Personalizing your Spotify playlist by uploading your own covert art image is a great way to put a visual stamp on your audio mix, but now, you can design that cover art right in the app.  Starting today as a beta feature in English in 65 markets, the “Create Cover Art” feature gives users the ability to pick backgrounds, create text effects, and add stickers to generate an original piece of cover art for their playlists. It’s available to both free and Spotify Premium users.

Accessing the new feature is as simple as opening a playlist you’ve created, selecting the context menu (the three dots … ) and choosing Create Cover Art. You’ll then be given the choice to change the cover image (by uploading) or to create covert art.

Selecting create covert art opens an editor view with your playlist’s name appearing over a default background. This default background is randomly chosen, so sometimes you’ll be given a solid color like blue or green, while other times you may see a gradient or a rainbow.

You don’t need to keep the name of the playlist — you can add or remove text, play with sizes and colors, and pick from several effects. The sticker list isn’t very big, but you can add as many as you like, and they can be resized to create interesting options. Once you’re satisfied with your creation and save it, it will automatically update on your playlist, which can be shared through all of the usual channels.

Your creativity is limited only by your imagination — and by Spotify’s existing Platform Rules. According to the company:

“Spotify is monitoring for violating content in Cover Art, and users can always report playlists for potential violations of Spotify’s Platform Rules. Listeners can still upload their own images to use as part of their custom playlist cover art. For additional design elements, you can use those available within the beta feature including text, color and stickers for further customization. Note, users must own or have the right to post any images uploaded into the feature and follow Spotify’s Platform Rules.”

If Spotify removes your cover art for violating its rules, there’s not much you can do to get it back — unless you live in the EU. Apparently EU residents alone are able to appeal Spotify’s content moderation decisions.

Will folks rush to customize their playlists? It seems like a reasonable assumption given their massive popularity. According to the company, more than 8 billion playlists have been created to date.

Want to create your own playlist, but wish someone would help you curate it? Spotify recently launched an AI playlist creation tool. The company has also partnered with Instagram to give Spotify users one-tap song saves when they discover new tracks on the Meta-owned social network.

Google has introduced a new update to Google Photos, improving its sharing menu. The latest change allows users to add more photos to share with an app without going through multiple steps. The update first noticed on Pixel devices running Android 15 by Smartdroid, simplifies the process for bulk sharing photos. This adjustment addresses user feedback regarding the complexity of the previous system.

Google Photos share menu adds more flexibility

The new update simplifies how users share images from Google Photos. Previously, sharing multiple images required extra steps, either by selecting multiple photos before hitting the share button or manually modifying the selection once inside the share menu. This sometimes felt cumbersome, particularly when users forgot to choose multiple images beforehand.

Now, the new Google Photos share menu enables users to swipe through images directly within the sharing panel. This new feature offers more flexibility by letting users add or remove photos before sending them to another app or contact. It removes the need to backtrack through the photo gallery to modify the selection.

The new sharing feature is reportedly being rolled out on devices running Android 15, with some Pixel 9 users already experiencing the update. According to reports, the Google Photos share menu now allows users to swipe left and right to browse through images without leaving the sharing panel. This swipe feature makes it easier to refine selections without disrupting the sharing process.

A gradual rollout

Android Police reports on the feature’s availability vary across devices. For instance, some users on Pixel 9 devices running Android 15 have confirmed the new functionality. However, others using Pixel 8 devices have not yet seen the change.

Interestingly, some iPhone users have already noticed the update in their Google Photos app. This shows that the rollout is not limited to Android devices. The update isn’t yet available to all users. However, the gradual rollout suggests it will soon reach a wider audience. This new feature is the latest in a series of updates to improve the experience for millions of users worldwide.

Netflix’s gaming arm is best known for its indie and mobile titles, but the company recently made a push into AAA by hiring execs from high-profile franchises like Halo, Overwatch and God of War. That strategy may be coming to an end, though, as Netflix is shutting down its AAA studio known as Team Blue, the company confirmed to Game File.

