Hold the phone: Do you love talking to robots on the phone? Have I got good news for you! Yelp’s rolling out two talking bots. A Host AI for restaurant bookings and Receptionist for business calls. They’ll handle everything from wait lists to “do you take dogs?” for about $99 a month per restaurant. Next up, a suggested 25% tip.
It’s a sign: A Kenyan engineer built what’s basically Google Translate for sign language. His app, Terp 360, listens to speech and uses AI-powered 3D avatars to sign in real time. It’s built with motion-capture tech (sensors track actual signers’ movements), and it already knows thousands of words. I’ve always wanted to learn ASL.
🔫 Artificial unintelligence: After football practice, a Maryland teen got swarmed by armed police because an AI gun detector thought his Doritos bag was a pistol. In other words, a weapon of nacho destruction. Turns out, the system flagged the way he held the bag as “gun-like.” The teen was cuffed, searched and cleared. Put your hands up and the chips where I can see them!
AWS eats its own: Here’s the cloud tea, Amazon says this week’s massive AWS outage wasn’t a hack but a software glitch so bad it fought itself. That’s right, a mini-tech civil war. Two automation systems tried to update network records at once and triggered a global domino crash. A chunk of the internet went briefly offline, even some people’s smart beds.
♣️ Hackers, hustlers and high rollers: This is nuts. The feds unsealed an indictment straight out of Ocean’s Eleven, full of poker tables with hidden cameras, hacked Deckmate shufflers, even contact lenses that read cards. 30+ people, including the NBA’s Chauncey Billups, Damon Jones and Terry Rozier, were charged in a $7 million poker scam tied to Mafia families. Maybe your uncle blaming the game for being “rigged” was actually onto something. But also, maybe he’s just bad at poker.
GM’s hands-free future: Are you tired of driving? GM’s 2028 Cadillac Escalade IQ wants to let you fully check out, literally. The next-gen Super Cruise drives itself (on approved highways) with lidar, radar and cameras, and the dash glows turquoise when it’s safe to let auto drive take over. Oh, and Google’s Gemini AI will chat with you, because silence is awkward.
💻 Delete this now: If you see ads or blogs pitching the “Universe Browser” as the fastest and safest one ever, don’t fall for it. Researchers found it secretly routes your data to China, logs keystrokes and installs hidden programs. They probably should have called it “Internet Exploiter.” Millions downloaded it, thinking it was legit. If you’re one of them, I hate to say it, but you need to wipe your system and reinstall the OS. This thing digs in deep.
Lunatics, start your remotes: Amazon relaunched Luna, its cloud service that streams games over the internet. You’ve got it for free if you have Prime. Sign in on your phones, and play against each other on the TV. It’s finally time to settle the score with your aunt.
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📦 Surprise package season: It’s not your lucky day. USPS says if you get a random package this holiday, don’t celebrate too fast. It’s probably a “brushing” scam, where fake sellers send cheap stuff to your address so they can post bogus “verified buyer” reviews. Basically, you’re an unwitting five-star accomplice.