The real price of a free TV

26:56It is, we should mention,$20 a month once it's out of early access. Although right now it's free. And then if you get Prime, you'll also get it for free, which is kind of weird because that's what,$15 a month. So we'll see how that pans out. Amazon would very much like you to get Prime. But also, if you don't have a Prime account, but you have an Alexa speaker, I have a bunch of questions about your subscription decisions. Yeah. So I think we can fairly safely assume that most people who have these things are going to have a Prime account and thus will eventually get Alexa Plus for free. And so I think this is kind of the thing, right, is to me, these are slightly better versions of the existing things, which is like great, right, as a way to if you just assume most people's smart speaker experience is basic smart home stuff, music and timers, which is what it is like that.

27:48That is statistically speaking how most people do smart speakers. These things are going to be slightly better hardware, but not like huge new ideas. The huge new idea is Alexa Plus. And it is better. Much better than the old Alexa. Yeah, even now? Oh, yes, yes. This makes me happy. Yeah, you can talk to it naturally. Natural language is just a game changer for smart speakers. The problem is, and I think the reason why a lot of people complain about, that I've seen complaining about Alexa Plus, is we've trained ourselves how to talk to these devices. Oh, totally. And the new versions don't really understand that language.

28:26Oh, interesting. You need to talk to them like you would just talk to a person. they're not designed to be deterministic. They're not designed to follow a pattern. So when you say, you know, A, turn on the light in the living room to 50%, it'll be like, I mean, it might do it, but it's less, if you say, hey, A, make it brighter in here. Oh, a bit more. Okay, bring it down a little. It'll do all of that. That's so much easier than the previous way. It's just we're so used to saying the first way. And so some of those issues, I think when people have just been using these devices for a long time and they've trained themselves how to do it.

29:07So you do have to rethink the way you communicate with them. But once you do that, it is a big change. And I've actually found that, you know, my family uses it more now because they never train themselves. They just relied on me to do it. But because you can literally just say what you want it to do and it mostly will do it, it makes a huge difference. It's also easier, it knows a lot more. The old Alexa used to always, you know, say, I'm not sure about that or sorry, I can't help with that if you asked more intricate questions or more specifics. But like the other day, my husband was very jealous.

29:42I was coming to New York and he was like, oh, I heard about this great play. It stars the girl from Dexter that we really liked. You should go see it. And I was like, what play is it? And he's like, I can't remember. And I said, well, let's, why don't we ask Alexa? And so he said, hey, what? And he tried to explain. He said exactly what he said to me. And it came back and came up with the name of the play. I think it's like The Great Americans or something. I've forgotten. But it came up with the name of the play, said where it's playing, when it's playing. The old Alexa would never have been able to do that.

30:09So that kind of stuff is great. A lot of the more agentic capabilities, which I tested a while back, I haven't tested again recently. Those were a little hit or miss. I also don't find much use for them. I could just as easily get my phone out. The recipe stuff is so good. Like using a smart display in the kitchen is like for me, the number one use case. And you can now like snap a picture of a recipe, send it to Alexa, and it will break it out into a format for you with the ingredients, the steps, it will talk you through it. You can say, hey, what was the temperature I needed to set it for for the oven and just go back and forth while you're walking around your kitchen.

30:50That experience, so much better. That's the stuff, right? Like that to me is where you go. All the agentic stuff is like fine and interesting. And I think like a long way off from actually being relevant to anybody. But like, if I can just do all of the things that it seems natural that my Alexa device should do, that's the stuff. And I think especially with the smart home stuff, like you and I've been talking about this forever. Like I just, no one will ever convince me that having to remember the names of my lamps is a thing that I need to do. Something you need to do. Yeah. And so like what I have and remembering to say brightness 60 % is like insane.

31:23No, I will not do that. But this change you're describing where it's like just like a little brighter but not too bright and it actually knows what to do. Yeah. That matters. Like that's a real switch in what it means to actually use this stuff inside your house. And you can set up a routine for something like that by just saying, oh, you know, Alexa, or I, can you please, actually, I feel like it's going to be really cold tomorrow. Can you make sure to set the temperature, change the temperature in the afternoon after the kids get home? Like you can go back and forth about things you want to happen in your home that you would maybe just think in your head about and then think, oh, I should sit down and program it into my app.

31:58And instead of doing that, you just spew it all out. And she sets up a routine. It sets up, sorry, I've been hanging out with Amazon people too long. It sets up a routine for you. You can go and change it in the app, or you can talk to it and change it. Say, actually, no, I don't want it to happen at four. Can you make it happen at five? And it adapts and changes. So that kind of stuff really is game changing for the smart home. But the thing about the smart home and Alexa that I should just mention before we wrap up is it's not always reliable, which is a bit of a problem, especially in the smart home.

32:33And this is down to the technology. And this is something that I'm assuming is going to be a problem for all of these systems. And I've been doing a bit of digging into this. And basically what it is, as we know, LLMs are not deterministic, right? They are designed to be creative, like designed to be, you ask ChatTPT a question and then ask the same question again and you get a different response. In the smart home, if you ask your smart assistant to turn on the lights. You want it to do that every time. And sometimes, depending on how you phrase it, it may misinterpret what you're asking, may not realize you're talking about the smart home, might think you're talking about traffic lights.

