Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh each had their moment in the sun a century ago, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said Monday — and then the warning lights started flashing, and their leaders at the time failed to heed them.

“Well, here we are. It is 2026,” Smith said at a press conference, flanked by dozens of regional leaders, with the Seattle skyline behind them. “And the warning signs are flashing on our economy.”

Smith was speaking at the launch of the Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound, a Challenge Seattle initiative that brought together roughly 50 elected officials from King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties — two county executives, around 20 mayors, port commissioners and about a dozen state legislators — along with labor leaders and business executives, behind a 20-point plan for reversing the region’s slide.

The region lost nearly 7,000 jobs in 2025, according to a report issued by the group, the first time in two decades outside a recession or the pandemic that Seattle-area employment growth has trailed the nation’s. Washington has fallen from 32nd to 47th in CNBC’s ranking of states by cost of doing business since 2017.

An ‘intentional’ regional tech strategy: The report makes a pointed observation about technology: aerospace has a coordinated regional agenda and tech doesn’t, despite tech accounting for nearly one in 10 regional jobs and about 24% of total payroll.

Aerospace knows what it’s working on: the next airplane, the space industry, sustainable fuels, supplier diversification. Technology, “despite being one of Puget Sound’s defining economic anchors, does not yet have an equally intentional regional strategy,” the report says.

Without one, it adds, the region risks losing “jobs, technology investment, headquarters, talent, and company growth” to the Bay Area, New York, Boston and Austin. The goal is “not simply to promote growth, but to protect and strengthen the region’s position as a leading technology center.”

Challenge Seattle says it will write that strategy with the Puget Sound Regional Council, built around two priorities: keeping the big tech companies investing here, and making it easier for startups to scale. Related recommendations target industrial space for AI hardware startups, commercial space, and the region’s fusion cluster.

The report sets no budget or measure of success for the tech strategy, and no deadline beyond its general goal of progress within three years.

A regional wake-up call: Many of the recommendations are changes to how local government operates, not new spending: deadlines for permit decisions, a designated business contact in every city and county, and a strategy for dealing with the way taxes stack across state, county and city.

“This is, for us, a wake-up call,” said former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, CEO of Challenge Seattle, launching the initiative during the press conference. “We cannot resort to relying on yesterday’s success while tomorrow’s jobs go somewhere else.”

April Sims, president of the Washington State Labor Council, said businesses need predictability and enough margin to invest, innovate and take risks — but “working people need margins, too.”

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said his office has hired an economic development team and is beginning an internal permitting audit. “AI is transforming our economy seemingly overnight,” he said, calling the 7,000 lost jobs “quite alarming.”

The group also released a playbook for Puget Sound mayors, drawn from interviews and surveys with local leaders, on building what it calls a culture of partnership with business.

Seattle as a Microsoft litmus test: Asked by GeekWire during the press conference what it would take for Microsoft to return and grow in Seattle proper, where it previously had offices in South Lake Union, Smith first pointed out that he was standing in front of Redmond Mayor Angela Birney.

“We have a great mayor, and every day we get up and we’re excited to go to work in Redmond, Washington,” he said, to laughter from the assembled officials.

Smith also pushed back on the premise: Microsoft moved to the Eastside from Albuquerque in 1979 and never had a large presence in Seattle, so he wouldn’t use the city as the point of comparison.

Then he turned to Seattle’s JumpStart payroll expense tax.

@media (max-width: 600px) {
aside.callout { float:none !important; max-width:100% !important; margin-left:0 !important; margin-right:0 !important; }
aside.callout .callout-img { display:none !important; }
}

As structured, the payroll tax “is really a tax on tech jobs,” Smith said, “and that’s why you’re seeing more tech jobs move from Seattle to places like Bellevue and the Eastside.” He noted that San Francisco abolished its payroll tax the same year Seattle adopted one, in 2021.

“You should tax things you want to discourage, like cigarettes, not jobs,” he said.

He tied the issue to the larger impact of AI on jobs. “We need people to succeed to some degree in a world of AI,” Smith said. “And you don’t want to make the cost of employing people more expensive, at the same time that AI is increasingly adding its own new form of competition.”

“There’s nothing that would lead to the decline in jobs in this state faster than a replication of the JumpStart tax,” he said. “And if Seattle wanted to do one thing to increase jobs in Seattle, it ought to revisit whether a payroll tax makes any sense.”

