Tech Roundup: Google Gemini Robotics, Perplexity Comet & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Apple makes a Wi-Fi Aware framework available to developers with iOS 26, allowing for App Store apps to offer peer-to-peer connections between Wi-Fi devices, without an internet connection or access point; introduces Recovery Assistant, a feature that allows users to restore malfunctioning iPhones without requiring a Mac or PC.
• Microsoft unveils Mu, an on-device small language model used in Copilot+ PCs, that maps natural language queries in the Settings app to function calls; says it is testing a new aggregated gaming library that integrates multiple storefronts in the Xbox PC app for Windows 11 with Xbox Insiders.
• Google launches AI mode in Search, its Q&A-style search tool, to users in India via Search Labs; unveils new Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 with up to 17 hours of battery life, support for Dolby Atmos, and AI features that allows users to "identify and get information about anything on your screen," capture text, create images on demand, and summarise information.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says it has provisionally found Google meets the legal tests to designate it with "strategic market status" in general search and search advertising; plans to require choice screens to help people easily select and switch between search services, including AI assistants, and give publishers more control over how their content collected for search is used for AI-generated responses and search results.
• The Linux Foundation unveils the Agent2Agent Project, with founding members including Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft, after Google donates the protocol specification and SDK.
• Apple joins China's national subsidy scheme to lift sales amid heightened competition from major domestic rivals, allowing consumers in Beijing and Shanghai to avail discounts of up to US$ 278 on select models; works on adding Android support in Swift, a coding language developed by Apple.
• Google finally lets Android users move Chrome's address bar to the bottom of the screen, years after a similar change was rolled out in iOS in 2023; makes available Imagen 4, the company's state-of-the-art text-to-image model, for free in AI Studio.
• Chainlink and Mastercard announce a partnership to enable card users to buy crypto "directly onchain through a secure fiat-to-crypto conversion."
• Microsoft makes Windows 10's extended security updates free for an extra year for users who sync PC settings via a Microsoft Account and the Windows Backup app.
• Google's DeepMind releases a new Gemini Robotics on-device model that enables robots to perform complex tasks locally without internet connectivity, and says the vision language action model can adapt to new tasks in 50 to 100 demonstrations; unveils AlphaGenome, an AI tool to predict the effects of DNA changes on molecular processes and fully releases Gemma 3n, an open-source, multimodal AI model that can run on as little as 2GB of memory.
• A U.S. judge rules Anthropic's use of legally purchased copyrighted books to train AI is fair use and transformative, but its decision to store pirated books in a central library used for training was not, a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. (In a similar development, Meta won a copyright case involving the company's Llama artificial intelligence model, stating the complainants failed to produce evidence that the illegal copying of protected works caused them harm. However, Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model.)
• Microsoft and Meta unveil the US $ 399 Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition, a bundle with the $299 Meta Quest 3S in a new colour.
• Google rolls out historical Street View imagery on Google Earth as the service turns 20; says pro U.S. users can access AI insights, like tree canopy coverage; partners with the Earth Fire Alliance and Muon Space's FireSat to launch 52 satellites by 2029 to detect wildfires globally and make the data accessible.
• Google launches Gemini CLI, an open-source agentic AI tool that lets developers make natural language requests in terminals by connecting Gemini models to local codebases; debuts unveiled its latest text-to-image model Imagen 4 with "significantly improved text rendering" over the previous version and makes generally available a revamped version of Colab with AI-powered features.
• Anthropic lets Claude app users build, host and share AI-powered apps directly in Claude via Artifacts.
• Amazon-owned Ring rolls out an AI-powered beta feature called Video Descriptions that generates text summaries of motion activity from its doorbells and cameras.
• Google's YouTube raises the minimum age required for its users to live stream to 16; says "live streams featuring 13 to 15-year-olds who are not visibly accompanied by an adult may have their live chat disabled and the account may temporarily lose access to live chat or other features"; launches an AI Overviews-like carousel for searches related to shopping, places, and things to do in a specific place, for Premium users in the U.S.
• Mozilla discontinues work on DeepSpeech, an "open-source, embedded (offline, on-device) speech-to-text engine which can run in real time on devices ranging from a Raspberry Pi 4 to high power GPU servers."
• Getty Images drops its primary claims of copyright infringement against Stability AI in a London court likely due to the company failing to establish that the images produced by the models reflects a significant portion of the images taken by photographers.
• Anthropic releases preliminary results showing users who discuss emotional issues with its Claude chatbot tend to grow more positive as conversations progress.
• Amazon launches at-home diagnostic services in six Indian cities in partnership with Orange Health Labs, marking its entry into India's diagnostics market.
