Airbnb plans to double down on artificial intelligence to improve its user experience for both guests and hosts. During a fourth-quarter earnings call, Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, said the company is building an “AI-native experience” aimed at helping guests book trips, assisting hosts with their listings, and running the company more efficiently. According to Chesky, there’s an AI search tool to help guests book trips that’s live for a small percentage of users right now.
In a shareholder letter posted on Airbnb’s website, the company said it’s conducting early testing with an AI-powered search that is “focused on giving guests a more natural way to describe what they’re looking for, and ask questions about the listing and location.” The letter added that the AI search tool will become “a more comprehensive and intuitive search experience that extends through the trip,” but the company didn’t offer a definitive date on when it would be available to the public.
While it may feel like Airbnb is late to incorporating AI into its ecosystem, it introduced an AI chatbot that handles customer service requests last year. While the AI agent is only available to users in North America currently, Airbnb said that it already handles a third of customer requests without the need for human intervention, as reported by TechCrunch. Chesky also said during the earnings call that the AI chatbot would tackle “significantly more” customer tickets a year from now and that it would roll out to the rest of the world.
As we wait for the broader redesign, Gboard for Android is getting a nice quality-of-life improvement with the “auto-switch after apostrophes” shortcut.
Update 2/14: “Auto-switch after apostrophes” has widely rolled out to stable users (version 16.7) in the past week. It’s enabled by default.
Original 1/22: Gboard can now “Automatically switch back to the letter keyboard after an apostrophe.” Previously, you had to press the space bar or use the ‘?123’ key in the bottom-left corner.
This lets you immediately complete a possessive noun or contraction. You’ll see a prompt when this is rolled out to your device. You have the option to disable from Settings > Preferences > Shortcuts.
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We’re currently seeing “Auto-switch after apostrophes” in the beta channel (version 16.6). It’s not yet widely rolled out for testers.
Speaking of Settings, Gboard has rolled out the Material 3 Expressive redesign as of version 16.5 in the stable channel. It’s a straightforward modernization that makes use of containers to group together relevant menus on the main list. Individual pages have also been updated.
Google is also testing a redesign of the shortcuts page, as well as rounded keys.
More on Gboard:
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SPRINGFIELD — After six days of an intensive search. Juan Nieves’ body was discovered Saturday by a detective who followed footsteps in the snow on Clough Street.
The body of Nieves, a 57-year-old with dementia, was discovered around 3 p.m. next to a residential building on the campus of the YWCA, according to police and the agency’s top executive.
“It was just heartbreaking,” said Liz Dineen, the CEO of the agency whose mission is to help victims of domestic violence. “I feel so terribly for his family.”
Nieves slipped out of his home at Manor Court in the early evening of Super Bowl Sunday. He was wearing only boxer shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. He lived in the complex off Allen Street with his elderly parents, police said.
His body was recovered less than a mile from his home.
The police search employed foot patrols, drones, helicopter surveillance and K-9 units scouring the city’s East Forest Park neighborhood and beyond.
Dineen said Nieves’ supine body was discovered during a search of the area where piles of snow had fallen from the roof. The discovery occurred as the temperatures rose and the snow began to melt.
“I think he froze pretty quickly. If he had been in a seated position he would have been found sooner,” said Dineen, a former prosecutor, who went to the scene of the discovery.
She said local residents and Nieves’ family members had also joined in the search.
“They were just totally bereft. Heartbroken,” Dineen said. “It’s just very sad.”
Much has changed for Jenny Wang, the founder who’s bringing “Clueless” fashion tech to life.
Last year, her company, Alta, raised $11 million in a round led by Menlo Ventures to let users create digital closets and try on their clothes with their own virtual avatars. It’s a tech once seen only in movies, most notably in “Clueless,” where Cher styles and plans her outfits using computer technology. Alta is similar to that, allowing users to plan and style outfits using the latest AI innovations.
