🔊 Alexa Is Finally Catching Up

🔊 You Can Now Have Near-Human-Like Conversations with Alexa

After 10 long years of robotic voice, Alexa is finally getting a makeover.

Now she can talk to you more naturally, has the ability to answer a wider range of questions, and is even capable of composing and reciting poems.

Since its introduction in 2014, Amazon has been trying to figure out how to make Alexa profitable. With these updates, they’re hoping to make Alexa more competitive with chatbots like Google’s Bard.

Amazon has also unveiled a bunch of new devices. One of them is the Echo Hub, a wall-mounted touchscreen priced at $180, designed to control all your home gadgets.

They’ve also updated the Echo Frames eyeglasses with embedded Alexa and refreshed versions of its Blink outdoor security cameras and Eero Wi-Fi extenders.

👩‍💻 Natural Language as a New Universal Programming Language

Three months ago, GitHub’s Copilot Chat was only available to organizations with a Copilot for Business subscription.

But now, they’ve opened up the beta version to all current GitHub Copilot for Individual subscribers in Visual Studio and VS Code as a free addition to the existing $10/month subscription.

Copilot Chat lives in a sidebar of your IDE. You can chat about coding in general, or get down to business and ask about the code you’re currently working on.

It can suggest best practices, offer solutions tailored to the code being worked on, and assist with code analysis and security issues.

But GitHub’s vision doesn’t stop there.

They’re aiming to make natural language a universal programming language.

They believe that integrating Copilot Chat with GitHub Copilot will cut down on boilerplate work and take your software development experience to new heights.

🎮 Fortnite Refund $245 Million to Parents

Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, will refund US parents whose kids made in-game purchases without their knowledge.

This decision comes after the US regulator accused the game of tricking players into making unintended purchases and breaking privacy rules.

Epic Games has agreed to pay a whopping $245m in refunds and a $275m fine for data collection practices.

Now, the FTC is on a mission, reaching out to 37 million people about the compensation. The refunds apply to purchases made between January 2017 and September 2022.

Epic Games is also introducing new measures to prevent these surprise purchases from happening again. They’re adding parental controls and setting spending limits for players under 13.

⚡ 3 Cool Tools

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