• Apple overhauls E.U. App Store to comply withthe E.U. Digital Markets Act; allows developers to push offers and alternative payments, swaps the Core Technology Fee in favour of a tiered commission-based structure.
• Microsoft plans to replace the Blue Screen of Death in Windows 11 with a simplified black screen "providing better information" in an update "later this summer."
• Google launches Doppl, an experimental AI app that lets users virtually try on outfits by generating videos from photos, for Android and iOS in the U.S.; updates Ask Photos feature in Google Photos with faster responses.
• Brazil's supreme court rules that platforms like Facebook and X can be held liable for user posts, requiring them to remove content even without a court order.
• Google gets banned from selling the Pixel 7 phone in Japan due to a patent dispute related to 4G connectivity; adds a new Manage subscriptions view in Gmail to declutter the inbox of spam and unsubscribe from newsletters.
• Germany's data protection watchdog deems DeepSeek as illegal after it is unable to address data security concerns, and asks Apple and Google to block it from their app stores; comes as Denmark plans to clamp down on AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to give its citizens rights to their own body, facial features and voice.
• Meta-owned Threads debuts a new Hidden Words setting that allows users to "block words, phrases, and emojis in batches, with optional time limits," as the service continues to decouple itself from Instagram; adds the ability for Instagram users to listen to previews of songs shared from Spotify to Stories.
• Google says says YouTube Shorts are now racking up an eye-watering 200 billion views every day, up from 70 billion daily views in March 2024; reveals users are watching over 1 billion hours of YouTube on their TVs.
• ByteDance's TikTok test a new messaging tool called "bulletin boards" that allows brands and creators share public, one-to-many messages to their followers, similar to Instagram's broadcast channels feature that launched in 2023.
• Apple faces criticism for serving ads in its Wallet, Sports, Apple TV, App Store, Fitness+ and Maps apps to promote the movie F1 (the company is one of the studios that has produced it) and for limiting the ability to send such "ads" only in iOS 26.
• Walmart's Flipkart says about 200 million Indian users engaged with social videos and livestreams promoting products on the platform in H1 2025, up from 75M a year ago.
• Apple plans to delay rolling out some iOS 26 features in the E.U. later this year, including "visited places" in Apple Maps, citing the difficulty of complying with the Digital Markets Act.
• Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri in a move aimed at turning around its own flailing AI efforts, according to a report from Bloomberg.
• An AI-generated band named The Velvet Sundown amasses more than 1.3 million listeners on Spotify with a "Verified Artist" label; claims their "sound mixes textures of '70s psychedelic alt-rock and folk rock, yet it blends effortlessly with modern alt-pop and indie structures." (The band's Spotify bio has been revised to clarify that it's a "synthetic music project" and an "ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.")
• Swiss company Proton files an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of violating U.S. antitrust law; says "Apple's monopoly control of software distribution on iOS devices presents a myriad of problems for consumers, businesses, and society as a whole." (The development comes as a U.S. judge denies Apple's motion to dismiss the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit, filed in March 2024, accusing Apple of unlawfully dominating the U.S. smartphone market.)
• Meta restructures the company's AI efforts to centre around building AI superintelligence under a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, as the company poaches hires AI talent from rivals Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI.
• Russian internet service providers restrict access to websites protected by Cloudflare starting June 9, 2025; Cloudflare says "the action is outside of Cloudflare's control and we are unable, at this time, to restore reliable, high performance access to Cloudflare products and protected websites for Russian users in a lawful manner."
• Nothing unveils the US$ 799 Phone 3, with a 6.7" AMOLED display, Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip, three 50MP rear cameras, and the US$ 299 Headphone 1.
• X announces plans to publish Community Notes written by AI agents and allow developers to submit their own "fact-checking" AI agents for review.
• Meta's WhatsApp expands voice calls to large businesses and explores AI-powered product recommendations for merchants' sites; launches DMs in Threads for users aged 18 and older without support for encryption, and announces a "highlighter" feature to emphasise trending topics.
• Grammarly acquires email startup Superhuman as part of a push to diversify and build an AI productivity suite.
• Apple sues Di Liu, a former senior product designer for the Vision Pro, for allegedly stealing a "massive volume" of its trade secrets to take to Snap.
• Cloudflare takes on AI crawlers with a new "Pay per Crawl" marketplace that lets sites charge AI crawlers per crawl; to block AI crawlers by default on new sites using Cloudflare.
• China's Huawei open-sources two of its AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market, following a trend set by DeepSeek and other Chinese companies like Baidu that have pursued an open-source development strategy in a bid to expand overseas; to also open-source its self-developed programming language Cangjie to rival Java and Swift and develop apps on Android and Apple iOS.
• Automattic confirms that the company is no longer working on migrating its Tumblr blogging platform to WordPress.
