YouTube is improving its auto-dubbing feature further to make it easier for viewers to watch videos in languages they actually understand. Auto-dubbing uses AI to translate and replace a video’s spoken audio with a dubbed version in another language.

The feature now supports 27 languages, and viewers can set a preferred language in YouTube’s settings. When a dubbed version is available, YouTube will automatically serve it in the selected language. So if a video exists in another language, YouTube wants it to feel accessible the moment you press play.

YouTube is making auto-dubs sound more natural

YouTube says it knows dubbing can feel awkward if it sounds robotic or out of sync. To address this, the company has rolled out Expressive Speech, a feature designed to preserve tone, emotion, and pacing in translated audio.

It is currently available for all YouTube channels in English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, with more languages expected later.

The platform is also testing a Lip Sync pilot, which subtly adjusts a speaker’s lip movements to better match the translated audio. This will make dubbed videos feel closer to the original, especially for viewers who find mismatched audio and visuals distracting.

Auto-dubs are generated automatically, but creators are not locked in. They can disable auto-dubbing entirely or upload their own dubbed versions if they prefer more control.

YouTube also uses automatic smart filtering to avoid dubbing content that does not make sense to translate, such as music-only videos or silent vlogs.

However, YouTube acknowledges that auto-dubs can still contain errors, often caused by imperfect speech recognition or unclear audio. The company says these systems will improve over time as more feedback comes in.

Apart from auto-dubbing, YouTube is also leaning into AI-driven personalization through its Recap feature that assigns users a personality based on their watch history, adding another layer to how content is understood and surfaced.

Photo-sharing platform Flickr is notifying users of a potential data breach after a vulnerability at a third-party email service provider exposed their real names, email addresses, IP addresses, and account activity.

Founded in 2004, Flickr is one of the world’s largest photography communities and sharing sites, hosting over 28 billion photos and videos. The company says it has 35 million monthly users and 800 million monthly page views.

Flickr did not disclose which third-party provider was involved or how many users were potentially affected by this incident. A Flickr spokesperson was not immediately available for comment when contacted by BleepingComputer earlier today for more details.

The company said that it shut down access to the affected system within hours after being informed of the security flaw on February 5. While the vulnerability “may have” provided access to some member information, Flickr said that passwords and payment card numbers were not compromised in the incident.

“On February 5, 2026, we were alerted to a vulnerability in a system operated by one of our email service providers,” the company said in emails to affected users. “This flaw may have allowed unauthorized access to some Flickr member information. We shut down access to the affected system within hours of learning about it.”

The exposed information includes member names, email addresses, Flickr usernames, account types, IP addresses, general location data, and their activity on the platform.

The company has also encouraged affected users to review their account settings for any unexpected changes and to remain vigilant against phishing emails that may use their Flickr account information, noting that it will never request passwords over email.

Users are also recommended to update their passwords as soon as possible if they use their Flickr credentials on other services.

“We sincerely apologize for this incident and for the concern it may cause,” Flickr added in the emailed notifications.

“We take the privacy and security of your data extremely seriously, and we are taking immediate action to prevent any similar issues by conducting a thorough investigation, strengthening our system architecture, & further enhancing our monitoring of third-party service providers.”

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

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Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

Compare Our Picks

Others We Tested

Photograph: Kat Merck

Els Pet Orbitie for $290: This is one of the least expensive automatic litter boxes, but it functions much like the more expensive models, with an internal 65-liter-capacity orb that rotates and catches clumps with a plastic grate, depositing them into a bag-lined box below. The opening is a generous 12 by 12 inches—plenty big enough for my two 7-year-old cats, who took to it almost immediately despite never having seen anything but a traditional litter box. The accompanying Orbitie app doesn’t offer an extensive amount of information; it tells the user the volume of litter and what step of the cleaning phase the box is currently in, as well as how many times the box has been used and at what times. The first test unit I received was faulty—it sent multiple phantom alerts to the app, letting me know it had cleaned itself as many as 36 times a day, which I knew for a fact was not true. The replacement unit, however, works just as intended, though the bin beneath fills up fast (about every other day with my two cats), and it occasionally needs to be disassembled and cleaned, as tiny pieces of cat litter have a tendency to get in the gears beneath the orb (and make a loud grinding noise). However, this isn’t an unusual occurrence even with pricier boxes. Online reviews panned an earlier version of this box, but Orbitie says this is an improved version. Thankfully, like the bigger brands, Orbitie also offers a 90-day money-back guarantee if you’re on the fence. —Kat Merck

