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Amazon will now use AI to recap what you’re watching

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Amazon will now use AI to recap what you're watching

Have you ever started a show, stopped mid-season and then struggled to get back into it because you have no idea exactly where you stopped watching or what was going on? Amazon just might have you covered. The company just launched a new tool for Prime Video that uses AI to generate personalized recaps.

X-Ray Recaps uses generative AI to create “brief, easy-to-digest summaries” of entire TV seasons, single episodes or even portions of episodes. All of this is personalized, so the recap will go up to the “exact minute of where you are watching.” The company promises “short textual snippets of key cliffhangers, character-driven plot points” and other details.

Adam Gray, vice president of product at Prime Video, says that this tool will help customers “quickly jump back into what they were watching or rediscover why they fell in love with a series in the first place.” It’s powered by Amazon Bedrock, the company’s proprietary AWS service for building and scaling AI applications. For those worrying about spoilers, the AI has been trained to avoid them at all costs.

The tool in action.

Amazon

This is an extension of the pre-existing X-Ray feature, which offers trivia and cast information during the stream. I love this tool and am constantly flabbergasted that other streamers haven’t adopted something like it.

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X-Ray Recaps launches today for Fire TV customers, though in a beta format. Additional devices will receive support by the end of the year. Right now, it only works with content made by Amazon MGM Studios, like Upload, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Wheel of Time and The Boys.

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Nintendo’s music app has great ideas and frustrating limitations

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Nintendo’s music app has great ideas and frustrating limitations

Listening to Nintendo music isn’t easy. It’s not available on streaming platforms, so I usually end up scouring YouTube for songs from Animal Crossing and Metroid. Because of this, I was hoping that Nintendo Music, a new app that surprise-launched last week, would be my one-stop shop for listening to Nintendo soundtracks. But while it features some clever ideas, there are lots of frustrations and weird choices from Nintendo that mean it isn’t quite what I was hoping for. 

Navigating the app, which is available on iOS and Android but only accessible to Switch Online subscribers, feels a lot like other music services like Apple Music or Spotify. You can browse tracks from individual games or hand-curated playlists themed around things like characters, Pokémon battle songs, or tracks you might want to listen to on an extended loop. It’s organized in a thoughtful way on a per-game basis. The fictional bands in Splatoon 3 all get artist pages with bios. The page for Animal Crossing: New Horizons features playlists for K.K. Slider performances and instrumentals, and if you want to listen to a full playlist of Kapp’n’s sea shanties, that’s available, too.

The extended loop feature is my favorite part. For some songs, you can choose to extend them out to 15, 30, or 60 minutes. I’ve already used it quite a bit to work to music from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; the calming piano sounds of “The Great Plateau” are still exquisite seven years later. I also like that you can add games to a “spoiler prevention” list to hide information about a game you might not have played yet, which could be a good way to keep yourself in the dark about a final boss for a game you might want to play.

There just aren’t many games on the app

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But Nintendo Music doesn’t have many game soundtracks to listen to. Nintendo has more than 40 years’ worth of titles it could have included, and right now, there are only 25 games to pick from. There are just two Zelda games: Breath of the Wild and Ocarina of Time. Fire Emblem is the only Game Boy Advance game. There are three NES games, and two of them are Metroid. Technically, one of the “games” is Wii Channels music (which, to be fair, is full of bangers).

I could go on, but the point is that Nintendo Music isn’t a comprehensive collection of the company’s enormous musical history. Given that most of the soundtracks are for Nintendo Switch games, it’s more of a collection of Nintendo’s recent musical history, but it seems like a huge miss that I can’t listen to anything from Super Mario World in the app.

That will start to change, and probably slowly, if the drip-feed of Switch Online retro games is any indication. A day after the service launched, Nintendo added the soundtrack to Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and on Monday, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest became available, too. In the Nintendo Music reveal trailer, the company showed that Wii Sports, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Splatoon 2, and F-Zero X are all set to arrive on the service, but only on a vague “over time” schedule.

Nintendo Music also doesn’t credit the real humans involved in making a song. That means, curiously enough, that the fictional bands in Splatoon 3 have more prominence in Nintendo Music than the legendary Koji Kondo. (Nintendo has kind of a weird thing about credits at the moment.)

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The app has some other issues, too. You can’t extend some songs, and there’s no indication why, which is really annoying. One of the first songs I wanted to try the feature with was Metroid Prime’s soothing “Phendrana Drifts” music, but it’s not possible — which, given that it’s one of the main songs you hear on loop while exploring that area of the game, doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, you can just set the song to repeat, but that’s not quite the same as an hour-long extension. And when you select the duration of how long you want to extend a song, the whole song starts over; it’s a little thing, but I wish the app could just make the extension happen without the brief but jarring halt. 

