Microsoft Wants You Talking To Your Windows PC… Again - DTNS 5126

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 16th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of those stories and help each other understand. Today, Sean Hollister tells us why the ROG Xbox ally might not be good for anybody. And Microsoft wants to let you talk to every computer as long as it's Windows. Hello, Microsoft. I'm Jason Howell. Hello, computer. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. saying hello microsoft was incorrect as you'll soon find out microsoft announced its plan to place ai at the heart of the windows 11 operating system microsoft's vision begins with new features rolling out now that are going to allow users to interact with the operating system using voice input so the actual wake word will be hey co-pilot not which is the last time And we can say it on the podcast without setting up every Windows machine around the world.

1:05Totally. And here we go. So let's just say it a bunch of times so we get it out of our system. Hey, Copilot. Copilot Voice, along with Copilot Vision, that's also rolling out now, will work alongside each other. So it's going to give Windows the ability to understand, yes, of course, your voice commands, and then act while also having the ability to scan the screen and kind of help with the interoperability between those features, help with apps, docs, whatever happens to be there that you're working on. I'm sure within certain restrictions, of course. This also elevates voice to be another key input method in the OS.

1:47So, you know, you have your mouse, you have your keyboard. These are things we're used to. Microsoft wants this to seem, wants this to be kind of a graduation of voice to one of those major input methods that you're going to want to use. Microsoft is stressing this is opt-in. User permission is critical, they say. And then beyond these new features, Microsoft is also planning to release co-pilot actions. This would be kind of a sandboxed environment that's going to use agentic AI to carry out tasks that have been requested by you, the user. That's currently testing inside the preview program. It's limited in scope during the preview to a narrow set of use cases.

2:26You can imagine that widening. And then finally, Copilot making its way to the taskbar, one-click access to all these tools that I've talked about. And big tip of the hat to R.W. Nash, who submitted this inside of our subreddit and put it on my radar. So there you go, talking to your OS. How do you feel about that, Tom? I feel great. Yay. It is interesting to see how Microsoft really pushed these kinds of ideas, not these exact features, but these kinds of ideas as why you would want to get a Copilot Plus branded PC, which is basically one with enough flops to do a lot of local processing of stuff.

3:09And now is expanding to say, hey, if your Windows 11 machine doesn't have that processor, we can still do a bunch of stuff in the cloud for you. Don't worry. I think it is smart to have the agentic stuff run in a sandbox. They basically launch a separate desktop, so it can still access your files and stuff, but it's not working with you on your own desktop. So it's got a little more security, a little more containment to it. I think it's super smart for that to be in preview and for it to be limited on what it can do at this point because Microsoft itself is like, this thing makes mistakes. So we're just trying to get it to where it doesn't make mistakes.

3:46We'll see how close they can get to that before they feel like they have to launch it. I also weep for Cortana. You know, I actually really liked Cortana and I thought they should have left Cortana there and called it Cortana. Calling it Copilot is fine. I'm not going to not use it because of that. I think this also is how we all would like to use our computer. However, Jason, I'm sure you noticed all the write-ups about this are like, well, they really screwed up with Windows Recall so nobody's going to trust them about this. Mm-hmm. Well, trust is a really big issue. It's certainly this, you know, and I see this happen a lot with Google and its businesses that they'll roll out a new service and it's like, yeah, you know, that sounds great.

4:31But, you know, you've burned me a couple of times by not supporting things. These things are sticky. You know, when you try a new service or you take a look at this new effort, and especially in this moment, this moment where AI is, you know, many people would say, being shoved down our throats in every different direction, that trust is key. And if you're given a reason to not trust it, you might not ever choose to use it. Or rather, it might take you a very long time before you get over that burnt trust and decide to dip your toes back into the water. So I'll see how this turns out. I will say from a voice input standpoint, I have started in the last little bit, really relying more on using my voice when it comes to interacting with AI systems and stuff.