33:15I don't know. It could come up with some other perspective and then forget or not send the command to the APIs or the smart home devices that it's trying to communicate with. And where that breakdown happens, that's where things, and I think a lot of people who have been using the smart home with Alexa for a long time and now use Alexa Plus are like, it's ruined my smart home. These things aren't working anymore. And I have had to rebuild a few routines because they don't work anymore, because the new Alexa doesn't understand them. So yeah, there's a friction there. And talking to Panas Panay this week about it, he said, you know, that is the problem that we are working on now.

33:55That is one of the reasons why Alexa Plus is in early access, because we need more and more people to be experiencing these sort of breakdowns in handoff between the LLMs and the more deterministic models so that we can figure out how to fix that. But he was very sort of saying, well, we're the only ones that are doing this at all right now. So, which is fair enough. We'll see what Google experience is like now that that's launching. But yeah, that is the problem. And And this is probably why Apple is still not in the game because, you know, Siri, for all she, he, it isn't great, does still turn the lights on every time you ask it to.

34:34So that kind of stuff is still being worked out. And whether they're going to be able to find a good solution or not, we're just going to have to wait and see. Yeah, that trade between it does a lot of things kind of well and it does a tiny number of things really reliably is the big challenge with all of this stuff right now. Because the ceiling for all of this LLM-based stuff is so much higher. There's new things it can do. It works new ways. The floor is so much lower because it will make dumb mistakes all the time. That, like, you can just program Siri with an if-then statement that will work most of the time.

35:09Right? And it's like you can't do anything else. Siri sucks at everything that is not a very basic if-then statement. Yeah. But it does the if-then statements. And it does them, right. It does. And that's something. But it doesn't think you're talking about something else. Yeah. Except for now, like, anyway. I'm very mad at Apple Reminders right now because Siri is so bad. But that's a whole different story. I want to switch gears to talk about Google here a little bit. But the last Amazon device we should talk about, there's lots more stuff. There's Ring stuff. There's Blink stuff. There's a million new cameras.

35:39Go read all of Jen's stories about them. There's thousands of them. I do want to talk about the new Kindle Scribe just for a minute because I think. Oh, so pretty. So, okay. So I got a virtual briefing of this. Todd Hazelson and our team went and actually saw the thing before it launched. You saw the thing at the event. I think this might be very exciting. It's expensive, particularly the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, which is$630. But you can get a Kindle Scribe for$430. It doesn't have a front light. The real one they want you to buy is, I think,$499. nine um but the the basic new thing is it's thinner it's lighter uh it it works better in all of the ways you would hope the second generation work better lower latency faster um it you know it integrates with one drive and google drive so it'll do some like productivity stuff a lot better this like seems like a paper notebook competitor in a in a real useful interesting way you've actually like held and touched and seen the thing is it is it does it look great?

36:38Is it great? Yeah. I mean, I have a Kindle from maybe a decade ago. So I've not been like really the front of technology when it comes to changing my Kindle. And I think a lot of people don't because, you know, it is such a great device and you read your book. How much more do you need to do? You just described the best and worst thing about the Kindle line. They can't figure out how to make any money because everybody bought a really good Kindle 10 years ago and has no need to. But this feels like a sort of step forward for the device in terms of actually becoming a paper replacement, a notepad replacement.

37:12And I think when I was, I mean, I was live blogging the event and I said, actually, I've always been a pen and paper girl. I use a physical notepad, but I really like the idea of this. I could really, like the fact that it just, and Pan Ospine was showing it on stage and he was saying it's like milliseconds of latency. You know, you really won't notice. It's really easy to write because that's been one of my other problems is I tried to use an iPad with a pen and it just wasn't intuitive. He was kind of cradling this thing. I mean, he was I think this was the thing he was most excited about. Panos is like famously a long term believer in handwriting on device, like all the way back to like killed Microsoft devices like that.

37:50That man loves a digital writing experience. Oh, yeah. He seemed like this sort of seemed really, really exciting for him. I think he was more excited about these than the shows, honestly. But yeah, it was, I mean, my daughter is an artist and I've been desperately trying to find a good sort of tablet for her that's not an iPad because iPads are kind of heavy. I mean, they really are for writing. You were used to doing it on a nice notepad with a pencil and they're distracting. And what's nice about this, I think, you know, if you can create this experience that's just your notes and just your books and just your sketches, but that you can get material in and out of.

38:31I mean, I remember, I'm sure it's better now, but sort of trying to send articles to my Kindle through Instapaper way back when. Oh, yes. But this seems like a— It's not better, by the way. Oh, okay. Not better. That's sad to hear. So, I mean, as a reading and drawing and somewhat content creation device that isn't a bright screen, that isn't distracting. I know there are other e-ink tablets out there that are kind of trying to do this as well. But obviously, Kindle has that lock-in with your books. And, yeah, I'm very – I was very impressed with this and very tempted. Maybe not from – well, maybe for me, but definitely for my daughter.

39:10It's easier to spend$600 on her than on me. you say this is one of those things that i think the price to me is the only thing that yeah that's like it is it's a lot of money for this specific thing and i think it is inching closer to being what i want it to be like i think color is a big deal and i think there are a lot of people who will see this as the big color kindle and will want it for that reason alone right like as a if you're reading comic books when the first color soft came out the main feedback i saw was from people being like this this looks great i want a bigger one yeah well the first feedback was why why is the screen yellow?