Then he added a caveat: “That’s probably something that would impact other companies more than Microsoft.”

Amazon, which has been reported to be the largest payer of the tax, did not have a speaker at Monday’s event. Individual Amazon execs are listed in the acknowledgments in the Challenge Seattle report, though the report says participation doesn’t imply endorsement.

View from Olympia: During the press conference, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, was asked whether Washington risks becoming an outlier among states on taxes. The Legislature has been correcting course, he said, pointing to two moves from this year’s session.

One was the estate tax. Lawmakers raised the top rate to 35% in 2025, the highest in the country, and reversed themselves this March, returning it to 20% as of July.

The other was the millionaires tax — a 9.9% tax on household income above $1 million, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson and projected to raise roughly $3 billion a year. It doesn’t take effect until 2028, and Seattle tech leaders warned it would push founders and investors out of the state.

Pedersen cast it as the fix for a different kind of outlier status: Washington’s business and sales taxes are high because it’s one of the few states with no personal income tax at all. The new tax would let Washington “join 41 other states that have a personal income tax,” he said.

Voters get the last word in November. Initiative 645, backed by Let’s Go Washington, qualified for the ballot in July and would repeal the tax. If it survives, Pedersen said, a statewide payroll tax is “vanishingly unlikely” next session.

Seattle’s mayor weighs in: Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who was an architect of the JumpStart tax before running for office, was not among the speakers at the press conference. She opened the regional session that followed, and said the region needs to do a better job telling its own story.

“There are some forces and interests that are pushing a narrative that does not want Seattle or our region to succeed,” Wilson said, “and we must counter that with a new commitment to a shared sense of destiny, because Seattle’s success is Bellevue’s success, Pierce County’s success is Snohomish County’s success.”

She called it a fragile moment and said the time to act is now, pointing to the economic actions she announced last week in conjunction with an independent report commissioned by the city and released by Seattle’s Office of Economic Development.

That report, “Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy,” found Seattle’s tax structure unique among peer cities in the way it “specifically penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers,” with the burden falling overwhelmingly on large tech employers.

Hiring a software engineer at $650,000 in total compensation costs about $17,000 more a year in Seattle than in Bellevue at JumpStart’s top rate, the researchers found.

The city report, conducted by the economic consulting firm Formation, said Seattle should bet on cleantech, the sector where the city owns the utility, writes the building codes and controls permitting and land use. It’s one place where Seattle has real leverage over its own economy, the researchers argued.

“It’s striking how much agreement we share across labor, businesses, and government,” Wilson said. “This is not a call to ignore our challenges, but to tackle them with a shared sense of possibility.”

She did not address the payroll tax in her remarks.

Source link

Photo credit: The Kyza
Khyzyl Saleem stretched Hyundai’s IONIQ 5 N into a Group B-inspired rally car that looks ready to leave the tarmac and start hunting special stages. Saleem produced the renders for Hyundai USA as a follow-up to last month’s Baja Santa Fe concept, packing the already angular N hatch with period-correct 1980s rally aggression and a bodykit that completely changes its proportions.

Saleem rebuilt the nose around a deep carbon-fiber splitter that extends well forward, and he put more LED lighting across a massively vented hood. Ultra-wide fender extensions flare out over the wheels and conceal cooling intakes designed to feed whatever powertrain is housed behind the cabin. Those arches transform the relatively tall manufacturing IONIQ 5 N into a low, planted machine that Saleem calls huge.

LEGO Speed Champions Ken Block’s ’65 Ford Mustang Hoonicorn V1 77262

• CUSTOM MUSTANG RACE CAR – This LEGO Speed Champions Ken Block’s ’65 Ford Mustang Hoonicorn V1 (77262) building toy for boys and girls ages 9 years…
• AUTHENTIC DETAILS – Builders will recognize cool features from the car’s debut in the 2014 Gymkhana SEVEN film, including exposed velocity stacks on…
• KEN BLOCK MINIFIGURE – The included Ken Block minifigure features a Hoonicorn hat and jacket, plus an extra helmet accessory for added play value

Flying buttresses rise from the back fenders to reach the C-pillars, resembling the Lancia Delta S4. IONIQ 5’s greenhouse already had subtle Delta proportions, so the additional building feels like a logical expansion rather than decoration. Lexan windows and a visible roll cage complete the particular stage treatment.