5:18Usually I'm so comfortable just typing in my things and everything, but I've started to really kind of get into the, or try to push myself to use my voice more to see how it improves things. And I'm pretty happy with what I get on the other side of it. I think these systems have improved to the point to where using your voice, you don't need that syntax. it's going to get things wrong. Obviously, AI is imperfect, but it's so much closer now to delivering on the previous promises, getting back to trust of just use your voice and you can get it to do anything. And then, you know, you try it and you run into all these roadblocks and, oh, that didn't do what I wanted.

5:55And, oh, I had to say that five times and I wasn't using the right syntax. Now we're kind of beyond the syntax problem. And I think that it does open up a world for a certain type of user where it's like, you know what? this is the way I want to use my OS. I don't want to have to like click and drag and type and everything. I could just say it and be done and move on. Yeah. Do not think of Amazon and Siri. When you think of Copilot, think of chat GPT voice mode. And if you haven't used chat GPT voice mode, go try it out or find someone who has it that you say, if you don't want to sign up yourself and try it out because it is just talking.

6:34And that is what I imagine Copilot voice is going to be more similar to it may not be as good it might be better who knows but it is going to be in that ballpark because they're using open ai systems here i also want to reiterate that right now it's i talk to my computer or i type in and ask it a question and it can use copilot vision to see what's on my screen right then it's opt-in it's only looking at what's on your screen at the moment it's not recording things like recall it's just saying like hey is this the right website or who's in this picture and then it can go oh yeah i can see the picture you're talking about here's the answer uh it is the agent snapshot that is in preview that can do more than that and a sandbox and all of that and and you can't get that unless you go and opt into copilot labs but you have to imagine that's coming soon they're testing it to you know roll it out on a on a wider basis at some point who knows i wonder how well those tests go and what their metric for success is to say yes Let's push it out to everybody, especially given all the trust issues that we just talked about.

7:39Yeah. No, I mean, agentic AI is far, in my opinion and in my experience anyways, agentic AI is far from being, you know, super dependable, let's say. You know, it gets you like most of the way there or maybe not even most, but much of the way there. But there's still that kind of last mile problem with agentic AI that's like, oh, okay. It's like an intern in their first week. Totally. They can do some stuff on their own, but you have to check in every once in a while. And sometimes it goes wrong. Yeah. Do I think it's going to get there? Yeah. I'm sure it'll get within the realm of, okay, I'm willing to live with it in order to get all the gains.

8:16I do think we're a ways off from that from my own personal experience. We'll see how it integrates into the OS. Yeah. And I also, just one last point. When we're talking about trust, we're talking about us, the tech enthusiasts who host the show, write into the show, listen to this show. Uh, if they can get past us and push it out to everybody, most people are only going to care if it works or not. If it works, they're going to use it. If they're not, they're not. Uh, so, you know, it's, it's really getting over the hump of our acceptance of the previews, uh, that they need to do to make it at the gate.

8:51Once, once it's on the, on the desktop, it's, it's reaching millions of people who only care when I use that, does it work? If it doesn't, I'm going to stop using it. Super true. Super true. Well, we are reliable because of you being reliable as a supporter of the show. DTNS is made possible by our listeners. Big thanks to High Tech Oki, Chris Zaragoza, Mike Akins for their long, long-term support. You guys are the best. And also a big thank you, we got raises. These are people who are like, you know what? I'm getting so much value out of the show. I want to give a little more value back. Big thanks to that from Dave and Pat and Ron.

9:32Right on. Thank you. Appreciate that very, very much.

9:38All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Spotify, partnering with the big ones, Sony, Universal, Warner, and Merlin. When I say big ones, I mean music labels, by the way. To create artist-first AI music products that aim to prioritize musician rights and fair compensation. So you as a musical artist will have the ability to tell Spotify whether to allow these kinds of tools to be used or not. You can opt in to generative features and protecting copyright in the process. I mean, they're going to protect copyright anyway, but you can opt into these features and say, yes, I'll allow them, but it will protect my copyright while they are allowed to be used.

10:24TechCounts speculates this might let them use sort of a content ID-like system on Spotify that would collect royalties if your music appears in a generated song from someone else. So if you say, yes, people can remix my songs with AI, but I get a little money for every stream that my song appears in. Spotify said if the music industry doesn't lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere without rights, consent, or compensation. trying to push the idea of like, we need to innovate and let people do this here in a safe place that protects copyright and compensates people, or people are just going to go do it elsewhere.