39:42But then they fixed that. And then the feedback was, why isn't this bigger? And I think this is going to be exciting to a lot of those people. It's just$630. And so I think the next phase of this is like, okay, let's take this stuff and bring it down towards regular Kindle prices, and we'll be really on to something. Yeah, and this goes along with the shows and the dots, because everything has got more expensive, but it also has got better. So there's that trade-off again. Like we want the more premium experience. Yeah, right now it's maybe more or too expensive in some cases. But as we've seen, the trend normally will be in two or three years, hopefully some of this technology will get cheaper and we'll get the first gen of these devices are always going to be a little.

40:28I mean, the original color, like Kindle Oasis, wasn't that like one of the first big redesigns? That was quite expensive. And that's now much more affordable. Yeah, it's it's Amazon does have a pretty good track record of sort of pulling this stuff down the lineup over time. Yeah. And I will probably be waiting for that one. Real quick before we take a break, we're going to talk a lot about Google's smart home strategy for next Tuesday's show. But there was some news this week. Google, as it does every once in a while, completely changed its mind about everything about how its smart home strategy works.

41:01just give me sort of the top line news. All I know is I saw a picture of a red speaker that I immediately was like, that is the best looking smart speaker I have ever seen in my entire life. It's very pretty. But inside that speaker, Google seems to have like kind of changed its whole smart home strategy. What is happening here? Yes. So the sort of top line is Google is relaunching its Google Home under, well, it's still called Google Home, But Gemini for Home is sort of the overarching theory now. It's similar to what Alexa Plus is doing for Amazon, but Gemini for Home is infusing Gemini AI throughout the smart home lineup and to partner products as well.

41:43So products developed by other manufacturers for Google Home. So what this is, is that the Google Assistant on the smart speakers and smart displays is going to be replaced by Gemini. That's already sort of happened, or you can get access to Gemini features, but this is now a complete wholesale shift. That's actually going to be available in an early access program, another one of those, for anyone starting on October 1st, which was Wednesday, which is actually today. But if you're listening to this on Friday. Time travel. Time travel. So you can sign up for this in your Google Home app. You don't have to be in the public preview program or anything.

42:24And you can use Gemini instead of Google Assistant on all of Google Home hardware, going all the way back to the original flower pot looking one in 2016. I still have that thing around here somewhere. Oh, you should get it out. I love that thing. I thought it was great looking. Yeah, see how it runs on there. It's still, I think, that original Google Home speaker, I think was the least speaker-y looking smart speaker anyone has made. And I loved it for that. It just looked like a little like tchotchke on your table. Yeah. In a way that like I wish more of these smart speakers. And Google's been very good.

43:00Google's definitely led the way on the design front for these smart devices. The Nest Mini was nice as well. It was small and easy to sort of tuck away. And they made it so you could like mount it on the wall, which was always, which was kind of neat. And the new one, so the Google Home speaker, they're getting rid of the Nest name. That's now just for cameras. I hate this. We don't need to dwell on this for too long. But I think Nest is, A, a terrific brand, and B, a brand that a lot of people know and have known for. The Nest thermostat is so iconic a thing in the annals of smart home history that it just seems weird, especially to turn it into this branding mush where Nest still exists, but now Google Home exists and Gemini at home exists.

43:46Just, it was Nest. Just call it Nest. What are we doing? Yeah, I know. Well, so yeah, Nest is still on the cameras and obviously on the thermostat. But as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, Nest, Google has very much gotten out of the Nest hardware game. So the speaker, the speakers were originally Google. So Google Home speaker was the first speaker. Then they made them Nest. And now they're going back to Google. So they're going to be Fitbit in six months. Like this is just what Google does. Yeah. Drives me crazy. The cameras are Nest. The thermostats Nest. But the app, there was also a Nest app.

44:22You can still use the Nest app, but now everything's gone. Now everything is in the Google Home app. You can use, you can even set passcodes for your Nest X lock, which I know is something that many of our readers very keen to be able to do. So this one's for you. You can now do that in the Google Home app. But the other in the Nest as a whole is now very much just sort of a subset because they got rid of the Nest Protect. They got rid of the Nest Secure. Any other, the Nest XL, Yale Lock, all that Nest branding has gone. Those products have gone because Google is basically saying we're only making the flagship products that make sense for our Gemini smart home.

45:01Speakers, cameras, they haven't mentioned the thermostat but they did just update that quite recently and then they're moving towards partners they just announced this week walmart the on brand has new cameras um that work with google home there's there was a post this week from the developer blog saying you know we're opening up all this gemini intelligence to anyone that wants to partner with google home to develop products for the platform so they're out of the hardware game except for where it works for Gemini. And where it works for Gemini, and this is what's the big news this week, is that the cameras, the new cameras that they've announced, which is a new outdoor camera, a new indoor camera, and a new video doorbell, all wired, all now have 2K sensors because the more data and the more fidelity they can pull in, the better they can feed into Gemini for home.

45:57And Anish Katakaran, who is the head of Google Home, was sort of saying these are the eyes for Gemini. This is like the multimodal AI that we need. Google Home has facial recognition feature. So, you know, now your home, if you have these cameras, can recognize like who's at home and maybe adjust different routines or, you know, make your home fit how you want it based on who's in the home because it can use the information and the data from these cameras and also tell you who's at the front door, who's in the backyard. Having this extra data to pull into the Gemini ecosystem to be able to then inform other things in your smart home.