The main version’s tail features a massive rear wing and matching diffuser. Saleem also created a second take with a smaller wing and bronze paint, which looks like a road-legal homologation special. Both are mounted on five-spoke black alloy wheels. A third Instagram set features a wingless black treatment that Saleem refers to as Birmingham spec, a cleaner look he prefers.

Saleem favors the idea of running a roaring turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder from Hyundai’s current WRC i20 N Rally1 cars, positioned midship if packaging allows. A rotary is his second preference. Current Rally1 rules limit that turbo four to around 375 horsepower after the hybrid system is removed, which is far less than the 641 horsepower previously produced by the stock dual-motor Ioniq 5 N. Hyundai never competed in Group B, but has raced in the WRC since the Accent program in 2000, winning manufacturers’ titles with the i20 in 2019 and 2020, and a drivers’ title with Thierry Neuville in 2025.

Saleem created the concept using 3ds Max and Corona. For the time being, the Group B IONIQ 5 N remains on screen, but the widebody stance and period features create a compelling case for what a Hyundai rally monster from that era may have looked like.
[Source]

Source link

Source link

BuyWander, an auction-based online marketplace for returned and overstocked retail items, announced Tuesday that it has raised $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group and Inspired Capital.

The fresh capital comes on the heels of the startup relocating its headquarters from Spokane, Wash., to the Seattle area to tap into the region’s deep pool of tech and retail talent and accelerate its nationwide warehouse expansion.

Founded in 2023 by CEO Jordan Allen and CFO Brock Kowalchuk, BuyWander connects bargain-seeking shoppers with inventory from major retailers like Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Home Depot.

Bidding on all items starts at $1 in fixed seven-day auctions, with customers picking up their winning purchases directly from local fulfillment centers to bypass shipping costs. The new funding — which brings total raised to date to $28 million — will fuel technology investments and power nationwide market expansion following recent warehouse launches in Denver and Chicago.

“This is blue ocean right now,” Allen said in an interview with GeekWire. “Nobody’s really built an incredibly strong consumer brand in this retail return space — what we call the intersection of the weird meets the wonderful underneath this misfit inventory. These items deserve a second chance, and as people have to tighten up their wallets, we’re an incredible option for them to buy the things they want and love.”

BuyWander officially relocated its corporate headquarters from Spokane to the Seattle area in August, establishing its central hub out of Kent, Wash., where 45 of its employees are based. The startup initially entered the region with a cramped facility to prove out local demand, but recently upgraded to a 52,000-square-foot warehouse that can process three to five times more volume for local shoppers.

Across its expanding national footprint — which now spans eight fulfillment locations — BuyWander’s total workforce has surged to 325 people, with the vast majority working in intake, stocking, and customer service.

“Spokane was a wonderful place to start the company,” Kowalchuk said. “It was where we were living at the time, and we were able to get a lot of feedback very iteratively. But getting to the size where we are today and building out that leadership team really requires a little bit more talent density that Seattle can provide with deep roots in retail and deep roots in tech.”

Allen previously founded Stay Alfred, a Spokane-based short-term rental company that shut down in 2020, amid the pandemic, after expanding to more than 30 cities.

Behind the scenes, AI is now helping BuyWander process and list hundreds of thousands of unique items each month. Historically, manual data entry and poor photography created a bottleneck for resale platforms. Today, automated tools instantly identify returned products, pull in retail valuations, and generate detailed listings with a single click.

“There’s been a ceiling on this business historically because of the technology required,” Allen said, adding that AI now optimizes everything from auction scheduling to appointment bookings. “It feels like World War II and Star Trek at the same time and we’re merging these two worlds together.”

To better capture regional markets, BuyWander plans to increase facility density in key metro areas. In the Puget Sound region, Allen noted that traffic and geography often create a barrier between regional hubs, pointing to plans to open four to five warehouses across the greater Seattle area over the next few years to keep pickup convenient for local shoppers.

Beyond bargain hunting, the circular model addresses a massive environmental headache for retailers, who often dispose of returned goods simply because their systems aren’t built to re-process them locally.