11:01Spotify is also developing a dedicated research lab and a product team to drive this and other efforts like it within the company. And side note, Jane Manchun Wong, love Jane Manchun Wong, found code in the Spotify app referring to a song DNA feature. that feature would let you explore the music credits and see where producers, writers, and others, and even singers, were featured in other tracks. So it's like the music genealogy books that I used to read back in the 90s. Yeah, it's like that, but in Spotify. Title has a similar feature that is called interactive credits. Yeah. I mean, talking about song DNA first, I love that they're doing this.

11:40I think this is really important. You know, you and I have been, you know, kicking around long enough to remember, you know, cassettes and before that albums and CDs, of course, where as a music lover and a music fan, I could open them up and I could really actually see all the people who were involved or a lot of them anyways. And I could start to build a library in my mind and in my head of who is important to me, who's worth following, why I want to listen to this band because that person's part of the team or whatever the case may be. So I love... Eric Clapton was in the Yardbirds. I had no idea.

12:15So I love that from just a music geek perspective. And then as far as the AI is concerned, I mean, who didn't see this coming a mile away? You know, the music industry was very resistant early on to people using artists in this way. And they were very much like, no, we don't want this to happen. And I always knew it was, we don't want this to happen, dot, dot, dot, unless we have the ability to control it. Because it's just, it's an interesting new and now way to get engagement from fans on a whole different level. Yeah, I think this is very similar to what YouTube had to go through. But YouTube had to go through it in a way that it was sort of the first time in protecting copyright.

12:59And certainly not with this kind of thing, with generative models and all of that. But I think Spotify has a leg up because it can look to what has happened with copyright over the past 20 years and say, oh, OK, I think we can get this right. And vice versa. I think the music labels understand, well, just trying to pretend this will go away and we can shut it down is not going to work. So we need we need to come up with a system that makes sure that we protect our rights and our artist compensation. organization uh i also always like to point out in these stories that the music labels are going to benefit more than the artists in these situations uh and so when the labels try to tell you like we're just doing this for the artists take the just out because they are doing it for the artists because they're going to take a bunch of money as a part of this as well so it's not it's never pure uh but there are also indie artists that publish to spotify that can take all the benefit from this.

13:53So that's good too. Indeed. Well, some people are going to be really happy about this news. Pinterest is tackling generated content overload, as I wrote it down apparently, with new user controls that allow limiting slop, AI slop, as some people call it, or AI generated content, as other people call it, in your feed. So generated imagery can be restricted via certain categories right now. There's a refine your recommendation setting that users can use. This is definitely an answer to calls from users who want to be given tools so that they can limit the appearance of this type of content in their feeds.

14:34The company says that it's going to bring the controls to more categories in the future. So if you're not seeing it in a category that you like, send them some of your feedback to let them know what categories it should be on. I'm kind of surprised that they aren't just like, here's a switch for everywhere, but they aren't. Pinterest also plans to make existing generated content more obvious through more prominent labeling. They had first rolled out AI modified labels earlier this year. I haven't worked directly with Pinterest enough to know why that was or was not obvious to the user, but apparently they're going to make it far more obvious.

15:09And I've just, I've heard so many, like I'm not a huge Pinterest user personally, but I have heard a lot of people who are just say how overwhelmed the service has become with AI-generated stuff. And I think even Pinterest pointed out 57%, they were pointing to an academic report that said 57 % of all online material is generated AI content. I don't know. That's the figure that they threw out, believe it or not. But this certainly does address an issue that I know I've heard people complain about a lot with Pinterest. Yeah, it would be nice if the settings had a turn them all off for the people who want.

15:49But we forget there are people who enjoy this. Oh, 100%. And there are a lot of people who enjoy it. So that's why they're like, you might want to leave it on in the art category, but turn it off in the home decor category, right? You may be tired of seeing fake couches, but you're like, I love to see the experimental stuff that people are doing. So that's why it's section by section because you may actually want to see it in certain things but not in others. And that makes sense to me. They should have a little toggle at the top for the people who are like, I just don't want to see it at all.