46:42This is also what Amazon's doing with Ring and Alexa Plus. It's all bringing, the AI is bringing together all the sources and the data sources of your home, sensors, cameras, temperature, anything that could play into what you want your home to do for you so that your home can potentially become more proactive. So you won't necessarily have to program it. Google is not at that stage yet. They seem a little behind, but you can see the path that they're going on. What's interesting about the new cameras. And actually, this is also coming to all the current cameras and even the discontinued ones going all the way back to 2015.

47:24So that's nice. I mean, I know we rag on Google for discontinuing products all the time, but that they are still supporting this in the cameras that people may still have is a good thing. So now you do have to pay a subscription for this. But with Gemini for Home, you can type into their new app. So they have a new home app. You can sort of say, when was the last time you saw my cat? And it can pull up any videos of cats. Or was there a skunk in my driveway? Or what time did my daughter get home? Or, you know, you could type that into the new Home app and it will pull up footage for you. You can also use the Home app to create automations.

48:01So you can just type in and say, you know, I want you to make me feel more secure. And it might come up with a suggestion. We'll lock your doors every day at 6 p.m. will turn the lights on when, you know, when it gets dark, it'll come up with automations for you. So all of this sort of intelligence is using the data from your home and sort of being able to manage things for you. And like I said, it's still kind of early days. What I'd really like to see is like an automation based on the triggers that cameras can now do. So like, okay, I saw your cat outside and it was after dark. So I'm going to send you an alert or I'm going to flash a light or, you know, you know, to be proactive rather than me having to set up.

48:44But that's where you can see all of this going. And actually that's what Amazon demoed, where it demoed an example with using Alexa Plus. Alexa actually said, oh, I noticed no one has fed the dog today. Would you like me to set a reminder to feed the dog every day at a certain time? and they were able to set up an automation. So whenever Alexa notices the dog hasn't been fed, it would send an alert to the person who was supposed to feed the dog. Obviously, you know, you could also get a smart pet feeder. But the idea here is your home being proactive and both companies, Amazon and Google, sort of moving towards that.

49:26And this new hardware and this new Gemini for Home platform is sort of laying the foundations for all of this. I know that was a lot. No, and I think it's telling that, A, these companies are all sort of converging on this same idea of like what we need is lots and lots and lots of input in order to do this kind of stuff. I also think, by the way, it's very funny that a huge part of the marketing for all of these platforms is you have a pet and you are a terrible pet owner. Yes. And like Ring is like we have a way to use Ring cameras to search for your lost dog because you're a terrible person who can't stop losing your dog.

49:59It's just all very funny. It's because no one can complain about pets. Like, you know. Right. It's a soft subject. It's like kids, right? Like, I will spend an unlimited amount of money if you can convince me that it will be good for my kids. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is how they get you. The other thing I didn't mention about the new Google Home hardware. So, the Google Home speaker has Gemini in it now, not Google Assistant, but it also has Gemini Live. And this is, so this is, most of the listeners I'm sure are familiar with Gemini Live, like on your smartphone, or you can like converse back and forth.

50:35And it's, you don't have to keep saying the wake word. Right. It's Gemini's version of like voice mode that you see in ChatGPT or Claude. Exactly. And so you can now do this with, it'll be on the new Google Home speaker, which is not launching until next spring. but it's also on the Nest Hub Max and the Nest Audio and the Nest Hub Second Gen. So you'll be able to use this starting today or this week if you're in early access. And you actually wake word, you do a different wake word. You say, hey, G, let's chat. And you get this little ding ding and you get this new Gemini Assistant, Gemini Live.

51:11And you can do that back and forth conversation. But annoyingly, Gemini Live has no way of taking any actions. So like it can't do anything in your smart home. It can't like send you recipes to your phone or to the Nest Hub. Right now it's just a more chatty chatbot. And that's actually something I should mention about all of these. They do talk way too much. They always kind of have. No one has quite figured this out yet. And they're also proud of themselves that they can talk in sentences now. And they're just like, yeah, give us 11 paragraphs of information. It's like, no, just shut up. And then all this kind of like, I hope that helped.

51:47Don't forget to have a nice day. Like, no, no, no, no, no. This is the stupidest thing. But whenever I'm in my car, in CarPlay, Spotify has a thing. You tap the thing to search with audio while you're in the Spotify app on CarPlay. And it pops up and the lights go around signaling that it's listening. But then you have to wait a full beat before Siri then goes, what would you like to play? And then you have to wait again. And it dings again. And then it's listening. And it's like, what are we? it's impossible to do. It just drives me insane. We're going to talk more about Google on Tuesday's show because I think the strategy there is really interesting.

52:24And I continue to think Google is the company that has the most pieces already in the right place to do all of the things it is trying to do. I just have no faith in that company's ability to, A, execute on them, or B, stay interested in them long enough to do them. So we are going to get deep into that on next week's show. So we'll come back to that. Great. For now, we're going to switch gears and talk about the strangest and most interesting television I have seen in a very long time. But first, we're going to take a break. Talking of ads. Yeah, seriously. Everything is ads. It's 2025. We're going to take a break.

52:59We'll be right back. We're going to talk telly. Be right back. Support for this show comes from Anthropic. Claude is the AI built for developers who don't settle for good enough. It's not just another chatbot. It's a coding collaborator that works alongside you. Cloud can help you reason through problems, explore alternatives, and arrive at cleaner, smarter solutions. And with MCP connectors, you can plug Cloud directly into your workflow. GitHub, Jira, Notion, Google Workspace, and more, turning it into your coding command center with full context across your projects. And with Cloud Code, you're not just getting an assistant.