• Google tests the ability for users to edit RCS messages that have been sent to iPhones from Android devices, as it continues to push for RCS messaging to become the de facto messaging standard.
• Google releases its Veo 3 video generation model to all Pro subscribers in more than 159 countries, with a cap of three videos per day; makes available Gems in the side panel of Google Workspace apps and opens its NotebookLM AI tools to students under 18.
• Apple faces new legal setback after it's ordered to pay US$ 110.7 million to Spanish company TOT Power Control by a U.S. court for infringing on its 3G wireless patents; come under renewed scrutiny in Brazil, as the country's competition regulator officially recommends sanctions against Apple over its App Store rules and restrictions on third-party access to iPhone features, including near-field communication (NFC) technology.
• Denmark proposes new legislation that aims to tackle the issue of AI-generated deepfakes by granting citizens property rights over their likeness and voice; allows people who find that their features have been used to create a deepfake would have the right to ask the platforms that host the content to take it down.
• Google gets fined US$ 314 million for collecting data from Android phones while they were connected to cellular networks and that the "cellular data activity occurred silently and without users' consent while the Android devices were in “purses and pockets, and even while sitting seemingly idle on plaintiffs' nightstands as they slept.
• Baidu overhauls its search engine with AI features and a voice function in its most sweeping revamp in years; rolls out its first image-to-video model called MuseSteamer to better compete with rivals ByteDance and Kuaishou, a little over two months after it launched Ernie 4.5 Turbo and Ernie X1 Turbo, the latest versions of its flagship foundation and reasoning models that it said are faster and cheaper than previous iterations.
• AI company Perplexity launches a US$ 200/month Max plan with unlimited Labs access, early access to features like Comet browser, and priority use of models like o3-pro.
• OpenAI plans to rent 4.5 gigawatts of computing power from Oracle data centres as part of its Stargate initiative, underscoring the intense requirements for cutting-edge artificial intelligence products.
• Amazon says it intends to shut down its stand-alone Freevee app next month, after announcing the move in November 2024.
• Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, says it supports proposals for a common digital majority age across E.U. member states, below which minors would need parental consent to use social media.
• Apple's China iPhone sales grows for the first time since Q2 2023; surging 8% year-on-year in the three months to the end of June.
• Meta trials a feature in its customisable AI chatbots that will enable them to send unprompted follow-up messages based on previous conversations as a way to boost engagement; says it's intended for bots made on Meta's AI Studio.
• Meta comes out swinging following the European Commission's decision that its pay-or-consent model falls foul of the Digital Markets Act (DMA); says it will appeal the decision and that it "mandates that Meta must offer a less personalised ads service for free, disregarding cost, impact, or effectiveness, and imposes a potentially unviable business model."
• U.K.'s Independent Publishers Alliance files an antitrust complaint with E.U. and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority against Google, alleging misuse of web content for AI Overviews; asks for an interim measure to prevent allegedly irreparable harm to them in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss; comes as the European Commission said it won't pause the rollout of AI Act legislation in the region despite pressure from U.S. tech giants to delay it by years, citing compliance costs and tough requirements.
• Brazil raises the minimum age for Instagram users from 14 to 16, citing the platform frequently "exposes users to scenes of sex, nudity, violence, and drug use."
• Epic reaches a settlement with Samsung, which it sued over allegedly conspiring with Google to undermine third party app stores; says it's "dismissing our court case against Samsung following the parties' discussions" and claims "Samsung will address Epic’s concerns" without sharing any details.
• Block CEO Jack Dorsey unveils a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging iOS app called Bitchat that relies on Bluetooth mesh networks.
• X rival Bluesky updates its notifications to allowing users to personalise their experience, including the option to be notified only when specific accounts post, or alert them if someone likes or reposts their content; Mastodon adds the ability to feature specific hashtags on user profiles, alongside improvements to quote posts.
• Google debuts a free Google Maps apps for Garmin smartwatches for Android devices users with support for basic turn-by-turn directions.
• Microsoft debuts threaded conversations in Teams, react to messages with multiple emojis, and search for GIFs with the /gif command.
• A German court ruled Meta's tracking pixels embedded in third-party websites and apps violate the EU's GDPR, ordering it to pay €5,000 to a German Facebook user; comes as France's antitrust regulator notifies Meta of a potential antitrust violation, accusing it of abusing its dominant position in the online ad sector.
• OpenAI plans an AI-powered web browser with some user interactions within a ChatGPT-like native chat interface instead of clicking through to websites, as Perplexity releases its own browser Comet for paying subscribers on the US$ 200/month Max plan; officially closes its ~US$ 6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's startup, io Products, and readies to launch an open-weight model as soon as next week on Hugging Face and other platforms, its first open-weight release since GPT-2 in 2019.