16:20But you can go in and turn them all off yourself. There's only a dozen or so of them, so it's not the end of the world. But, yeah, good on you, Pinterest. interest. Uber is offering its drivers the option to make money labeling data or even kind of creating data while they're waiting to accept a ride. Companies need labeled and unlabeled data like crazy these days because we've used almost all the existing data that was out there. So this is a really interesting story to me. There will be a category in the driver app called digital tasks that has been tested in India. So if you're an Indian driver, you may say, oh yeah, I've already got that.

17:01And it will show up later in the US later this fall. It will include tasks like uploading a photo of a restaurant menu, photos of cars, recording yourself speaking. It's just creating stuff. This is very similar to what Scale AI does. Mechanical Turk actually kind of does this stuff, although it does a lot of other stuff. Uber will pay you based on the amount of time your task takes. And then the data will be used by Uber AI Solutions, which is a division of the company that offers development services to enterprises, specifically around AI data. That division also employs people for more complex tasks like annotation, translation, editing multilingual, multimodal content.

17:44So they've got people working on this the way scale AI does. But I thought it was really interesting that they're sort of saying, hey, drivers, in your downtime. Here's another way to earn a few extra dollars, which is building goodwill and also beefs up what Uber AI Solutions has to work with. Hmm. Downtime. See, when I read this, I'm like, I can just imagine the Uber drivers driving around just like talking into their app because they've been given a task while they're waiting for, you know, another pickup or whatever. And you know, that takes me to, okay, are you, are you distracted or are you in a place where you can actually focus on this and do this properly?

18:16But Jason, yeah. Yeah. Only do this while you're parts or the Uber Eats driver goes into the restaurant and then snaps a photo of the menu and then upload it. Right. Yeah. I guess, I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That's super fascinating. It's super interesting. I wonder what it pays too. Like, uh, probably not. I'm guessing. I mean, if we're going to mechanical Turk model, yeah, it's a few dollars here and there, but you know, over time it builds up and it's like, well, I could, I could be surfing Facebook or I could be making a couple of dollars. So there's your choice. Yeah.

18:47Okay. That's interesting incentive. I like it. DoorDash is launching autonomous food delivery in Phoenix. I mean, it already had food delivery there. Now it's just a portion of their business is going to be autonomous using Waymo's driverless fleet of Jaguar SUVs. users can order their items to be delivered by that Waymo service and given access to the trunk, which will of course be locked, but can be unlocked via the app curbside. So if you're getting your food delivered with this service, you will have to go out curbside and obviously, you know, the Waymo is not going to come up to your front door.

19:25DoorDash will focus on delivering DoorDash's Dash Mart convenience grocery and retail store in Phoenix. Broader support for more businesses over time, but putting to work some of these Waymos in the area for delivery. And I think one of the big benefits here is that, you know, obviously, probably doesn't need to be stated, but the Waymos, they're driving the streets. So they're able to go longer distances. They're able to go faster door to door, potentially. You just have to do a little work as the recipient of the food by going down to the street and intercepting the delivery. Yeah, which is the old way.

20:03Uber used to make you go out and meet a driver before COVID for Uber Eats. So this is similar to that. Let's just skip past all the like, I bet this won't work at first. Yeah, it won't. There'll be stories of somebody who couldn't get the trunk to open and then had to call support. There'll be stories of somebody forgetting to put something in the trunk. Once you get past that, those are kinks that can get worked out. I'm not sure what big advantage this has. I mean, the fact that they're having to limit it to the convenience store stuff means they've trained the people at Dash Mart to know how to use this.

20:38And they're going to have to figure out how to train every restaurant to use it as well. because I assume the restaurant is the one that's going to have to walk out to the Waymo, use their app to unlock the trunk, put the stuff in the trunk, close it, say, yep, it's been delivered and send it on its way. That's a really good point. That's a tall hill to climb. Although, you know, if they're getting a ton of extra business, I guess that's the proof point, right? Like if DoorDash can prove to the restaurants that this is actually going to bring them and an extra amount of business that makes it worth their effort and their time to walk out and follow these protocols, then great.