53:35You're getting an agent built for the frontier of software development. It combines the latest Claude models with tools optimized for coding, so it can handle project-wide changes, manage dependencies, and refactor, all while respecting your conventions. The result? You write better code faster without ever giving up ownership of the process. Ready to tackle bigger problems? You can sign up for Claude today and get 50 % off Claude Pro, which includes access to Claude code when you use this link, claude.ai.verge. That's claude.ai slash verge right now for 50 % off your first three months of Claude Pro.

54:11That includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash verge. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

54:51Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free.

55:27Terms and conditions apply. When did Simple & Cheap get such a bad rap? Just because something might be considered simple and cheap doesn't mean it's only for beginners. Professionals want tools that save time and money too. It's not just for newbies. That's the idea behind Spaceship, a platform that simplifies buying, connecting, and managing domain names with over 4 million domains registered already. That's alongside offering web hosting, business email, and more advanced business products like Virtual Machines and Hyperlift, which lets you create apps, APIs, websites, and more without touching infrastructure.

56:04You're ready to launch new ventures in seconds. Plus, Spaceship comes with extra highlights, including Unbox, making it super easy to connect your products to your domain. Or Alf, your AI buddy, that can handle domain transfers, DNS updates, and all the tedious tasks. And Roadmap, a community-driven way to suggest and vote on features so the platform evolves around what professionals actually need. Grab exclusive deals at Spaceship.com slash Verge and use the promo code Verge. That's Spaceship.com slash Verge. Promo code Verge.

57:10All right, we're back. Okay. So this has been a fascination both of mine and of the whole Verge and VergeCast audience for a long time. And actually, let me just play a voicemail we got on the VergeCast hotline from a listener a couple of weeks ago, and then we're going to get into it. Hey, VergeCast. This is Eric Jew calling from Los Angeles. I just listened to your last pod and it really got me wondering, what's going on with Tele, that company that gave everyone free TVs for unlimited advertisements on their TV or the second screen of their TV? I haven't heard from them in a while. I was wondering if we could check in with people and see what's going on with them.

57:50Is it going good? Isn't it a good model? I'm really curious. Thanks. We had the CEO of Telly on the show a while ago. And ever since, actually, The Verge has been covering Telly for a long time. And you got a Telly. But you didn't get one as like a reviewer. You got a Telly. Yeah, I just kind of put my name in the hat. I mean, I didn't like contact them or anything and tell them, oh, I'm going to review this. They just kind of picked me out, I guess, and sent one to me. And yeah. So tell me, I'm like, I just want to start this experience at the very beginning, because I think literally everything about Telly is weird and fascinating.

58:28Like, what happens when Telly arrives at your house? Yeah, well, I think it actually begins before it even gets to your house because when you reserve a Telly, you have to agree to so many different things. Like, it is, I mean, I do kind of give them credit for being very upfront about what they are doing here, and that's to collect your data to use for its ads. and, like, a lot of the questions you'll have to answer is, like, how many people are living in your house? Like, are you a parent? Like, do you like to go to the movie theater? Like, stuff like that. And I filled all of this, like, giant questionnaire out, and as I know in my report, the first time the telly arrived, it was broken.

59:19And... Like, broken how? The whole screen was cracked. And of course, I didn't realize that until I got out of the box and set it up and turned it on. And it was just broken. So I have to... At least it was free. Exactly. It would have been more disappointing, I think, if it was like a Samsung or something. but so I think I mean part of what I think is so interesting is like this that's such a perfect company who has never shipped a television trying to figure out how to ship a television thing because I think like we I just looked this up and I interviewed Ilya Poznan the CEO of Telly almost exactly two years ago on the show and this was after they had started taking reservations and the thing existed and Telly's whole thing was like we're just gonna say the quiet part loud Right.

1:00:09Like the Vizios of the world out there are selling you TVs essentially at cost and they're making all of their money with advertising. And Roku is selling stuff really cheap and making all of its money on advertising. And like this is the business of television now is sneaky advertising. and he's just like well what if i just took that all the way to its logical conclusion and i will ship you a television for free and it's going to be a big beautiful television that is going to have another screen underneath it that just always shows you ads and the ads are going to be how we make money by putting a billboard inside of your house that's how we're going to make money and then you can just sort of see them in the intervening two and a half years be like oh my god we have to build and ship a television and i just think that to me is like the the perfect microcosm of this whole thing.

1:00:56And we've heard from so many people who are furious about the amount of time it has taken for their own telly to show up. And it's just like the things that they're doing where they're like, well, it's really easy to make a TV. We'll just ship it to you for free and everything will be fine. Like, nope, it's not nearly as simple as you make it sound. But you did eventually get a working television to your house. Yeah, I have to say they were like pretty responsive with that. Like they sent a new TV like pretty quickly after that. and it came through FedEx. And once we finally got it set up, it's just funny because it shows you a whole introduction, like how telly is the future of TV and all this stuff.

1:01:39And then you just see the secondary display light up and it's just, it's pretty wild to see. Is it very distracting? It is. Can you watch a show and does it go away when you watch a show? No. I mean, it's on all the time. You cannot turn it off and you can't cover it up because telly has it in their terms of service. You cannot cover the second screen. So wait, OK, just describe what this thing looks like in your living room. Like you get the whole thing set up and I'm just imagining like a TV on top and like a, I don't know, an iPad on the bottom. Like what does this actually look like when you put the thing in place?