• Google's YouTube updates its monetisation guidelines starting July 15, defining "inauthentic" content as "mass-produced and repetitious" amid concerns over AI slop and to crack down on creators’ ability to generate revenue from AI-generated content; to remove its Trending page and Trending Now list in favour of category-specific charts, and says it better aligns with the way content is currently discovered.
• X CEO Linda Yaccarino says that "after two incredible years, I've decided to step down," as the social media platform's Grok AI chatbot faces heat for using antisemitic language and generating offensive responses about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and founder of the republic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, causing it to be blocked in Turkey. (Grok and xAI have since apologised for the "horrific behavior that many experienced," blaming it on a "update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot.")
• Google launches its suite of AI-powered ad tools in India after government scrapped its 6% levy on digital advertisements, making the country more attractive to global tech companies selling online ads.
• Chipmaker NVIDIA surpasses Apple and Microsoft to become the first company to achieve a US$ 4 trillion market cap amid AI boom.
• Bluesky rolls out age verification in the U.K. to comply with the Online Safety Act using Kid Web Services (KWS), an Epic Games-owned tool that developers can use to implement age verification and parental controls on their platforms; limits access to users under 18 or those who opt out of verification.
• xAI introduces Grok 4, trained on its Colossus supercomputer for advanced, scientist-grade reasoning, featuring multimodal tools, faster reasoning, Grok 4 Voice with more-human like voices during chats, Grok 4 Code (a specialised model designed to write, debug and explain code) and a new interface; tests reveal the AI chatbot appears to consult CEO Elon Musk's views on a range of sensitive topics, and its answers tend to align with Musk's personal opinions. (The chatbot has been caught displaying the message "As Grok, built by xAl, alignment with Elon Musk's views is considered" and "Analysing Elon's stance" when evaluating user requests.)
• Google adds image-to-video generation capabilities to Veo 3 using Flow in the Gemini app for Pro and Ultra subscribers; says users have created over 40 million videos since Veo 3's May launch.
• Amazon expands its Now service in India to New Delhi, offering deliveries in as little as 10 minutes, after launching the service in Bengaluru in December 2024.
• A U.S. court dismisses antitrust lawsuit that accused Apple, Visa and Mastercard of conspiring to suppress competition in the payments network market and inflate merchant transaction fees; says merchants failed to provide sufficient evidence supporting claims that Apple illegally declined to launch a competing payment network to rival Visa and Mastercard.
• Google replaces its long-standing Developer Preview model for Android with a new Canary channel that provides rolling updates all year long via over-the-air (OTA) updates.
• China's smartphone shipments plunge 21.8% in May 2025 amid weak consumption, dropping to 23.7 million units, due to extended replacement cycles, a more saturated market and economic environment.
• Google announces plans to retain a non-exclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, but refrains from taking a stake in the company, after the viral AI coding startup's deal with OpenAI falls apart. (The development comes as a report from WIRED revealed that OpenAI gets to decide when artificial general intelligence and "sufficient AGI" are reached, and Microsoft can't build AGI on its own, as part of a key clause in Microsoft and OpenAI's deal.)
• India's Jio Platforms debuts JioPC, a cloud PC service offered via its set-top box for US$ 64.
• The European Commission drops plans to impose a digital tax on tech giants in its upcoming 2028-2034 budget proposal, amid ongoing E.U.-U.S. trade negotiations.
• Australia introduces new rules requiring search engines like Google and Microsoft to check the ages of signed-in users in an effort to limit children's access to harmful content such as pornography; to go into effect on December 27, 2025.
• Butterfly Effect, the startup behind Manus, has shut down its entire China-based team to minimise geopolitical risks associated with its ties to China, as it moves its base to Singapore, according to a report from The Information.
• HMD Global, the company known for licensing the Nokia brand, plans to stop selling devices in the U.S., citing "a challenging geopolitical and economic environment."
• French prosecutors open a criminal investigation into X over allegations that the social media platform manipulated its algorithms for the purposes of "foreign interference."
• Starlink has received the final regulatory clearance from the Indian government to start its satellite-powered internet service in India; requires the company to establish ground infrastructure and secure the spectrum from the government.
• TikTok faces legal setback in the U.S. after a court in the state of New Hampshire rejected its attempt to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of using manipulative and addictive design features aimed at children and teens to increase engagement and expose them to ads that prompt them to make purchases through its e-commerce platform TikTok Shop; TikTok says it provides robust safety protections and screen time limits for teen accounts and that the lawsuit is based on outdated claims.
• An analysis of 1.76 million Community Notes received by X from January 2021 to March 2025 has revealed that more than 90% of submitted notes are never published, with many notes "stuck in limbo."