21:18But I think you're right. That might be a hard thing to prove, at least initially. Not impossible, but - Not impossible. Yeah, I'm not, will it pay off to do all that work? Yeah, right. All right, we got a bunch of little headlines here that are always good just to know, to understand future stories, little facts and figures like Google's VO 3.1 model update is here. It offers improved prompt adherence, simultaneous audio and video generation, and a new frame-to-video feature inside the Flow Editor for defining the start and end frames, which gives you better user control. Very nice. Google launched Android scam protection tools, some new tools that you might see in your apps.

21:59inside of messages. You might find the ability to detect malicious links that might appear there, improved account recovery tools via trusted contacts, and then also a little web game that will educate you around different scams that are out there. Meta has hired Kay Yang, a leader of Apple's Answer Knowledge and Information team, which has been working to make Siri more like ChatGPT. It is another in a series of high profile defections Infections from Apple's team to Meta's super intelligence labs. Indeed. And the Apple Vision Pro soon getting a dedicated iPad app coming with the iPad OS 26.1 update.

22:41It's going to bring all the features that you currently find in the iPhone app. So nothing new. It's just that it's finally coming tailored for the tablet. And a sign that Warner Brothers is about to be acquired by someone is that CNN launches a streaming app. CNN is going to launch its CNN all access subscription for$6.99 a month or$69.99 a year starting October 28th in the U.S. Gives you access to select live programming and print articles. Those are the essentials for today. And now we dive a little deeper. All right. The ROG, again, ROG, R-O-G. I just say them both because I always get it wrong.

23:18The ROG Xbox Ally launched today, October 16th. So you may have heard about that already. And you might be wondering if you should consider buying it. Well, Tom, you caught up with Sean Hollister from The Verge to find out. Sean Hollister, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I know you have been up late working on this review, as so many people have, of the ROG Xbox Ally. Do you say ROG and do you say Ally or Ally? Oh, God, I keep going back and forth on ROG. I said ROG, ROG, ROG, and people made so much fun of me because it's an acronym for Republic of Gamers. Sure. But I still say ROG Ally.

24:00Ally, it's my ally. It's my friend. Yeah. Now, Ally seems straightforward. ASUS says ROG, even though it is an acronym. So I think we'll just have to leave that to be settled another day. But we've got two. The ROG Xbox Ally is$600. The ROG Xbox Ally X is$1 ,000. dollars. You have had both of them have been putting them through their paces. Talk a little bit about, let's start with the Xbox full screen experience, because that seems to be the big advantage here over the regular ROG ally is that you get that unified experience. How did that work? I say it in the piece, Microsoft kind of had one job here.

24:40It was to make Windows kind of go away under the hood, put Xbox front and center, and just make it easy to pick up and play. And so once you finally get into the Xbox full screen experience, which for many early adopters might involve a lot of downloading and installing of updates. Once you do that, assuming you do that once it's done. Sure. Then you get to an experience where you can hold down a button, an Xbox button, the first on a handheld, and it will let you task switch with your various apps. So if you're in a game and you're like, I want to change some settings, you hold down one button.

25:14You can just swipe with the analog stick, go over there. if there is a pin entry field or a password field, you can use your sticks to type in the pin, to use the keyboard in many instances. And it is nice to have that working when it is working, which is not always, unfortunately. Yeah, that seems to be the knock on this, is that it's a great idea, but in execution, how did you find it? I found that the most important thing, I will always say the most important thing that I want out of a handheld, whether it's a Nintendo's handheld, whether it's a Microsoft handheld, any other handheld, is I want to be able to know that when I press the power button, go to sleep, and my game will be there waiting for me when it wakes up again.

