Perplexity has turned its AI “answer engine” into a mobile assistant on Android. The new assistant can answer general questions and perform tasks on your behalf, such as writing an email, setting a reminder, booking dinners, and more.

It’s also multimodal, meaning you can ask it questions about what’s on your screen as well as have it open your camera and “see” what’s in front of you. In an example shared by Perplexity, a user asks the assistant to “get me a ride.” Once it learns where the user wants to go, the assistant automatically opens Uber with available rides to that destination.

I tried it out for myself, and it is kind of neat. When I asked it to “open up a good podcast,” my phone started playing the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience on YouTube. It worked rather quickly, even though its taste may be questionable.

Using my phone’s camera, Perplexity’s assistant successfully identified the promotional Pokémon pack I got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal (don’t judge), which I found impressive since the promotion only started a couple of days ago. It also helped me write and send a text to a family member using the information in my contacts.

Alongside Samsung’s announcement of the Gemini-equipped Galaxy S25, Google revealed that its AI assistant can now complete tasks across multiple apps, as well as complete multimodal requests.

But Perplexity’s assistant doesn’t work across every app and with every feature. It’s not able to access Slack or Reddit, for example, and I also couldn’t use it to leave a comment on a YouTube video. Right now, the assistant supports Spotify, YouTube, and Uber, along with email, messaging, and clock apps, according to Perplexity spokesperson Sara Platick. “We’re continuing to add support for more apps and more functionality though, so this is just the starting point,” Platnick adds.

You can enable the assistant through the Perplexity app, which prompts you to replace your phone’s default assistant with Perplexity. From there, you can swipe up on the left corner of your screen or hold down your home button to access the assistant.

It’s currently not available on the iPhone, however. “If Apple gives us the right permissions, we’ll make it happen,” Platnick says.

Oil and gas isn’t the only source of energy lurking under our feet. Drill deep enough and the Earth’s temperature stays consistent enough that it can be a source of heating and cooling for homes, offices, and data centers.

But in many regions, geothermal wells today bottom out at around 500 feet, a limitation that is largely dictated by the sort of drilling equipment that’s typically used. 

“It’s pretty shallow, and you’re going to need two or three times the amount of space if you only go to those depths,” Joselyn Lai, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Energy, told TechCrunch. 

To minimize geothermal’s footprint, Bedrock drills deeper.

“In a cooling dominant location that can very well be 800 to 1,000 feet, which is three times more space efficient. And in a heating dominant location, that can very well be 1,000 to 1,200 feet or even more, which is two times more space efficient,” Lai said.

Because it doesn’t need as much land, Bedrock has been targeting commercial buildings where land tends to be at a premium. It completed its first two installations last year, one at an office building in Austin, Texas, and another at a resort in Utah. For installations like these, Lai said that the company expects to be profitable on a project basis in the next year.

Bedrock has also started to explore applying geothermal cooling to data centers. Last fall, the startup partnered with Dominion Energy to study the space.

One of the main challenges is that data centers are one-way users of geothermal energy. Since servers generate heat 24/7, data centers would be dumping heat into the ground year round. Contrast that with other users like office buildings, which tend to cool in the summer and heat in the winter, leading to a more balanced annual energy budget.

Still, it’s looking promising, Lai said. What’s underground can make a difference: fast flowing ground water, for example, can cool things off more quickly. The boreholes would need to be spread out compared with other installations, raising overall costs. But Bedrock’s data analysis, developed with experience gleaned from the oil and gas sector, suggests that geothermal would be a good fit for data centers, especially when paired with solar farms, which also need large tracts of land.

“Broadly speaking, cooling with geothermal is about twice as efficient as cooling with water and air, especially at the hottest times of the day when it’s very, very humid, which is what happens in a lot of states that have data centers,” Lai said.

Geothermal’s other benefit is how consistently it uses electricity. Because the Earth’s temperature is relatively stable, the heat pumps that transfer energy to or from a geothermal reservoir don’t have to ramp up or down to compensate for changes in air temperature, as air-source heat pumps do. For large electricity users like office buildings and data centers, that can be a boon to the bottom line since utilities typically charge heavy users more when their demand spikes.

Lai said that the outlook for geothermal remains promising enough that the company continues to invest in expanding operations and research and development, focusing on automation to speed installations. To support that growth, Bedrock recently raised a $12 million Series A led by Titanium Ventures. Energy Impact Partners, and Sustainable Future Ventures with participation from Cantos, Elemental Capital, First Star Ventures, Overture Ventures, Toba Capital, and Wireframe Ventures.