And disappointingly, Nintendo Music is currently only available on iOS and Android — there’s no desktop or web app. I’d really like to listen to Nintendo Music from a Mac app or in my desktop browser; it isn’t compatible with CarPlay or Android Auto, either.

For the songs that are currently available, Nintendo Music is great. But so much is missing that part of me wonders if Nintendo pushed this service out the door ahead of the launch of the successor to the Switch so that it could add to the service later. It’s a similar feeling to the frustrations with other recent not-Switch things from Nintendo, like the Alarmo clock and skin-deep Nintendo Museum; they all have good ideas but also some weird limitations.

Nintendo Music just isn’t as deep as I would like it to be. It means I’m going to have to keep tracking a lot of music down on YouTube.

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The Call of Duty: Mobile five year anniversary kicks off with Season 10 launch and new battle royale map

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Call of Duty: Mobile Season 10 key art.


  • Call of Duty: Mobile Season 10 launches tomorrow
  • The update includes a new weapon, battle royale map, and skins
  • Call of Duty: Mobile has also hit one billion downloads worldwide

The fifth anniversary update for Call of Duty: Mobile arrives tomorrow, introducing a new season of content and an additional battle royale map.

Season 10 will introduce the new Anniversary Pass with both premium and paid tiers. Free players will be able to claim the all–new USS 9 SMG weapon, plus the brand-new Teleport battle royale class, a range of skins, weapon blueprints, Vault Coins, and more.

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3D printing with light and sound could let us copy human organs

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3D printing with light and sound could let us copy human organs


A rapid form of 3D printing that uses sound and light could one day produce copies of human organs made from a person’s own cells, allowing for a range of drug tests.

Traditional 3D printers build from a hard base, layer by layer. This is time consuming and risks damage to printed objects when they are removed from the printing bed. David Collins at the University of Melbourne and his colleagues have taken a different approach, which they call “dynamic interface printing”.

The new printer is essentially a…

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Coinbase’s big election bet is about to be tested

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Coinbase's big election bet is about to be tested


How Coinbase is looking to drive crypto voters to the polls

WASHINGTON — In the first few years after founding Coinbase, CEO Brian Armstrong shied away from Washington, D.C. But as his ambitions for his crypto exchange scaled, so too did his need to curry favor on Capitol Hill.

“About five or six years ago, we realized that crypto was getting big enough that we needed to go really engage actively in a policy effort, so I started coming out to D.C.,” Armstrong, who started Coinbase in 2012, told CNBC in September, following a day of meetings with political leaders.

Now, it’s practically Armstrong’s full-time job, and Coinbase’s money is all over the nation’s capital. The company was one of the top corporate donors this election cycle, giving more than $75 million to a group called Fairshake and its affiliate PACs, including a fresh pledge of $25 million to support the pro-crypto super PAC in the 2026 midterms. Armstrong personally contributed over $1.3 million to a mix of candidates up and down the ballot.

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The tech industry’s biggest names have dotted Washington for years to try and push their agendas as their market caps have expanded, but for Coinbase, the matter is potentially existential.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler sued the firm last year over claims that it sells unregistered securities. A judge has since ruled that the case should be heard by a jury. Coinbase has fought back vociferously, and has also said that it wants to work with regulators to come up with a proper set of laws governing the nascent industry.

Meanwhile, Coinbase faces a growing list of competitors.

In the company’s latest quarterly earnings report last week, Coinbase missed on the top and bottom lines due to lower transaction revenues and a drop in subscription and services revenues. The shares plummeted 15%.

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Data from CCData shows the exchange is losing spot market share to industry rivals like Crypto.com. And investors have many new options for accessing bitcoin and ethereum since the SEC greenlit spot funds this year. BlackRock’s ETF chief Samara Cohen told CNBC that 75% of its bitcoin buyers are crypto investors who are new to Wall Street.

Washington can’t save Coinbase from the competition, but the company is betting that, with favorable lawmakers in place, it can be the leader in a thriving industry rather than under the constant threat of lawsuits and Wells notices.

Armstrong said his D.C. visits normally took place once or twice a year. Then it got to be at least a quarterly occasion. And the pace has only increased.

“In the beginning, a lot of people didn’t know what crypto was,” Armstrong said of his earlier trips. Now, “the discussion has advanced, really, to, how do we pass clear rules, create legislation in the United States?”

