently-launched Streaming Stick and Streaming Stick Plus to support private listening through Bluetooth headphones and earbuds.
TV-focused AI
Unlike rivals Amazon and Google, Roku isn't trying to launch an all-purpose AI that also happens to work on TVs. Roku doesn't sell its own smart speakers, and users primarily interact with voice control through the mic button on Roku remotes. The new AI-powered assistant will only respond to entertainment-related queries, Roku says.
"Even in this case, with us evolving Roku voice to now answer entertainment Q&A, we are specializing in a TV-related solution only," Amit Desai, Roku's director of product and UX for voice and conversational AI, told reporters. He added that the feature will use a combination of in-house and commercial AI technology.
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That's where we come in.
We've actually tried out every laptop on this list ourselves, so they're real recommendations based on hands-on experience.
PROMOTION
PLAY TO DIFFER
Meet the GIGABYTE AERO X16, the one notebook that does it all. Powered by the latest AMD Ryzen processors and NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 50 Series GPUs, this laptop is perfectly designed to game, create, or simply entertain on the go.
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Why you should trust us: It's in our name! PCWorld prides itself on laptop experience and expertise. We've been covering PCs since 1983, and we now review more than 70 laptops every year. All of the picks below have been personally tested and vetted by our experts, who've applied not only performance benchmarks but rigorous usability standards. We're also committed to r
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The 12-core version of the Panther Lake iGPU is obviously the one to watch, jumping core count over Lunar Lake by 50 percent and giving a huge graphics boost to thin-and-light laptops (and possibly even PC gaming handhelds, currently dominated by AMD's Ryzen Z series). In addition to the usual power boost that newer chips get, the Xe3 series is getting new intelligent bias control powers for more game-specific resource management, x3 and x4 frame generation for all games that support XeSS 2, and a handful of other optimizations.
Tom's a great guest—whom you might recognize from The Full Nerd podcast—but unfortunately he couldn't get specific on that new In
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The Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court's ruling that Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard did not violate antitrust laws. The Federal Trade Commission had sued to block the merger of these large gaming brands on claims that the new entity would fall afoul of antitrust laws. In the court's ruling, released today, the FTC failed to prove that Microsoft would have blocked access to popular titles such as Call of Duty on hardware owned by other gaming brands. The appeals court was also unswayed by the FTC's arguments that the deal would have lessened competition in gaming subscription services and cloud streaming.
The issue of platform-exclusive titles was one of the core tenets of the FTC's latest charge against this acquisition. However, the opinion written by Judge Daniel P. Collins observed that "all major manufacturers have engaged in this practice." And as Microsoft has been making more and more of its once-exclusive titles available on new hardware, this may mean that the competition agency will finally accept the deal as done.
The $68.7 billion deal for Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard closed in
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