The number of phishing emails received by Australians surged by 30% last year, new research by security firm Abnormal Security has found. Cybercriminals have increasingly targeted the Asia-Pacific region, partly because it is becoming a larger player in critical industries like data centres and telecoms.

For APAC as a whole, credential phishing attacks rose by 30.5% between 2023 and 2024, according to the research. New Zealand saw a 30% rise, while for Japan and Singapore, it was 37%. Out of all the types of advanced email attacks, including business email compromise and malware deployment, phishing saw the biggest increase.

“The surge in attack volume across the APAC region can likely be attributed to several factors, including the strategic significance of its countries as epicentres for trade, finance, and defence,” said Tim Bentley, Vice President of APJ at Abnormal Security said in a press release.

“This makes organisations in the region attractive targets for complex email campaigns designed to exploit economic dynamics, disrupt essential industries, and steal sensitive data.”

SEE: 80% of Critical National Infrastructure Companies Experienced an Email Security Breach in Last Year

Between 2023 and 2024, the median monthly rate of all advanced email attacks rose by 26.9% across all of APAC, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore. This encompassed a 16% increase from Q1 to Q2 2024, and a 20% increase from Q2 to Q3.

While phishing was the dominant attack type, BEC attacks — including executive impersonation and payment fraud — also grew by 6% year-over-year in APAC. According to Abnormal Security, the average cost associated with one successful BEC attack exceeded USD $137,000 in 2023.

Australia’s cyber immaturity and the AI boom are causing a perfect storm

The news that Australia is prone to cyber attack is not entirely new. A Rubrik survey from last year found that Australian organisations reported the highest rate of data breaches compared with global markets in 2023.

Antoine Le Tard, vice president – of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Rubrik, said at the time that Australia was a favourite target partly because the country “is a mature market and early adopter of cloud and enterprise security technologies,” and therefore may have prioritised rapid deployment over comprehensive security.

At a national level, the approach to cyber security has been a bit slow off the mark. The Australian Signals Directorate reported that only 15% of government agencies achieved the minimum level of cyber security in 2024 — a sharp decline from 25% in 2023. Such entities have also proven reluctant to adopt passkey authentication methods, stemming from cyber security maturity in the public sector and the perception that implementing it is complex.

There is also the AI factor, which is influencing the security landscape globally. The ease of access to chatbots, both regular and jailbroken for nefarious purposes, makes it faster to generate material for phishing emails and lowers the barrier to entry, as no technical knowledge is required to use them. AI-powered chatbots were named one of 2025’s top AI threats for Australian cyber professionals, for that reason.

SEE: Impacts of AI on Cyber Security Landscape

The number of BEC attacks detected by security firm Vipre in the second quarter of 2024 was 20% higher than the same period in 2023 — and two-fifths of them were generated by AI. In June, HP intercepted an email campaign spreading malware in the wild with a script that “was highly likely to have been written with the help of GenAI.”

Furthermore, adversaries have begun using AI chatbots to build trust with victims and ultimately scam them. The technique mimics how an enterprise may use AI to combine human-driven interaction with the AI chatbot to engage and “convert” a person.

A day on from Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked, I’m genuinely impressed with a Samsung event for the first time in my life. You see, I’ve been an iPhone user since 2010, when I was 15 years old, and while I write about tech for a living, the most I’ve come to using Android daily is a week or so for an experiment.

After watching Galaxy Unpacked and the unveiling of Samsung’s Galaxy S25 lineup of smartphones, I’m not only intrigued by the Android phones on offer, but I’m starting to think I should really give the South Korean tech giant’s flagship a try.

OpenAI is letting some users try a new ChatGPT feature that uses its artificial intelligence to operate a web browser to book trips, buy groceries, hunt for bargains, and do many other online chores.

The new tool, called Operator, is an AI agent: It relies on an AI model trained on both text and images to interpret commands and figure out how to use a web browser to execute them. OpenAI claims it has the potential to automate many day-to-day tasks and workday errands.

OpenAI’s Operator follows rival releases by both Google and Anthropic, which have demonstrated ones capable of using the web. AI agents are widely seen as the next evolutionary stage for AI following chatbots, and many companies have hopped on the hype train by touting them. In most cases, these are very limited in their abilities and simply use a language model to automate things normally done with regular software.