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Coinbase's legal chief on crypto's 2024 election spending

An SEC sans Chair Gensler

Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, attended a fundraiser in San Francisco in June that raised $12 million for former President Donald Trump. It was hosted by venture capitalist David Sacks, a former Trump critic who became an outspoken supporter when he became the Republican nominee.

Grewal later joined a fundraiser in Nashville in July for the former president.

Trump has never shown much of an aptitude for the nuances of crypto, but he’s welcomed the industry’s financial support. He was applauded in the summer, when he vowed to fire Gensler as head of the SEC if he wins.

Grewal told CNBC that he’s had “many conversations” behind closed doors with both the Trump camp as well as Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. Heading into Election Day on Tuesday, the candidates were in a virtual dead-heat.

“What I think we’re hearing from both campaigns is they get it,” Grewal said. “They understand that in swing state after swing state, there are enough voters who care about crypto that the candidate and their campaigns need to give voice to the concerns of those voters in supporting sensible rules for crypto, sensible legislation coming out of Congress, and that’s very encouraging.”

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Grewal said that Trump “came earlier to this pro-crypto view,” but said that Harris recognizes the need for “an agenda focused on promoting sensible rules for crypto as much as any other technology.”

But Coinbase’s political interests as an organization have been focused exclusively on Congressional races, as the company looks to help assemble a group of lawmakers with favorable views of the industry.

The Stand With Crypto Alliance, launched by Coinbase last year, has developed a grading system for House and Senate candidates across the country.

In the Ohio Senate race, for example, the organization gives Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, who chairs the banking committee, an “F” grade, versus an “A” grade for his Republican rival Bernie Moreno, a blockchain entrepreneur. Some $40 million of crypto money has been directed at defeating Brown, and one PAC has paid for five ads designed to boost awareness of Moreno. The race is very close and is crucial in determining which party will control the Senate.

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Stand with Crypto, which has enrolled 1.4 million advocates across the country, is also working to mobilize digital asset owners living in swing states. This effort involved a cross-country bus tour through battlegrounds focused on getting these residents registered to vote.

Crypto climbs and bitcoin nears all-time high ahead of U.S. election

“It’s really extraordinary, given how razor-thin the margin of victory was in the 2020 election, to see crypto not only be an issue, but potentially a determinative issue in terms of the presidential cycle,” Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase’s chief policy officer, said in an interview.

Shirzad said that last year, he and his team concluded that the only way to get politics out of crypto was “to build our own political operation.” He said the goal is to “neutralization the politicization of the crypto issue and talk about it on the merits.”

Coinbase is far from alone. Nearly half of all corporate money raised this election comes from crypto firms.

Fairshake, one of the top spending PACs this cycle, told CNBC it’s raised around $170 million this election and disbursed approximately $135 million.

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Ripple Labs is another one of Fairshake’s top political donors.

The company, which has spent more than $100 million battling Gensler, has given around $50 million to Fairshake. Several executives have also contributed to a mix of Democratic and Republican candidates in races across the country.

Ripple’s head of U.S. public policy, Lauren Belive, told CNBC at a fintech conference in Las Vegas that the company was motivated by the SEC’s overreach.

“We really wanted to put people into office that could learn about this technology and understand this technology, because we need Congress to act and to create federal statutes and not have this enforcement regime,” said Belive. She added the regulator has issued over 100 enforcement actions against crypto-aligned companies.

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Crypto donor Chris Larsen on why he's giving millions to the Harris campaign

The crypto voter

Bitcoin slumps to $67,000 level on eve of U.S. election: CNBC Crypto World



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Metal Slug Tactics is an arcade reimagining worth playing

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Metal Slug Tactics is an arcade reimagining worth playing

I was not expecting the Metal Slug franchise to transition to the strategy game genre as well as it did.

SNK’s classic action-platformer arcade series is a high-energy, bombastic shoot ’em up perfect for quick hits of destructive gaming goodness. Strategy games are inherently much slower-paced than Metal Slug typically was, so I wasn’t sure if Leikir Studio and Dotemu could effectively make the genre jump with this franchise. I’m happy to be proven wrong.

Metal Slug Tactics is an excellent example of the connective tissue between action and strategy games. This is a strategy game that encourages players to be on the move and constantly attacking, and its roguelite structure harks back to the series’ arcade roots. Metal Slug fans need not worry about this revival misunderstanding the series’ appeal.

From action to strategy

There’s little to write home about with Metal Slug Tactics narrative, as it’s just about characters from previous Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors games once again taking on General Morden’s forces. This was never a story-focused franchise, so that’s not a big deal. The look and feel of Metal Slug Tactics kept me around run after run. Metal Slug Tactics expertly replicates the aesthetics of SNK’s arcade classics with gorgeous pixel art and faithful sound design.