Photograph: Molly Higgins

FurryTail Automatic Litter Box Pro for $400: I was surprised by how quickly and easily my cats took to this device—even my larger cat, who hates change, started using it right away. Setup was super easy, and the box comes with a year’s supply of waste bag liners, an additional grate attachment, and a mat to reduce litter tracking. Similar to many models, the spherical orb rotates, sifting dirty litter into a waste bag, which, on this model, is on top of the machine rather than below. The box has both a manual display and buttons on the machine, as well as an app to adjust settings. I’d include this model in our top picks because of how easy it was to set up and use, as well as how much my cats liked it, but the app was basically useless. Through the app, you can adjust settings like timed cleanings and do-not-disturb modes, manually clean, and monitor waste levels. However, the app never tracked usage or weight, and for the majority of the time, didn’t clean when I manually instructed it to. The sensors would sense ghost cats and refuse to clean, with the device not automatically cycling for the majority of the day (which sort of defeats the purpose). This automatic box has tons of potential, but I can’t fully recommend it until the kinks (especially in the app) are ironed out.

Courtesy of Smarty Pear

Casa Leo Leo’s Loo Too Automatic Litter Box for $700: This automatic litter box was a top pick for a long time, but it’s pricey and a bit cramped for some cats. We still like it, but think the options above are better for most people (and cats). There are four weight sensors inside the barrel to detect when a cat is still inside (it needs just 1 pound of weight to detect your cat), an anti-pinch sensor (for fingers and paws), and a radar system that detects when anyone, feline or human, is near it. For extra cleanliness, it also uses ultraviolet light for extra sanitation. The Smarty Pear app (on iOS and Android) alerts you when the drawer is full (about once a week), records the times your cat uses it and the cat’s weight, and you can set it to automatically clean six seconds to 20 minutes after your cat uses it. You can start a cleaning session manually from the app or use your voice if you connect the box to Alexa or Google Assistant. Former WIRED reviewer Medea Giordano’s biggest struggle using the Loo Too was pouring new litter into it, which can be tricky because of the small entry hole. The barrel is also pretty cramped, especially for her 12-pound cat.

Photograph: Simon Hill

PetSafe ScoopFree SmartSpin Self-Cleaning Litter Box for $370: This basic automatic litter box is around half the price but has a similar design to more expensive models. This futuristic-looking pod on legs has a rubbery bottom, a weight detector that sets off the cleaning cycle a few minutes after your cat has done its business, and a slide-out tray in the bottom. After they’ve been, the body rotates, and a mesh catches the clumps and deposits them in the tray, where there’s a bag with a wee deodorizer unit that smells like watermelon. You can connect it to Wi-Fi and review your cat’s toilet visits in the app on your phone, where each entry displays the time they went, their weight, and toilet trip duration. This self-cleaning box was easy to build and works surprisingly well, even though it feels kinda cheap. Ultimately, as a relatively affordable self-cleaning device, the PetSafe ScoopFree SmartSpin is worth a look. —Simon Hill

Not Recommended

Photograph: Molly Higgins

PetSnowy Snow+ Self-Cleaning Litter Box for $680: This box looks like something from Kubrick’s visions of space travel, or if Eames started making plastic litter boxes. It takes up quite a bit of horizontal floor space, so it may not be ideal for those in cramped apartments looking to conserve space. Unlike all others on this list, this globe is closed during cleaning, which could cause injury if the machine malfunctioned and didn’t sense a cat. The box also doesn’t tell you when the litter’s low or needs to be refilled. My cats had a really hard time using it—they just couldn’t understand that it was a litter box. Older cats could have a tough time jumping into it, and the smaller opening could be a problem if you have bigger cats. It might be great for someone who wants to keep things tidy—it’s extremely clean, smells good, and hugely reduces litter tracking. However, we just can’t recommend the device since it’s closed during cleaning, which is not safe.

