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Google Adds Talking Live Avatars to Gemini 3.8 Live for Enterprises

By Jackson Chung September 25, 2026

Google just gave its newest live conversation model a face. Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar became generally available on September 24 for Gemini Enterprise customers, one week after the audio-focused Gemini 3.8 Live models launched and months after a first look at Google Cloud Next 2026. The update generates a 24-frame-per-second video of an animated person or cartoon character whose mouth and expressions stay locked to the spoken words, pairing the existing speech model with low-latency streaming video in a single pass.

Project Suncatcher Flies Google AI Chips Into Orbit to Learn If Compute Can Live on Sunlight

By Jackson Chung September 24, 2026

Google will send its first AI chips into space next week as the opening flight of Project Suncatcher, a long-term research effort to find out whether machine learning hardware can run in low Earth orbit on solar power. A refrigerator-sized prototype named MVP, built with Planet Labs and carrying four Tensor Processing Units, is booked on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 Falcon 9 rideshare from Vandenberg, with a target date of October 1. The satellite is not a working orbital data center. It exists to measure what launch vibration, radiation, and vacuum heat do to Google’s chips once they leave the ground.

Google Pixel 10a Still Makes Four Hundred Dollars Feel Like a Fair Trade for a Phone You Will Actually Keep

By Jackson Chung September 23, 2026

Google kept the Pixel 10a at $499 for 128GB when it launched, and street prices have since drifted lower, with the Obsidian version often landing at $424. That number matters because almost every rival in this range either costs more on day one or starts cutting software support much sooner. Hardware inside this phone will look familiar if you held a Pixel 9a.

Whisplay HAT+ Rebuilds Google’s Offline Gemma Translator Into One Compact Pi 5 Slab

By Jackson Chung September 20, 2026

Google Creative Lab published Gemma Translator back in August 2026 as a voice box that never phones home. Alan Yam, Shashwath Santosh, and Dan Motzenbecker built it with help from Google Antigravity, then posted the code, model scripts, and 3D-print files on GitHub under Apache 2.0. You talk into a microphone. Moonshine turns the recording into text. Gemma 4 E2B, running locally through LiteRT-LM, translates that text. Moonshine speaks the other language from a speaker. After the first download, the radio can stay off.

Teaching Google’s Fruit Fly Brain to Play Balatro Results in MaleCNS Beating Ante 8

By Jackson Chung September 18, 2026

Google Research and HHMI Janelia’s FlyEM team released MaleCNS v1.0 earlier this month, a complete wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord. More than 166,000 neurons and about 125 million synapses sit in that public map, rebuilt from electron-microscope slices of a real Drosophila with machine-learning reconstruction. Hobbyists spent the next two weeks pointing those cells at DOOM, Beat Saber, Minecraft, a Rubik’s Cube, crypto tickers, and a parallel-parking drill. Then someone pointed them at Jimbo from Balatro.

Google’s Pixel Watch 4 (45mm) Puts Gemini on a Domed Wrist

By Jackson Chung September 14, 2026

Forty-five millimeters is the size that finally makes Google’s round watch feel finished. The Wi-Fi Pixel Watch 4 in that case starts at $399, though the Moonstone Wi-Fi listing is now sitting nearer $280. The aluminum body is 12.3 mm thick and 36.7 grams without a band, so it sits low on the wrist instead of stacking like a hockey puck.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas Places a Score on Every Possible DNA Letter Change

By Jackson Chung September 8, 2026

Google DeepMind opened AlphaGenome Atlas on September 8, 2026, as a free lookup table of predicted effects for every possible single-letter swap in human DNA. That catalog covers about nine billion single-nucleotide variants, plus more than one hundred million short insertions and deletions already seen in people. Anyone doing academic research can type a variant into a website and read the forecasts without writing code or running the original model.

Pixel Watch 5 Leaves the Latch Unlocked for Simple Repairs

By Jackson Chung September 5, 2026

Most smartwatches get glued shut, live a short life, and then sit in a drawer. Google’s Pixel Watch 5 still refuses that fate. iFixit’s teardown team opened the 45 mm model and handed it a provisional 9 out of 10 on the smartwatch repairability scale, the same mark last year’s Pixel Watch 4 earned, with a few small changes that make the job even clearer once you are inside.

M. Night Shyamalan Starts Talking, Kicks Off Night Diaries Series on YouTube

By Bill Smith September 1, 2026

On August 27, M. Night Shyamalan posted a short note and a fifty-six-second clip. Starting my YouTube page today, he wrote. He sat on a small bench outside his office. A tree grows there that he planted after his father died earlier this year. After thirty years making movies he wanted to undo stigmas sitting in his head and in other people’s heads.

Pikachu Clocked In for Night Shift on Google’s Newest Fitbit Air Special Edition

By Bill Smith August 27, 2026

Google and The Pokémon Company spent Pokémon’s 30th anniversary year pairing a screenless fitness band with the one app that already treats sleep like a daily hunt. Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep arrived this morning as a $129.99 US / ¥19,800 Japan exclusive, limited to those two countries and rated for ages 13 and up. Preorders opened today at the Google Store and Target, with shipments starting September 15.