A slew of big names participated in Atla’s round last year, including models Jasmine Tookes and Karlie Kloss, Anthropic’s VC arm Anthology Fund, and Rent the Runway cofounder Jenny Fleiss.
TechCrunch caught up with Wang during New York Fashion Week to talk about how the company has expanded since that round.
For starters, the product is officially in the app store; Time and Vogue named it one of the best innovations of last year, and Wang said more than 100 million outfits have been generated on the platform since its launch in 2023. It has partnerships with Poshmark and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, with more partnerships to be announced soon.
“Alta’s own app also features thousands of brands that users can shop from,” Wang said.
Right now, the company is focused on building app and website integration experiences for brands, she said, where customers can try on a designer’s clothing using a personalized Alta Avatar. This week, the company unveiled its first integration collaboration, teaming up with Public School, a storied New York City brand.
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“Shoppers can style looks from the new collection on their own Alta avatar,” Wang said.
She met the Public School team — Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne — through the founder of Poshmak, who is also an angel investor in both companies.
“Public School designers Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne had been looking for an AI partner and virtual try-on avatar solution, and Dao-Yi has been an Alta app user himself,” Wang said.
Public School actually went on hiatus for a few years, with this NYFW marking its grand re-debut. When asked, the founders of the brand said they rediscovered their voices and what they wanted to say.
“We have to look at tech as a partner in the business today,” Chow told TechCrunch, adding, “It’s not 2015 anymore,” so the team wants to take advantage of the latest technological developments. “We want to be thoughtful on how we use tech and AI,” he continued, “not as a design tool but as a tool to extend our storytelling and a tool to interact with the consumer and have them experience the brand even if they can’t do so in person.”
Image Credits:Alta
Wang said this is one of the first instances of a designer embedding personal avatar and styling technology into its own website. Near the bottom of Public School’s product page, there is an icon that says Style by Alta. Clicking that takes the customer to Alta for them to then style their avatars and test out how Public School clothing would look on them, should they purchase.
Users on Alta’s standalone app can also access Public School through Alta’s app. Wang said the goal is for Alta to integrate more experiences like this into other brands and websites, so Alta users can try on clothes on other websites even while outside the Alta app.
“Right now, a user would have to add a potential purchase into their Alta wishlist, then style outfits and try on their avatar, versus being able to do that directly on the brand website.” (For every site but Public School, that is.) “The goal is to bring their community on a new journey to engage with and shop the brand.”
Many major fashion brands, like Zara and Balmain, have already experimented with digital avatars. Wang said what makes Alta different here, especially compared to Zara, is that Alta avatars can put on at least 8 items within seconds, whereas Zara avatars can wear only four and often take around two minutes.
Overall, demand for virtual avatars has increased. Wang considers Alta both still the “Cluless” technology that it started out with, and a digital avatar business.
“The consumer Alta app is the ‘Clueless’ closet, while the enterprise Alta experience allows shoppers to style pieces and try the outfits on their pre-existing Alta avatar,” he said. Eventually, Wang said she wants Alta to be the “personal identity layer for the future of consumer AI and shopping.”
For agentic commerce to truly work, she said, “We need a data layer that understands the shopper’s style preferences, such as their closet, past purchases, and their avatar, likeness, and body, which is Alta.”
Sony’s wireless WH-1000XM6 headphones are on sale for $398 via Amazon. This is a record-low price, as it drops $62 from the price tag. The sale applies to all three colorways.
These easily topped our list of the best wireless headphones. They are, in a word, fantastic. The headphones are packed with premium features, like advanced ANC. There are a whopping 12 ANC microphones throughout and a brand-new chip to power the feature. The end result? It successfully blocks background noise at medium and high frequencies, including the human voice.
Sony
This is a record-low price.
The sound quality is extremely pleasing to the ears, thanks to new audio drivers and a team of mastering engineers that assisted with tuning. There are perforations in the driver’s voice coil, which extends high frequency reproduction.