25:58And this was the case with the black Xbox Alley most of the time, which is a lot more than usual, but not all the time. And unless it's all the time, you can't trust it. Right. You'll actually have the game waiting for you when it comes back. And I found it happened with the white Xbox Alley almost none of the time. And the white is the$600 one? The white is the$600 model. The$600 model, both of these handhelds, they start from a great hardware base. I mean, we liked the original ROG Ally X and the Xbox ROG Ally X is based on the same hardware. It's got the same buttons, basically, the same joysticks, same screen, all of that, same 80 watt hour battery, which is big for a handheld.

26:39I mean, I can get two hours in an intensive game, four hours of a media weight game, eight hours of a very, very lightweight game if I tweak on this thing. Big battery. Good hardware to begin with. And on top of that, I was like, maybe now we can finally have it go to sleep reliably. Maybe we can finally use the joysticks and buttons to navigate windows. These things are a bit of a miss. The$600 one, on the other hand, the white Xbox Ally is based on a chip that's more like what's in the Steam Deck. In fact, it is the same architecture in that chip. It is roughly the same chip, only instead of being limited to 15 watts, which is fairly low for a handheld, it goes up to 20 watts when you plug it in or when you lock it to that 20 watt power mode.

27:27I figured, okay, if you're charging$50 more for the Xbox Ally over the Steam Deck with the same chip and you get five more watts of power, you should get better performance, right? No, the performance is worse. We were hoping that the new Xbox full screen experience would take enough of Windows out of the way. It wouldn't hold back the performance. But no, SteamOS is how you get that performance, it seems. This experience is handheld, or at least these graphics drivers not doing it in the$600 model. Okay, so Xbox full screen experience, a little bit unreliable. Performance, not better. or not where you wanted it to be.

28:08What about the game management? What about installing a game? How does that work? If you are part of the Xbox ecosystem and you want to play Xbox games, you need to know if that game is a game that is designed only for the Xbox, in which case you can't play it on here, or if it has a PC version that Microsoft has provided with something called Xbox Play Anywhere. If it is one of those, maybe roughly a thousand games and you have purchased it within the Xbox ecosystem, then things actually can be pretty cool. You'll be in the Xbox experience with what is unfortunately a really sluggish app that doesn't control a wall of the joystick right now.

28:48Anyhow, you're in this experience and it'll show that you played the game on console. It'll let you pick it up where you left off on PC. It'll sync your saves. It'll show you there is integrated voice chat in there for your Xbox friends. So if you're really locked into the Xbox ecosystem, you can do that. If you got PC games from other places, is they can show up in your library. It can be in your one-stop. I don't want to say one-stop shop though, because you can't buy them there. You can't install them there if they're not part of the Xbox ecosystem. But if I'm on Steam, I got a lot of Steam games.

29:20If I go to my Steam app, I install them in Steam, they then show up in the Xbox interface. And you can buy them in the Steam app still, but you have to go to the Steam app to buy them. Is that right? Yeah, I'm going to go to the Steam app to buy them. I'm going to go there to install them. then when I launch the system the next time, they will show up in the Xbox app that automatically comes up when I start the console. So yeah, it's not optimal. There's a lot of issues with the Xbox full screen experience when it comes to launching those games too, because while the Xbox full screen experience is trying to put just one thing front and center, not all these windows, sometimes it's not the thing that you wanted to be front and center, the thing you needed to be front and center.

30:01If a game, for instance, if I'm playing a game on Steam, I launch it on Xbox, press the launch button, and the app just doesn't come up for some reason. I'm just waiting, hanging there, waiting for it to load. It might be because there's a prompt over in the Steam app telling me that I haven't synced the cloud game properly or the launcher needs to pop up or something like that. They haven't done all that. Some dialog box or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a bunch of that stuff still going on. I ran into all sorts of little random issues, too. I would launch a game and the game would appear sometimes, but it would not have focus in Windows.

30:39It would not think it was the app that my gamepad, my joysticks and buttons were ready to control. So I'd start looking around. I was like, why aren't the menus loading? It's because it didn't have focus. I had to touch the screen or hold down that Xbox button and switch back to the game that I thought I was already in in order to start the gamepad controls work. there's so many of these little issues that add up to why did they launch this now when it's so half-baked yeah well it's a gargantuan task to try to manage across multiple platforms everything in one interface so the fact that they can even get them to show up after you install is kind of a win but it's not enough of a win to make it easy and then add to that you'll have a lot of people are like, yeah, but I have an Xbox game.