Petlibro Luma Smart Litter Box for $600: I’m a big fan of Petlibro’s automatic feeders and fountains, but I’ve found that the brand’s other tech products, like this automatic litter box and AI-enabled pet camera, aren’t on the same level. First, we cannot recommend any model that closes completely during cleaning cycles. The Luma is outfitted with tons of sensors to prevent cleaning while a cat (or any object) is inside or near the entrance, and I highly doubt injury would occur. But the globe spins backward and forward, rather than clockwise and counterclockwise, meaning that the entrance is closed during cycling. If a sensing malfunction happened, the cat would be trapped inside. I appreciated the button controls on the outside top, which allow for manual control. However, they’re on a touchscreen above the camera. So, oftentimes, when I tried to manually reset, the camera caught me and wouldn’t continue the cleaning or control I asked of it, because the safety features would prevent action inside the box. It was very frustrating. When I went out of town, it got stuck in the middle of the cleaning cycle for two days because it kept sensing a ghost cat. The globe was mid-cycle, and the entrance was covered; I couldn’t bypass via the app to keep cleaning. (Thank God I had a second litter box for my cats available, or I would’ve been SOL.) The auto-deodorizing feature goes off automatically for five minutes after each use and sounds like an airplane engine. There’s no way to turn it off; you can turn the power down to a lower level, but it’s still egregiously loud. Right now, I can’t recommend this model (mostly for safety reasons), but a lot of the design flaws could be fixed in future iterations to make it a solid choice.

Photograph: Molly Higgins

The Pet Zone Smart Scoop for $166: This is probably the least “smart” automatic litter box we’ve tested—it’s a typical rectangular plastic box with an automatic arm that acts as a rake and scoops the clumped (soiled) litter into a small bin on the other side. Once the cat leaves, it begins a 15-minute countdown and the rake slides over the length of the box, (ideally) scooping up the waste and lifting it into the receptacle. You’re only allowed to fill the device with about an inch and a half of litter, which my cats didn’t like (they prefer a few inches to really bury it). The rake doesn’t stop when it’s in the cleaning cycle—even if something jumps in, which is potentially dangerous. My cats tend to pee on the side of the litter box, which, because of the rake’s placement, means it misses an inch on either side—I still had to scrape the caked-on litter from the edges. The cycle timing can’t be adjusted, so the litter didn’t have time to clump completely, and the rake would immediately break it down into smaller clumps that would then be missed because they were too small. For me, the hassle’s not worth it, and I’d rather just scoop it myself.

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It’s 2005, and the computer room has been vibrating for two hours straight, my fingers gliding across the keyboard copying HTML and Java code while jamming to the latest R&B CD I burned. No, I’m not a computer programming wiz — I’m designing my MySpace page. I spend countless hours choosing the perfect song, trying to figure out why my About section header isn’t bold, and how to get those glittery GIFs to work.

I was in sixth grade when MySpace became popular, and today, my niece, an avid TikTok-er, is the same age I was back then. So after spending most of the summer rejecting my niece’s urgent requests to join in on her trending TikTok dances, I did what any researcher would do — start with “me-search.” I asked my niece what her TikTok would tell someone about her that they wouldn’t otherwise know.

“I’m trendy. I’m into fashion. I like to dance,” she said.

Thinking back to my constant MySpace page redesigning, Top 8 tweaks, and song choice updates, my obsession with getting the page just right wasn’t all that different from Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s TikTok fixation.

Granted, I could easily shut down the computer, leave the room, go hang out with friends, do homework, and not think about it until a new song hit me so deeply I thought, “this should be on my page!”

In contrast, observing my niece and her friends today, I wonder why kids just can’t get off that particular app.

Yes, there have been relative social and cultural changes since the mid-2000s, but there is one inimitable variable: the COVID-19 shutdowns. We heard a lot about Gen Z or “Zoomers,” during the COVID-19 pandemic, coming of age and entering college in virtual school classrooms. But the pandemic shutdowns also forced the newest generation at the time, Gen Alpha, to interact in the virtual world. I remember my niece’s last few months of kindergarten on Zoom. For career day, she said she wanted to be a “brain doctor,” so we dressed her up as a surgeon. Watching the kids excitedly scan their classmates’ Zoom boxes to guess each other’s costumes. Between this virtual reality and TikTok’s tweaks to its algorithms and features, we have the perfect storm for what psychologists call “short video addiction.”

This timeline doesn’t start with TikTok, but its accessible video creation lowered the stakes when the mass exodus from what used to be Twitter turned users toward other platforms that prioritize influencers and sponsored content in its feeds, making the average user a content- consuming doom scroller instead of a participant in —– our not-so-social —– social media. Over the past few years, surveys of user behavior have shown a downward trend in people posting and an increase in influencer and product ads. When TikTok’s low-stakes algorithms made going viral seem attainable for any user who can hop on a trending sound or dance, the rest of its competitors iterated — Instagram Reels, FaceBook Reels, YouTube Shorts — all on an eternally refreshing loop of new content.