@media (max-width: 600px) {
aside.callout { float:none !important; max-width:100% !important; margin-left:0 !important; margin-right:0 !important; }
aside.callout .callout-img { display:none !important; }
}

Total U.S. retail returns reach roughly $850 billion annually, driven heavily by online shopping, where return rates hover near 20%, according to data from the National Retail Federation and Happy Returns. For retailers, processing a single return can cost between 20% and 65% of the item’s original retail price once return shipping, inspection, and restocking are factored in — making local secondary marketplaces an increasingly vital alternative to taking a total loss.

“Some of these brands and retailers were throwing this stuff away, and it just feels kind of criminal,” Allen said, pointing out how returned items often get trucked back and forth across the country. “You can buy a Seahawks jersey, and it gets returned in the mail back to Hebron, Kentucky, and ends up loaded up on a truck, ending up in Miami. The stars really align when the stuff can be sold locally where the demand already was to begin with.”

BuyWander’s expansion is backed by rapid operational momentum, hitting 400% year-over-year growth as it expands nationally. The platform now counts 50,000 active and winning customers who have saved a cumulative $200 million — averaging roughly $4,000 in savings per customer. Over the past month alone, the company sold nearly 500,000 unique items across its eight warehouse locations, with goods selling for an average discount of 75% off retail prices.

According to Kowalchuk, roughly 80% of the returned goods arrive in “appears new” condition with only minor packaging damage. About 80% of buyers are end consumers using the platform for everyday shopping, while 20% are local resellers — a customer base Allen says grows almost entirely organically, with nine out of 10 shoppers joining via word-of-mouth referrals.

The platform offers a sprawling, unpredictable lineup of products — having sold everything from electronic cow milkers, log splitters, and commercial ice cream machines to everyday staples like hair dryers and air fryers.

“It is probably one of the best product discovery platforms out there,” Allen said, predicting the company will eventually sell a bit of everything listed on the internet. “We’ll get hilariously fun items, like foam blasters right after spring break or 12-foot tall skeletons right after Halloween. That’s why it’s odd, and that’s why the deals are so good.”

Source link

Agility Robotics unveiled the next version of its Digit humanoid robot, which it says is designed to work safely alongside people in warehouses and factories without the barriers that are usually required.

The Salem, Ore.-based company, which is preparing to go public through a $2.5 billion SPAC merger, said Digit 5 is its first humanoid built for “cooperatively safe” work at scale.

The robot uses AI and multiple sensors to watch for nearby people. Depending on the situation, it steers around them, stops or sits down. Visual and audio cues signal what it’s about to do, and a separate safety controller triggers its responses when someone gets too close.

Digit 5 can lift up to 50 pounds, 40% more than its predecessor, and reach objects as high as 7.2 feet off the ground, up from 5.5 feet, according to the company. A new battery runs for 90 minutes and recharges in 9 minutes, which Agility says allows more than 20 hours of work in a 24-hour day. Its grippers can be swapped for different jobs.

“We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors,” said Agility CEO Peggy Johnson, a former Microsoft executive and Magic Leap CEO, in the announcement.

Digit 4, the current model, has mostly moved totes, logging more than 65,000 hours at customers including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm, according to the company. Agility says Digit 5 will take on more of a facility’s work — unloading pallets, tending machines, gathering parts and inspecting items before loading them back onto pallets for shipment.

Amazon, an early Agility investor, has run multiple pilots of earlier Digit models, including one GeekWire observed at a warehouse south of Seattle in 2023. It bought five Digit robots for $1.05 million, according to Agility’s S-4 registration statement, filed with the SEC this month in connection with its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company.

Agility says it had more than $300 million in multi-year orders for Digit 5 as of May, contingent on hitting certain milestones. According to the S-4, those orders are from one customer, for 1,000 robots over three years. The filing doesn’t name the customer, but it also describes a May deal for at least 1,000 robots with a “related party,” an accounting term for those with close ties to a company, such as major investors.

Agility had $1.78 million in net sales in 2025, up from $310,000 the year before. Its loss from operations doubled to $140.2 million.

Its auditor, Grant Thornton, included a going-concern warning in the report, citing substantial doubt about the company’s ability to keep operating. Agility said in the filing that the cash forecasts behind that conclusion didn’t take into account the SPAC deal, which the companies said in June could provide more than $620 million in gross cash proceeds before any shareholder redemptions.

In the S-4, Agility names Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apptronik, Figure AI and 1X Technologies among its competitors, many of which it describes as well-funded.