1:02:18Yeah, so the TV itself, it's a 55-inch screen, and beneath it, it's a 10-inch display that runs the entire length of the screen. Okay. So it's just like an elongated, kind of like a bar. But it's 10 inches tall. That's a pretty tall screen. Do you have to wall-mount it then? No, I just, I put it on a stand. I'm not sure. You probably could wall-mount it, but this thing is heavy. like it is very heavy it is very tall and it's very like awkward to put on your stand and um does it kind of to the bottom bit like is it connect fully connected or is it on a hinge it's fully connected it's just like part of the entire screen so what's the total size that's i actually am not sure about how tall it is but i know there's a sound bar like connecting the top screen to the bottom and there's like a little webcam in there too.

1:03:14So it's like watching you. It has a privacy shutter. And it only opens when you... I mean, this is like Amazon's dream, right? Let's all be honest with each other. It's watching you. And again, this is like... The thing I love about this so much is it is so straightforward about what it is doing. It's like, yeah, we're watching you. People will do it. We will throw you in jail if you cover up the advertising screen. I'm just looking at this picture that you took of it, Emma. And the only way I can think to describe it is like, imagine if you took like a, just a row of laptop screens and sort of put them on your table and then mounted your TV above it.

1:03:54It's like the size wise, the only way that this is starting to make sense to me because it's this, it's a big bottom thing. And then it has a soundbar in the middle and then the 55 inch screen and then the little camera. It just looks like it's going to tip over at all times. This whole thing is like top heavy in a way that I'm finding really kind of unnerving to look at. Yeah, I think it's a little bit more stable than it looks, but it is just very unwieldy. The design was not thought through, it sounds like. It's not interior design ready. It's not a frame. Yeah, no. I mean, it's just, it's very tall.

1:04:28Like, that's why I have to say I've never seen a tall TV like this before. So the viewing experience, I would think best case scenario is it would kind of feel like watching every show through the like cable news chyron where like you're watching what you're watching, but there's like something sort of happening on the bottom. Yeah. And we're all like a little bit used to that. It's a little annoying, but we're a little bit used to it. Over time, you used the thing for months. Did you eventually train yourself to stop looking at the bottom screen? Can you successfully ignore it? Like that would be the goal, right?

1:05:00is like you kind of stop noticing it's there and you just watch the TV and everybody wins. Did you ever get to that point? Not really. Oh, no. It's just, it's like very distracting because there's moving elements in the bottom screen. So your eyes are just always drawn to, like, there's a news ticker. There's some of the ads that it shows are video ads. And they don't have sound, but they have subtitles that you can barely read. But, and they have like rotating news stories. is like you can customize like what the widgets the bottom bar shows, but you can't like fully get rid of that screen. Or like I tried lowering the brightness even and it just, it didn't even do anything, I feel like.

1:05:46Yeah, so it looks like basically the left two thirds is like widgets. And I think you had it set up that it's like baseball scores and weather and other news information. So you can customize it a little bit there? Yeah, you can. You can, like, kind of choose what you want in there or, like, and stuff like that. And that, I think, was Tele's big, like, operating system plan. If I'm remembering this correctly, they had ideas about, like, we're going to have a whole app store. You're going to be able to do all kinds of stuff down there. It's going to be super cool and exciting. And, like, you can sort of, if you squint at it, see why that might be something.

1:06:19Yeah. But how much would you pay for a TV like this? Like, how much are you really saving to give up your experience watching TV? I mean, yeah, that's like the main question because it's I mean, the TV itself, it's a the display is nice and I mean, it's decent and the soundbar is nice. It's just is it worth your privacy and your sanity, basically? Yeah. I mean, TVs, you could buy a TV, a nice TV for not very much money these days. I just did one single Google search. So take this for whatever it's worth. But I can very quickly find a 55-inch, like very well-reviewed TCL TV for$280. Yeah, we just bought for our porch a 65-inch TCL Google TV.

1:07:10I think it was$350, and we got it from Costco. So it's like that, I mean, how much better is something like this? How big is this? how big is the it's a 55 inch okay so yeah but if i were to tell you that you can either have a tv for 300 or you can have a tv for zero dollars and they're going to make the same amount of money on you either way yeah people love free yeah but wait emma can i say the single most devious thing that i think telly is doing here and the thing that i kept laughing at reading your story is that not Not only is it against the terms of service to cover up the advertising stuff, they've actually moved so much of the interface down to the bottom screen that you have to look at it all the time just to use the television.

1:07:56Which to me seems it's somewhere between like really deeply gross and totally genius. And I think they're like, they know that you can't cover the TV and they have made damn sure that you can't cover that bottom screen. All of that effort. I mean, yeah, everything, the effort they've put into making sure you see those ads. It's like evil genius levels here. It truly is. Like, you can't, you have to go to that screen to, like, switch in between, like, your inputs and to navigate between other apps as well. And you really can't cover it up. And they definitely did think about that. it's really smart so as other than watching tv like you know you mentioned you tried it as a as a way to make zoom calls because i think again like the thing i found fascinating about telly's whole idea other than the uh like we're just doing the quiet part loud piece of it is like jen a thing you and i have talked about before and agree on is that there is huge potential for the tv as like the central computer in your house and there's lots of interesting smart home stuff you can do.