“AI is evolving from this tool that could answer your questions to one that is also able to take action in the world, carrying out complex, multistep workflows,” says Peter Welinder, VP of product at OpenAI. “We’ll see a lot of impact on people’s productivity—but also the quality of work that people are able to accomplish.”

OpenAI admits that giving ChatGPT access to a web browser does introduce new risks, and it says that Operator may sometimes misbehave. It says it has implemented various new safeguards and plans to extend Operator’s capabilities gradually.

Welinder and Yash Kumar, product and engineering lead for OpenAI’s Computer Using Agent, say the plan is to learn from how people use the tool. They acknowledge that the tool could make unwanted bookings or purchases but add that a lot of work has gone into ensuring that it asks before doing anything risky. “It will come back to me and ask for confirmations before taking steps that might be irreversible,” Kumar says.

OpenAI today also released a new “system card” outlining the problems that might arrive with Operator. These include the potential for it to misunderstand commands or diverge from what a user asks; to be misused by users; or to be targeted by cybercriminals.

“It also poses an incredible amount of safety challenges,” Kumar says. “Because your attack vector area and your risk vector area increase quite significantly.”

Operator will initially be available as a “research preview” for ChatGPT users with a Pro account, which costs a hefty $200 per month. The company says it plans to expand access while rolling the tool out slowly, because it will inevitably make some mistakes along the way.

In several demonstrations, Operator showed the potential for AI to take on a more active role as a web helper. The tool features a remote web browser and a chat window for communicating with a user.

At WIRED’s request, Operator was asked to book an Amtrak train trip from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC. It went to the right website and entered the necessary information correctly to bring up the timetable, then asked for further instruction. If a user were logged in to the Amtrak website or into a browser profile with stored credit card information, Operator would be able to go ahead and book a ticket—although it is designed to ask for permission first.

Kumar asked Operator to book a table at Beretta, a restaurant in San Francisco. The program went to the OpenTable website, found the correct restaurant, and looked up availability before asking what to do next. OpenAI says it has partnered with a number of popular sites, including OpenTable, to ensure that Operator works smoothly on them.

The new tool is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model, which can perceive a browser and web page and converse in typed text. The tool incorporates additional training designed to help it understand how to execute tasks online. OpenAI will also make its Computer Use Agent available through its API.

After revealing its next Doom game last summer, id Software is almost ready to release it: the studio announced that Doom: The Dark Ages is launching on May 15th.

The news came as part of Xbox’s most recent Developer Direct livestream, which provided the best look yet at the prequel. As the name implies, The Dark Ages is set in a medieval fantasy realm and takes place long before the events of Doom Eternal and the franchise’s 2016 reboot. The developers say that the new game features a much bigger world with a larger emphasis on story — including plenty of cutscenes — but the most important changes appear to be with how The Dark Ages will play.

A big focus this time around is on melee combat. Since this is a Doom set in medieval times, that means players will get access to brutal new melee weapons like a spiked mace and iron flail. The scale of battles also seems to have ramped up. We already knew that players would get a mount in the form of a cybernetic dragon, but today’s reveal also showed off a skyscraper-sized mech suit so that the Doomslayer can fight enemies the size of kaiju.

Another big change is a greater emphasis on accessibility through a series of gameplay sliders. These let you adjust things like the game speed or parry timing, either ramping them up or down. Essentially, these options should give players the ability to really customize the experience, either making it more approachable or a whole lot harder. There are standard difficulty options as well.

Doom: The Dark Ages is coming to the PS5, Xbox, and PC when it launches in May.

Social network X has grown its in-app revenue over the past year, despite a decline in active users, new data shows. Global consumer spending in the X mobile app across both iOS and Android has climbed by 76.3% year-over-year, when comparing two similar periods in January, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. However, other data indicates X’s daily active users have declined, as usage of rivals like Bluesky and Threads has increased.

In an analysis performed by Appfigures, X’s global consumer spending on iOS and Android reached $7.6 million for the period of January 1-20, 2024. During the same time in January 2025, X saw $13.4 million in consumer spending, the firm said. This figure includes in-app purchases made through X’s mobile apps — not revenue from advertising or subscriptions bought on the web, where X users receive a discount on their purchases.

In other words, this is not a number that represents X’s total revenue. X continues to be a largely advertising-driven business, so this is only a window into consumer spending trends.

The addition of xAI’s Grok AI chatbot to X’s app may be helping to fuel the increase in consumer spending, at least in part. There were obvious spikes in net revenue shortly after X began testing a free version of Grok in X in November. This was just ahead of X’s addition of a faster model and a new Grok button to the X app in mid-December 2024 and the launch of a new image generation model on December 9.