With how much time and energy children today pour into videos and social media, it prompts the question of whether we can harness that for something potentially a little more productive: education.

Scroll Science

Can learning be as addictive as TikTok?

Well, let’s look at the science behind why it’s so addictive. You’ve probably heard about dopamine. It isn’t just our brain’s pleasure chemical — it’s also the learning signal that releases after unexpected rewards, especially from low-effort activity, like swiping from reel to reel and finding even better DIY project ideas you’ve been wanting to get to.

We experience either positive, negative, or zero reward prediction error, which keeps us striving for more rewards. Neuroscience research gives us a clear picture of what’s happening in our brains when we’re watching short-form videos. Our brains are constantly predicting what will happen next — it’s one of the ways we stay safe and make sense of the world. Reward prediction error is that chemical magic that happens when our prediction is wrong. It’s the same basic mechanism used to design slot machines and other variable-reward systems.

With endless video loops, when the next clip is better than we expected — the kind that’s so spot-on you immediately save it or send it to the group chat — our brain gives us a small dopamine boost. When a video is boring, we get no dopamine. When it’s disappointing, dopamine briefly dips. That constant cycle of maybe this next one will be great, new information, or useful is what keeps us scrolling.With every social media feed carefully curated for each user, there are dozens of algorithms learning what holds your gaze to feed you more of what will keep you on the app or website. For me, it’s funny parenting reels and home improvement YouTube Shorts. Of course I need to see the difference between galvanized and stainless steel screws for my next DIY project. That’s the sense of novelty and variable rewards that keeps us scrolling.

Lastly, because the feeds just keep feeding more content through the infinite scroll feature, there’s no natural stopping point, so there is never a cue to stop and end the scrolling session.

Recent neuroscience studies show that high TikTok usage can activate brain regions tied to impulse and habit formation. In another recent study, researchers looked at electroencephalogram, or EEG tests, to assess the relationship between youth and young adults’ frequent short video consumption and reduced attention control, higher levels of stress, and learning fatigue. These are the makings of short video addiction, a condition researchers suggest is worthy of a spot in the DSM-5.

We Can Make Learning As Addictive

But should we?

It sounds like a good idea. It reminds me of when adults would say, “if only you knew your times tables like you know those rap songs.” But in this case, it’s not as simple as putting math on hip-hop beats.

Imagine your child or student’s TikTok infinite scroll were actually mini-lessons on tectonic plates, followed by how a basketball arc follows a parabola, and each 30‑second video ended with a satisfying “aha” moment and a surprising new fact. The algorithm could learn what students enjoy and what they are struggling with, then feed them culturally relevant examples with humor and well-timed reveals. It would feel great, and your students might start saying, “Just one more reel,” as they send you GIFs and memes — seemingly addicted to learning!

Let’s look deeper at the science of learning. These techniques would likely keep students engaged, producing frequent dopamine hits, but for information to register as learning, though, we need a little more than dopamine and surprise rewards. Learning requires effortful processing, retrieval, and opportunities to apply ideas in new situations. Otherwise, our educational TikTok app prototype could fall into the loop of attention trap, making it easy to go from education to edu-tainment without the friction of problem-solving that makes learning stick.

This is where the attention trap shows up: a stream of highly optimized, bite-sized “aha” moments can keep eyes glued to the screen while quietly removing the productive friction of wrestling with problems, making choices, and getting feedback — the very processes that strengthen memory, understanding, and transfer. When the system does all the cognitive heavy lifting, students get edu‑tainment: they feel informed and interested, but they have not built the durable mental models that let them explain, use, or remember the ideas later.

Learning takes more than clever hooks and sticky formats. Digital experiences can be engaging — even addictive — but if they skip struggle and retrieval, they risk producing the illusion of learning rather than the real thing. As educators, the goal is not to compete with short‑form platforms on sheer stickiness, but to design experiences where attention is channeled into thinking, problem‑solving, and revisiting ideas over time.

Education apps can be addictive, but I’m not sure we want them to be. Then there might be too many people like me — addicted to the infinite scroll of YouTube Shorts on neuroscience and psychology research.