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Metal Slug Tactics – Gameplay Trailer

The developers had to get more creative to stay true to Metal Slug on the gameplay front. Metal Slug Tactics is a roguelike where players fight through four regions. Players complete three missions within each region before facing off against a powerful boss. This structure lends itself to bite-sized play, like the arcade classics. While most strategy games require hours of dedicaton to a play session, I have no problem booting up Metal Slug Tactics to get a quick level or run in when I have some spare time.

Once you’re actually on a mission, Metal Slug Tactics still stays faithful. Each unit goes into a run with a unique loadout of two weapons and special skills. Outside of your units’ health, adrenaline is the most important stat to keep track of. Adrenaline for each unit is generated as they move around Metal Slug Tactics’ grid-based battlefields. Move as far as you can with a unit; you might build up enough adrenaline to use a powerful skill. Stay where you are and you won’t get that benefit, but you may have a clear shot at an enemy.

Keep moving

The adrenaline system makes Metal Slug Tactics the rare strategy game where the best option is to run and gun. I was missing out on a powerful resource if I wasn’t moving units each turn. The key to success in Metal Slug Tactics is to keep moving and attacking while maximizing the effect of synchronous attacks, cover, and other passive bonuses for each unit. Then, each mission puts a twist on this with its specific objectives, which can range from killing every enemy to destroying a convoy to keeping at least one unit alive for five turns.

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Gameplay from Metal Slug Tactics.
Dotemu

Bosses also mix things up with unique, devastating attack patterns. It’s not on the level of something like Into the Breach, but each level essentially becomes a puzzle to solve. I had to learn how to use and where to move my units most effectively each turn so I could maximize their offensive potential and minimize damage. I was dodging and weaving between enemies with my units much more boldly than I ever would in a strategy game like Fire Emblem Engage or XCOM 2.

All of that makes Metal Slug Tactics a refreshing strategy game, and it’s also what keeps it in line with the series’ design philosophies. Metal Slug is a series where the best thing players can typically do is run and gun without taking critical, game-ending damage. While that’s simpler to do in a platformer, Metal Slug Tactics’ finds a way to apply that feeling to a strategy game and stands out triumphantly.

Pepper in the mid-run and between-run upgrades and other systems befitting of a roguelike, and Metal Slug Tactics is also immensely replayable. When I first heard about SNK making a new Metal Slug game, something like Metal Slug Tactics wasn’t what I had in mind; thankfully, I’m now grateful that this was made.

Metal Slug Tactics is available now for PC, PlayStation S4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. It’s also part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate catalog.


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Galaxy S25 series may not be Exynos-free after all, here’s proof

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Samsung may ditch the vanilla Galaxy S26, tipster claims

We’ve seen so many rumors regarding the Samsung Galaxy S25 series and its possible chip choices that… it has become annoying at this point. The latest news said that the Galaxy S25 will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite exclusively, but that may not be accurate. The Galaxy S25 series may not be Exynos-free after all, and we have some proof.

Here’s some proof that the Galaxy S25 series may not be entirely Exynos-free

The Samsung Galaxy S25+, with the model number SM-S936B, has been spotted on Geekbench. The thing is, it’s fueled by the S5E9955 chip, which is the model number for the unannounced Exynos 2500 chip.

Galaxy S25 Plus Exynos 2500 Geekbench

Considering that this is a fresh listing, from today, Samsung is obviously still testing that chip, which means that we could get an Exynos variant after all. This definitely leaves a possibility for some Galaxy S25 units to use the Exynos 2500.

A recent report said that the yield of the Exynos 2500 chips is so low that Samsung may have to cancel its plans for it, especially for the Galaxy S25 series. Even one of the best-known tipsters out there said that the Galaxy S25 series will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite exclusively. Well… that may not be the case after all.

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The Exynos model(s) could make their way to Europe

If the Galaxy S25 and/or Galaxy S25+ get the Exynos 2500 treatment, those models will almost certainly be sold in Europe, as was the case with their predecessors. The Galaxy S25 Ultra will likely use the Snapdragon 8 Elite everywhere.

The variant of the Galaxy S25+ that surfaced on Geekbench comes with 12GB of RAM and runs Android 15. It managed to score 2,359 points in the single-core, and 8,141 points in the multi-core benchmark tests.

As a reminder, we exclusively revealed the design of all three Galaxy S25 phones, the Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+, and Galaxy S25 Ultra. All three of those devices are expected to arrive in early 2025, most likely January.

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