X also added an NFL portal in late November to increase sports engagement on its app. This could have boosted X adoption given that sports is one of the most-discussed topics on X.

In the U.S., X saw 61.4% growth in year-over-year consumer spending on iOS and Android, growing from $4.4 million from January 1-20, 2024, to $7.1 million during the same period in 2025.

While global mobile consumer spending is up year-over-year, the monthly totals haven’t always been on a steady climb. In some months, the spending dropped, and in other months it climbed. During 2025, the lowest month was February, with spending of $9.6 million across iOS and Android. December saw the highest total with $25.6 million, after increases that started in October leading up to the U.S. elections.

The top in-app purchases on the X iOS app in January 2025 are as follows: at No. 1 is the X Premium Monthly subscription ($11/mo.), followed by the X Premium Plus Monthly subscription ($30/mo.), X Premium Basic Monthly ($4/mo.), a subscription to Elon Musk’s account directly ($4/mo.), and X Premium’s Annual Subscription ($114.99/yr.).

Despite the jump in consumer spending towards year-end, further data suggests that X may be losing active users.

Both X’s U.S. and worldwide daily active users decreased in January 2025, with each figure down by roughly 13% compared with the same time last year, according to estimates from app intelligence provider Sensor Tower, shared in response to a data request from TechCrunch. Year-over-year growth in monthly active users on X has also dipped slightly, Sensor Tower found.

The firm’s principal market insights manager, Jonathan Briskma, told TechCrunch that X had more than 313 million worldwide mobile app MAUs (monthly active users) in the fourth quarter of 2024 and more than 300 million worldwide mobile app MAUs through January 2025 month-to-date.

As X’s active usage dipped when comparing the same period in January 2024 with January 2025, daily active users on competing apps Instagram Threads and Bluesky jumped up more than 170% and 495%, respectively. This growth has been driven by a number of factors, including international expansions and the addition of several new features and functionality across both platforms.

We asked X if it could share its own internal MAUs figure, but the company did not respond.

• Wix has announced a new integration with YouTube Shopping
• YouTube Shopping allows people to purchase products directly through YouTube videos
• The feature is available to creators in specific countries

Wix, one of the best website builders on the market, has announced a new integration with YouTube Shopping, giving store owners a new and popular avenue to sell their products, while also expanding YouTube’s social shopping features.

YouTube Shopping is a relatively new service (first announced in 2021) that allows YouTube creators to tag products within their videos. That way, viewers can easily purchase the items directly from the platform.

Microsoft promised a new game announcement at its Xbox Developer Direct event, and that game turned out to be Ninja Gaiden 4. The new entry in the long-running franchise is being co-developed by Team Ninja along with Platinum Games, the team behind action games like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata. Though no release date was announced, the game will be coming to Xbox, and will be available via Game Pass.

While the Ninja Gaiden franchise has been around since the late ‘80s, it entered into a new era on the Xbox with the bloody, and tough-as-nails Ninja Gaiden on Xbox in 2004. That version, developed by Team Ninja, was ported to a handful of other consoles and also received a number of sequels. Based on the debut trailer, the new game looks to continue the dark action started with the 2004 release, but with even faster gameplay.

Roli on Thursday announced its latest educational product at the NAAM audio show in Anaheim. The simply named Roli Piano builds on products like the Roli Airwave and Piano M, more than doubling the latter’s key count to 49.

The Piano is much like its predecessor in most ways, with MIDI keys that light up and sync with an instructional app played back on a phone or tablet. The Airwave, meanwhile, adds hand tracking into the mix, creating gesture-based sounds.

The new instrument is pricey, at $599, well over double the Piano M’s current $249 price point. The London-based music tech startup is offering up the larger model at $399 for a limited time “super early bird special.”

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a 2025 product launch without some mention of generative AI. That arrives by way of the newly announced Piano AI Assistitant, which the company refers to as, “the first step in using generative AI to make learning to play easier, more intuitive and more fun than ever before.”

The Assistant, which is rolling out as part of the Piano launch, aims to further instruction, while adding music theory into the mix.

Over the past year, the Piano line has become Roli’s primary focus. The pivot toward educational products makes sense for the company, which filed for bankruptcy back in 2021. Products like the Seaboard and Blocks were always cool and clever, but remained niche in the music world.

Music education, on the other hand, offers massive market potential for a smaller hardware maker.