The design has been upgraded from the previous iteration and we found them extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time, which is important with headphones. The battery gets around 30 hours, which is a fairly standard metric for this type of thing.
The only real major nitpick here is the original asking price. It’s tough to recommend any pair of headphones for $460, but a bit easier at under $400.
Besides replacing Developer Previews, the Android 17 Beta cycle is operating on a faster release schedule.
The continuous Android Canary channel introduced last year has replaced Developer Previews. Last cycle, we had two DPs in November and December, with the first Beta in January.
Despite the late start, Android 17 looks to be getting a stable launch in June 2026. That’s when the next opt-out without a data wipe is coming.
In March, the next beta will bring the Platform Stability milestone that offers final SDK/NDK APIs and largely final app-facing behaviors.
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We’re going to be moving quickly from this Beta to our Platform Stability milestone, targeted for March.
Compared to previous cycles, Google is being less firm about what other betas are coming. The graphic and “About” page usually indicate how many releases are coming. There’s just “Later Beta releases” this year.
Beta 1: Initial beta-quality release, over-the-air update to developers and early adopters who enroll in Android Beta.
Later Beta releases: Incremental Beta-quality release
That said, we’d expect April and May releases for a total of three major releases that align with the QPR (Quarterly Platform Release) cycle.
Android 17
Android 16
Google acknowledged that there will be a 26Q3 (presumably called “17 QPR1”) release and bigger 26Q4 (“17 QPR2”) update, with 27Q1 (“17 QPR3”) rounding things out. One thing to note is how several posts this week referred to releases using that year-quarter nomenclature that’s arguably a bit more descriptive than QPR[x].
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A Babson College student who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration must be returned, a federal judge ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns ordered that Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 20-year-old student at Babson, must be brought back from Honduras within 14 days of the ruling.
“In this unfortunate case, the government commendably admits that it did wrong,” the judge wrote in his order. “Now it is time for the government to make amends.”
Stearns ordered the government to file a status report by Feb. 18, detailing a “tangible” plan to bring Lopez Belloza back to the U.S. by the Feb. 27 deadline.
A judge issued a temporary stay of removal while she was still in the United States, but because of an admitted “clerical error,” ICE deported her to Honduras despite the order.
Lopez Belloza entered the country with her mother in 2014 when she was 8 years old, according to court documents. Their asylum application was denied, and an immigration judge issued a removal order against Lopez Belloza in 2017, when she was around 11.
Lopez Belloza graduated high school in 2025 and began her freshman year at Babson in the fall.
Since being mistakenly deported, Lopez Belloza has continued attending classes remotely while living with her grandparents in Honduras.
In his ruling Friday, Stearns said the Trump administration “readily acknowledged that they violated the Emergency Judge’s order staying removal when they removed Any from the United States.” He previously suggested the government provide Lopez Belloza with an expedited student visa to continue her studies at Babson while her status is litigated, an action the Trump administration has so far declined to take.
In January, 80 members of Congress signed a letter addressed to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, calling on the government to facilitate Lopez Belloza’s return.
Nothing, the hardware company backed by Tiger Global, is opening its first retail store in India, its biggest market. The store is located in Bengaluru, where a large chunk of Nothing’s userbase in India is concentrated, the company said.
The new, two-storied location will show off Nothing’s products and other projects. Customers will also be able to buy hardware products and other merchandise from the store and have select items customized.
“We wanted to create a fun space. It is kind of inspired by all the parts that are related to the brand. For instance, the factory: if you buy a product, there’s like a production line where the product comes out. We also show machines where phones go through testing, like USB port testing or water resistance testing. So we just wanted to bring that world together,” the company’s co-founder and CEO Carl Pei said.
The store will feature products from both Nothing and CMF, its budget brand, which it spun off last year. Notably, CMF is headquartered in India and has a joint venture with local Indian ODM (original design manufacturer), Optiemus.