Early access to Digit 5 is expected to begin in the first half of 2027, with general availability by the end of the year. The robots are assembled at the company’s RoboFab factory in Salem, which is designed to produce up to 10,000 robots a year.

Source link

When machinists with decades of experience retire, everything they know about how metal behaves under a cutting tool — or anything else they learned through a career of scrapped parts and expensive mistakes — walks out the door with them.

A startup with roots in Seattle, started by two founders in their 20s, is building technology to capture that knowledge long before that point.

Neuramill, founded last year by CEO Nistha Mitra and COO Nick Khormaei, is developing what the company calls an intelligence layer for high-precision manufacturing.

The software reads a design file and figures out how the part should be made: which tools, which machines, and in what order. A machinist reviews and approves every plan before anything reaches the floor.

“This is a high-skill job, and nobody’s retaining this information,” Mitra said. When the machinists who know how to build complex jet engine parts retire, she said, that knowledge goes with them. “We help retain that for the future generation.”

Khormaei said the two founders spent much of the past year visiting machine shops to watch how the work gets done.

“The craft itself is so impressive,” he said. “They’re able to look at these drawings and models that come in and know exactly how to build it. It’s like they’re doing real-time physics simulation.”

Early customers and partners: The company says it has closed a six-figure contract with a major defense contractor, one of the companies known in the industry as primes. Neuramill declined to name the contractor.

Two of the machine shops using the software are Diamond Machine Works, a Seattle precision machining company founded in 1959, and VTN Manufacturing in San Jose, Calif. Satellite maker Astranis is a design partner.

Mitra said the company is not yet selling broadly, but has been paid by some of the early customers testing the software.

How they got here: Mitra, 26, has a computer science degree from the University of Maryland and spent three years at Oracle, most recently as an AI applied scientist in Seattle, working on multimodal models that reason across several kinds of data at once.

Khormaei, 24, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He was a propulsion engineer at Boeing in Everett, where he worked on 777X fuel system electrical certification, and then spent part of last year at SpaceX as an integration and test engineer on Starlink manufacturing in Redmond.

He also grew up around machining. His father, Ron Khormaei, co-founded FINEX Cast Iron Cookware in Portland in 2012 and sold it to Lodge in 2019. Khormaei worked production there as a teenager.

Where the software fits in: Neuramill’s technology works at a stage that has stayed largely manual: after the design file arrives, and before a programmer opens the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software that translates decisions into machine instructions.

Rather than position the company against Siemens and Mastercam, Mitra said Neuramill plugs into those systems. The company recently joined Siemens’ Frontier Partner Program, which gives startups access to the company’s software tools.

“At this point we are very collaborative with these companies,” she said, adding that the established vendors are looking for new technology of their own.

Bay Area and Seattle: Both founders worked in the Seattle region before leaving for San Francisco, a move Mitra described to GeekWire in February. They are back every four or five weeks now, working out of Foundations, the Seattle founder hub.

“We love this ecosystem. It gave birth to Neuramill,” Mitra said. They keep coming back in part for the customers: “This is a booming ecosystem in space and in aerospace.”

Funding and team: Neuramill has raised an undisclosed amount from Ascend, Breakwater Ventures, Schema Ventures, Creative Destruction Lab, Acequia Capital and Correlation Ventures.

The team is six people plus a contractor: the two founders, a chief research scientist who worked with Mitra at Oracle, and three engineers, one of them a machinist.

What’s next: The long-term goal, Mitra said, is a “world model” for manufacturing: a system that can reason across geometry, materials and machine behavior at any level of complexity. Even then, she sees a role for the people on the shop floor.

“There is a beauty to the craft of manufacturing that we should really respect,” she said. “There are some places where humans should not be extracted out of an industry, and I think manufacturing is one of them.”

Source link

Source link

Future Motion’s Santa Cruz shop looks out on the Pacific. About thirty feet from the door sits a stretch of abandoned railroad Kyle Doerksen had been staring at for years. In September 2026 he pulled a bone-stock XR Classic off the shelf and decided that line was going to carry a Onewheel.