1:09:00I think I spent a long time during the pandemic, like doing Zoom calls from a Facebook portal camera that I put on top of my TV and it was awesome. And so there's like, I think telly has a bunch of those ideas. Did you get to test any of that stuff? Is this any of that stuff even exist? Like what, what was good and what was bad outside of just the TV watching experience? Yeah, I tried doing Zoom and, um, I mean, it, it worked for a little bit, but for some reason, the microphone on the telly was not picking up my voice. Like at first it was, it was worked for like two seconds and then it just like cut off and I tried it again and like another day and just like totally didn't work.

1:09:45And I'm not sure what happened there, but I have to say like navigating - Making hardware is hard, Kelly. Did you find this out? But I mean, if you could get it working, it would be kind of cool. And you could have little watch parties. You could have your friends on the bottom display. You could see them while you watch a show together. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. They don't have to have a telly either. They could just go on Zoom. If I could actually get the mic working, that would be kind of cool. Yeah. This is the thing, telly. Keep saying things that you're like, oh, that seems like a good idea.

1:10:22And then they're like, but the device is free. And you're like, oh, I bet it's going to be bad. you also tried an app that I believe is called gofa oh yeah yeah the fitness tell me about gofa so basically it's almost like the xbox connect like it walks you through various like workouts and it uses like the camera to I guess look at what you're doing and like judge if you're doing it right but I mean I didn't I thought it was kind of cool because I used to like use the connect so much when I was like a long time ago when that was a thing. And I yeah, it was just it's just interesting. Like I thought that was kind of a cool idea that they had.

1:11:02Yeah, there's a lot of this happening in TVs like the Samsung TVs and also the new fire TVs. They have millimeter wave sensors to kind of see like your check your form and stuff. But or you can stick a little camera there as well. They don't have them built in for obvious reasons. But yeah, I mean, the TV, the giant screen in your living room is kind of like the obvious place for so much of what we're seeing with like the smart home and like home wellness fitness there's so much you can do there i mean apple tv fitness obviously i mean i use the fitness program with my apple tv all the time you know watch the guys rowing in the studio and row along with them all that kind of interactive stuff is great and it seems like if telly could start to add a bit more value like that those types of features, you could kind of see perhaps the point of this, but I'm still far behind, even though I don't mind Amazon's ads on my Echo Show device.

1:11:59This is too much. This is the big thing I've been thinking about this whole time is a question I asked Ilya two years ago is you have all these big ideas about what a TV could be. You have all these interesting features you want to add. You have all the stuff you could do. What if instead of selling me a free TV, you sold me a really expensive TV? That did everything. Right. And you made this stuff really good and it all worked. And you actually tried to sort of proactively make the case that this thing should be the center of your home in this like meaningful technological way. And his answer to me was essentially I could do that and it would be great and absolutely nobody would buy it because the price race of televisions has gone all the way down to the bottom such that if I tried to sell you the best TV you've ever seen in your entire life and it did everything perfectly, no one would buy it anyway.

1:12:40But I'm curious, you've now used the thing and lived with it for a while. Like, is there a version of this idea that is compelling to you? I think it would be kind of, it is an interesting concept. And I think like in the future, I know like even streaming services are free now. I just, I think, I feel like they're relying on being free so much that it's almost like taking away from the TV. like you were just saying. I mean, I do wonder how it would be if they did sell it for a price tag. I mean, it's just, I don't know. I just don't know if, I don't know about the ads. I think if they got rid of the ads and maybe made it a really innovative TV, kept the secondary display, but maybe did have cool apps on there, allowed you to do watch parties and stuff like that, maybe that would be viable.

1:13:40I think we just all have to come to terms with that this is probably the future and that we are all going to have mini billboards all over our home. It's going to be our fridges. It's going to be on our smart displays. It's going to be hanging under our TVs. It is like the home has been the sacred space for advertising, right? It's not been in our homes. It's everywhere else you go. It's in your email. It's on your phone. It's wherever you walk around the world, there are ads, but they've not been in our homes. But it does seem inevitable. It's like they're coming. And obviously in this instance, telly, you're inviting them in.

1:14:14In Amazon's instances with the shows, they added them after the fact. And same thing's happening with the Samsung fridge. I know you guys talked about that on the show a while back. I haven't seen them on mine yet. I'm keeping an eye out. But yeah, it's like that encroaching on the sacred space is just happening more and more and more and it needs to stop and we yeah we need one safe space and i think like there's already so much advertising on your tv right like i'm on record as saying i have absolutely no problem with the pause ads that everybody has on streaming services now i actually think that is like a terrifically good idea and i hope they all make so much money on it that they never have to do anything else like if i'm pausing my show i don't care what's on the screen right it's the same way i feel about the the kindle ads like we were just talking about Like, I'm not doing anything here.

1:15:00Sure, show me an ad. But I think, like, Emma, it seems like the real bummer of your experience so much was that not only are the ads there, they are perpetually fighting the thing that you're actually trying to do on your TV. So it's not even interruptive. It's actively making the experience worse. Yeah, exactly. And that's hard to get over. Yeah, I think so. Are you sending it back? I am going to soon, I think. Yeah, because this is actually an unusually good question to ask in this context, because mostly we're product reviewers who use these things and then send them back to companies because for ethical reasons we don't keep any of the stuff that we review.