31:25It's like, oh, but that's the Xbox console, not the Xbox service. So if I'm hearing you right, it's easy if you're a Game Pass subscriber, but everything else it can do. All you have to do is X, Y, and Z, but it's a little more complicated. It's certainly easier if you're a Game Pass subscriber. But the other thing to think about with these handhelds, that the Xbox with the game bar interface that lets you control them, the full screen experience that's letting me navigate there. Microsoft thinks of this as a platform play. It's going to bring these to other handhelds as well. And many components of it, save for that full screen experience, the game bar, the game pass integration, the ability to pull up cloud gaming.

32:11You can get that on any Windows PC already. The job of this handheld was to be Microsoft controls the full hardware and software stack so they can do it right and make it easy. And they didn't cross that bar. Not only did they not cross that bar, they marketed it like it's the best thing since sliced bread. It's the new Xbox. It's all your games on the go. You're the rest of Xbox and Windows together and all that. And it's just not remotely there right now. It's just picking up threads they were already working on on other Windows PCs, is pulling them together into a half cohesive. Yeah. Do you think this is right for anyone?

32:52Oh boy. I'm not sure I can say yes to that. I don't think anybody should buy the$600 white Xbox Ally until they've worked out the sleep mode. You need to be able to trust that when you press the power button, it'll go to sleep. Won't just keep waking up in the middle of the night draining your battery. I woke up the next morning, it's practically dead. Multiple times I saw that happen. If they can figure that out, they can improve the performance. I could see$600 for$1 ,000 for the Xbox LiX. I really want to see this be extremely competitive, either extremely competitive Windows handheld, which is not quite as close.

33:39It would be if they fix sleep. or they need to make it really easy. They really need to fulfill that Xbox promise. Gotcha. Well, Sean, thank you so much for taking us through this and for suffering for us so that the rest of us don't have to. We appreciate it. If folks want to follow you, what you do, you're writing at The Verge, where should they go? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Theverge.com is where I live and do all my work. And I'm also on Blue Sky. blue sky at sean hollister dot b s k y dot social fantastic thanks sean thanks for having me i hope you didn't order one jason no you know the xbox thing is is a little outside of my uh my must buy but i mean it looks you know i'm so like out out of the know with uh some of the you know kind of current gaming trends and everything it looks nice to me you know just looking at it looks like a nice piece of hardware.

34:36Absolutely. Well, if you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, one way to talk to us about it is our social networks. We are at DTNS show. You can find us on X, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, and Mastodon. For TikTok and YouTube, find us at Daily Tech News Show.

34:58And we end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Chanterelle has more thoughts on live translation. Yeah, folks. And if you're like, why so much about live translation? That's what people are writing in about. So you got another topic? Please send it our way. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Chanterelle writes, while I've thankfully never had a need myself, a coworker brought up the recent need to seek somewhat urgent medical attention during a trip to Spain and the complications of the language barrier despite the ubiquity of translation apps. While I hope I'll never have this need, I'll be glad for the Babelfish-esque experience should the need arise.

35:36Yeah, I think that's been a little bit of my experiences. I have very little need for it, but when I find myself in a situation where I do need it, I'm so out of practice that it's hard for me to just know exactly what to do in that moment. It's almost like I need to get myself into an immersive situation for a full week where I'm relying on it, and that way it's stored in my memory banks exactly what I do the next random time it comes across my path. I was using it, uh, with Shohei Otani's press conference, even though they translate it. Uh, I was listening to him speak in Japanese and then having the AirPods translate it.

36:16And it worked pretty well, I have to say, you know, and that was just with TV. So, uh, well folks, please keep these emails coming. We want to hear from you. If you've been thinking about something, you want to let us know, you got a comment on something we talked about, you think we're horribly wrong or maybe horribly right, please share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Sean, of course, Chantrell as well for contributing to today's show. Possibly even you, if you decide to email us, please do. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS.

36:51We'll see you tomorrow the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program