The plan was simple: insert a railroad axle through the hole that ordinarily houses the hub motor. First, lift the motor out of the way. Teach a gearless direct-drive engine to pull a chain rather than spinning a hub while keeping the self-balancing board’s brain intact, allowing the rider to maneuver by leaning. They cut up the stock frame and added some CNC mounts in the middle so the motor could sit on top of the deck instead of taking up the former wheel space. Then they slapped some massive steel rail wheels from eBay, weighing over 70 pounds, onto an axle that now serves as the original center line. The first test run consisted of just the axle and wheels on the tracks, with no motor or board, to ensure that the gage was accurate. When the steel slid easily over the steel, it was very much a green signal.

INMOTION E20 Electric Unicycle with Dual Tires for Easier Self-Balancing

• Safe & Reliable: Certified to ANSI/CAN/UL 2272
• Unlike traditional electric unicycles, which typically have one wheel and one tire, the INMOTION E20 features a single wheel with dual tires. This…
• The E20 is designed for simplicity and stability. Our proprietary dynamic self-balancing algorithm maintains both front and rear balance…

Kyle disassembled the hub and turned the housing on a lathe until the flanges were tiny enough for a chain sprocket to fit. He needed a custom end cover to go onto the motor for a bike sprocket. The chain then drops from the sprocket to the train axle. Bearing carriers began as 3D printouts, but they had to be sanded down to clear some wire, and after the fit was correct, they were simply cut out of aluminum.

The same sensors that keep a standard Onewheel upright continue to power the self-balancing feature. Lean forward, and the controller nudges the hub in that direction, but now it rotates a sprocket rather than a wheel. Rails lock the item left to right, but the rider may still alter the pitch with their ankles and toes. The result is a good guided cart that nevertheless responds to the rider.

The first time they moved the thing and turned the cart on, it was noisy, but eventually everything settled down. Kyle thought the motion was incredibly smooth, “like butter.” The crew claimed it looked like flying and was so smooth it hurt their minds. So they started chanting “all aboard” for a cause. Future Motion isn’t selling a conversion kit, though; instead, he’s talking about riding out to Capitola or Davenport and how there are a plethora of self-balancing rail cars just waiting to be created. For the time being, the Rail Board consists of a converted XRC, a couple of heavy eBay wheels, a length of chain, and a quiet small section of track outside the office, complete with a rider.
[Source]

Source link

Unlike most of its social media rivals, Snap hasn’t made many big bets on AI. The company has added a bunch of generative AI-powered features to Snapchat, but it hasn’t made the technology a central focus.

Now, the company is introducing a new standalone AI assistant alongside its redesigned AR glasses. Called Specs Intelligence, the “anticipatory AI service” will feature prominently in Snap’s hardware, but will also have dedicated desktop and mobile apps for those who don’t have a pair of glasses.

Snap doesn’t describe Specs Intelligence as an agent or assistant, but its description will sound familiar to anyone who followed Meta’s recent Muse announcement. “Specs Intelligence builds an understanding of your goals, priorities, relationships, and routines from the apps and tools you choose to connect,” the company explains in a blog post.

Specs Intelligence is separate from Snapchat and sounds much more productivity-focused than anything we’ve previously seen from the company. The assistant relies on connections to users’ outside accounts, like Google, to surface timely reminders and other relevant info based on what it knows about you. For example, the company says, it could highlight “questions to ask, and things to remember” before a meeting or show travel plans ahead of a trip. It’s also able to organize info into different “corners” based on the context in which you need them, like keeping family-related tasks separate from work deadlines.

Advertisement

Snap

If you do have a pair of AR Specs, the assistant can surface relevant info directly into your field of view. Specs owners will be able to ask it questions by saying “Hey Specs.” The feature wasn’t available during my demo with Specs, though I was able to launch a browser window by saying “Hey Specs,” but it sounds similar to some aspects of how Meta AI works with the company’s glasses.

It also seems like Snap is hoping to get ahead of some of the privacy concerns people have had with Meta’s approach. The company says it won’t use Specs intelligence to train its AI models or serve ads and that “Snap personnel cannot view or access the personal content you use with the service.”

Snap is making a limited version of Specs Intelligence available in the US to try now via the Specs app on iOS. The preview version will allow users to connect their Google accounts to see “insights about where you spend your time and attention” but won’t feature proactive suggestions. The “full early-access” version will be invite-only to start and only available with Specs’ Mac app. Anyone interested can sign up for the waitlist now.

Source link

Source link