Pei mentioned that both brands are differentiated in terms of the products they offer, which fall in different price ranges, as well as the audience they target.
“Nothing is more niche with a higher price. CMF is more [targeted towards] mass. You know it’s mass, but it’s not like just off-the-shelf rebrand products that usually what occurs in this price point. They are also products that we put a lot of care into,” he said.
India has been Nothing’s strongest market, with over 2% market share in smartphones, analyst firm IDC told TechCrunch last year. It also noted that Nothing was the fastest-growing brand in the country in Q2 2025, with 85% growth in shipments year-over-year.
Other hardware makers are building aspirational retail stores in India, too. Apple is set to open its sixth store in the country this month, situated in Borivali, Mumbai, for instance.
This is the first Nothing store outside of London, where the company is headquartered. The startup said that it plans to open two more stores in Tokyo and New York, but didn’t provide timelines for openings.
Killing Satoshi, an upcoming biopic about the elusive creator of Bitcoin, will reportedly rely heavily on artificial intelligence to generate locations and adjust actors’ performances, Variety reports. The film was announced in 2025 as being directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, The Edge of Tomorrow) and starring Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson in undisclosed roles, but its connection to overhyped technology was previously understood to begin and end with cryptocurrency.
According to a UK casting notice viewed by Variety, the producers of Killing Satoshi reserve the right to “change, add to, take from, translate, reformat or reprocess” actors’ performances, using “generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and/or machine learning technologies.” No digital replicas will be created of performers, but it sounds like plenty of other AI-driven tweaks are on the table. The production’s use of AI will also extend to the setting of its shoots, per Variety’s source. Killing Satoshi will be shot on a “markerless performative capture stage” and things like backgrounds and locations will be entirely generated by AI.
You guess is as good as mine as to why a film about blockchain technology needs to be filmed this way, but Doug Liman has been connected with plenty of unusual projects in the past, including a rumored Tom Cruise film that was supposed to film on the International Space Station. Killing Satoshi will be far less practical in comparison, and walking a much finer line of what’s acceptable in the entertainment industry.
A major sticking point in SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 contract negotiations was guaranteeing protections for actors who could be replaced by AI. Equity, the union representing actors in the UK, is currently negotiating protections for members that are concerned that AI could be used to reproduce their likenesses and voices and let studios use them without their consent.
The monthly “Google System Release Notes” primarily detail what’s new in Play services, Play Store, and Play system update across Android phones/tablets, Wear OS, Google/Android TV, Auto, and PC. Some features apply to end users, while others are aimed at developers.
The following first-party apps comprise the “Google System”:
To update, open the Settings app > tap your name at the very top for “Google services” (on Pixel) > All services tab > Privacy & security > System services.
A feature appearing in the changelog does not mean it’s widely available. Some capabilities take months to fully launch.
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Private Compute Services B.22 (2026-02-13)
[Phone] Maintenance changes.
Google Play services v26.05 (2026-02-09)
Developer Services
[Auto, Phone, Wear] This update lets you control the transit data display on the map when available.
Device Connectivity
[Phone] New developer features for Google and third party app developers to support Device Connectivity related processes in their apps.
Wallet
[Phone] With this update, you’ll get more supported passports for ID Pass.
Google Play Store v50.1 (2026-02-09)
[Auto, Phone, TV, Wear] Content publication is no longer supported for outdated EngageSDK versions.
Google Play services v26.04 (2026-02-02)
Account Management
[Phone] You’ll now get an improved experience when you purchase Google Account storage.
Developer Services
[Phone] New developer features for Google and third party app developers to support Security & Privacy related processes in their apps.
System Management
[Phone] With this feature, we’ve streamlined the new device setup process.
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![What’s new in Android’s February 2026 Google System Updates [U]](https://eyeobserver.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/google-play-services-2-768x402.jpg "What’s new in Android’s February 2026 Google System Updates [U]")