In 2022, Netflix brought on former Overwatch boss Chacko Sonny to head up a new SoCal-based AAA studio. A year later, former Halo exec Joseph Staten was hired on as Creative Director, followed by God of War art director Rafael Grassetti. At the time, both Staten said he was working on a multi-platform AAA game with all-new IP.

Those executives are no longer with the company and Netflix confirmed to Game File that Team Blue has been shut down. Engadget reached out to Staten and Grassetti for comment.

Netflix got into gaming in 2017 with its retro-inspired Stranger Things mobile game. In the following years, its strategy was primarily centered around obtaining mobile publishing rights to respected indie titles like Into the Breach and Terra Nil. It also built a number of mobile games in-house. In 2023, Netflix had nearly 90 such titles in development with in-house and partner studios.

Those can be accessed through Netflix’s app and played directly on your device, so they fit in pretty well with its overall streaming strategy. The Team Blue studio venture didn’t quite line up as neatly with that model, though, which made it a bit of a surprise. As Engadget’s Igor Bonifacic noted at the time, “funding the development of a multiplatform AAA game is significantly more ambitious and, it should be noted, risky.”

Back in 2022, João Moura was directing AI engineering efforts at Clearbit, a startup creating a unified hub for business intelligence tools. There, Moura was responsible for leading the development of AI integrations, as well as defining Clearbit’s AI product roadmap.

After a year, HubSpot acquired Clearbit, and Moura had the itch to go it alone. He’d founded startups before, including Urdog, which sold a smart collar for pets. But this go-around, Moura had a more technically ambitious concept in mind.

Moura’s newest company, CrewAI, aims to automate repetitive, back-office tasks like summarizing reports and onboarding employees. Customers can build workflow automations using CrewAI’s platform, then deploy and track them from a dashboard.

CrewAI doesn’t train AI models itself. Rather, the company taps models from vendors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to drive automations. Companies can build workflows on top of the apps they already use to automate things like enriching marketing databases, analyzing customer feedback, and forecasting trends.

Moura pitches CrewAI as an alternative to robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA drives workflow automation. But it’s a much more rigid form based on “if-then” preset rules.

“We have made it easy for teams to build groups of AI ‘agents’ to perform tasks using any model, integrate with more than a thousand different applications, and to do so in a way that protects their data privacy,” Moura said. “We encourage our customers to try multiple models and pick the models that provide the best results for specific business use cases.”

RPA is indeed brittle — and error-prone. A 2022 survey from Robocorp, an RPA vendor, found that of the organizations that said they’d adopted RPA, 69% experienced broken workflows at least once weekly. Entire businesses have been made out of helping enterprises manage their RPA installations and prevent them from breaking.

Of course, AI can break, too — or rather, hallucinate and suffer from the effects of bias. Still, Moura argues that it’s a far more resilient tech than RPA.

Investors seem to agree. CrewAI has raised $18 million across seed and Series A rounds from backers including Boldstart Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital, and Insight Partners. Coursera co-founder and AI enterpreneur Andrew Ng has also invested, as has Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot.

CrewAI has competition in spades. Orby, Bardeen (which also has funding from HubSpot), Tektonic, 11x.ai, Twin Labs, and Emergence are all developing similar AI-powered, business-focused workflow automation products. Traditional RPA vendors like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, meanwhile, are working to incorporate more AI tech into their tools in an effort to stay relevant.

To its credit, CrewAI, which is currently valued at around $100 million, has managed to attract a sizeable number of customers — 150 — in its first year. (CrewAI launched in January.) And it’s angling to land more with Enterprise Cloud, a new managed subscription plan.

Built on top of open source components CrewAI has released over the past year, Enterprise Cloud provides additional access controls and analytics to help secure and audit automations. Subscribers also get “VIP” support and templates for workflows.

“We are seeing 100,000 groups of multi-AI executions per day across hundreds of different use cases,” Moura said. “Given our current pipeline, we could be cash-flow-positive by next summer.”

CrewAI, which is based in San Francisco and Brazil, plans to use the cash it has raised so far to grow its 16-person workforce and expand its core automation products.