1:15:38A, I don't know if that applies here because the TV is free in the first place, but B, you just got one. So if you just wanted this to be your TV, it could be your TV. Yeah. Is this going to be your TV? No.

1:15:53I have my LG I'm very happy with. What was the breaking point for you that you were like, this is not an experience I can do anymore? It was almost like not even the ads. It was just the interface itself because it kind of takes a long time to boot up. Oh, God, it just gets worse. You're subject to like an AI news segment when you turn on the TV. Wait, what? Hold on. Hold on. So there's an act before you get to actually see the TV? Oh, my goodness. Okay, this is not a thing I even thought I needed to ask. Okay, I have a new question for you, Emma. You walk into the room. You sit down. You pick up the remote.

1:16:38What happens? Okay. so it like it'll display telly on the tv while it like boots up okay and then once that happens the telly today segment comes on and that uses an ai likeness of an actress who then details all these news stories like i did not know she was ai at first i was like because then when i started using the tv i was like why is she wearing the same outfit every day and with the same hair i I was like, this is not right. I don't even know if I would really pick up on that. Like, she's so busy. How is she doing this every day? I was just like, this isn't right. Okay. How long is this news broadcast?

1:17:21It's not like, I like listened to the whole thing on, like the whole thing through. Because then it just like loops. I'm not sure how long it is, but it's not that long. And the worst part is though, is that when you turn off the TV and turn it back on, it just like resets. So you can't like pick off, pick up where you left off on the new segment. It just like starts at the beginning again. Yeah, no, I'm immediately out. Like literally just that. I'm like back in the box. You didn't give this a score. Yeah. Okay. Come on. What's the score? What's the review score? If I had to pick a number, I mean like maybe like a four.

1:18:00I'm not a reviewer. I know. I don't know. Based on this, I'm thinking a solid two. Okay. Yeah. but it's free yeah exactly i mean ai and ads yeah and then in between the news segment you also get more ads oh my god on your main display okay so wait i'm now so hung up on the startup experience here i'm really sorry so so you turn it on the the the news thing starts playing the the ai woman tells you what i guess whatever news stories telly thinks are interesting that day yeah Yeah. What is it? It's mainly like celebrity like news or like viral videos. Like I'm just imagining like a team at telly trying to like program the daily every day to like make for.

1:18:48But anyway. OK, so you go through that. Can you can you just immediately like home button out of that and then go to your apps? Yeah, you can like you can just click your your input because it operates like you can't even it doesn't even have built in streaming apps like you. It comes with a Google dongle. Oh, right. Like a Chromecast? Yeah, I think so. Google TV thing? Yeah, it's like the little Google TV dongle. I forgot that it was that. They haven't even... And I think the plan was not to be like that forever, but to, like, offload. Again, this is an advertising company, right? Yeah. It's important to keep remembering that this is an advertising company.

1:19:27Okay, but so... But you're going to get, like, a jump scare, essentially, every time you turn on your TV, because there's just going to be an AI woman yelling news at you every time you turn on, which is kind of alarming when you first turn on the TV. It's a little unsettling because she's always like, hello, hello, friends. Like, we're gonna, and then like, she goes into the thing and it's, I don't know. And there's another AI person that shows up, I noticed, too, in there. And it's just, it's just a bizarre experience. It's a dystopian nightmare. Yes. Yeah, that is tough. But you brought into your home for free, though, so there's the bonus.

1:20:03Yeah. Didn't spend any money on this. I do think this is a fascinating test. And I know we should switch gears and get to the lightning round. But I do know there are a lot of Verge readers and Vergecast listeners who signed up to get one of these things and have them in your house. And I think this is maybe the most straightforward test we've ever had of what people are willing to put up with for free stuff. And I mean that like everybody's price tolerance is different. There is a whole spectrum of stuff we are willing to put up with for free. right? Like my Gmail got more and more ads all the time.

1:20:37And I keep using Gmail like that. Everybody has been testing this theory for years and years and years and years. And I think this is the most extreme version of it we've ever encountered. Like, what if all of this was blaring in your face at all times, but you got to save$300 on your TV. And I think I want to hear from everyone who has one of these in your house, call the hotline at 66 version one, send us an email vergecast to the verge.com. I genuinely no judgment on any direction. But I want to know if you kept your telly. And I want to know whether it has proven to be worth it for you or not.

1:21:07Because I think there's a lot of this stuff that Emma sounds like just sort of first gen problems that it's like, I suspect the next webcam would be better. I suspect some of the apps would get better if this thing becomes popular. People will start to like, if there is a there there with this, I actually think V2 might be really fascinating. I also think it's possible that enough people are going to have the experience you did of just like, this becomes untenable because the longer I sit here and watch it, the more I hate it. That the whole thesis behind this device is just not going to work.

1:21:38Well, and this has to be in your main viewing area, right? I think I read that in your piece. You can't like put this in the guest room or something because your extra TV. Yeah, you're not supposed to. Yeah, I was gonna say, how do they know that? Yeah, well, that's another thing. Like, you're supposed to keep it connected to the internet, plugged in at all times, but at one point... Yeah, has anyone from telly like shown up at your house to make sure? I'm imagining this like a random inspection kind of situation. I was actually kind of scared because like I left it unplugged for like three weeks.

1:22:09I was like on vacation and nothing happened. So I was a little bit nervous about that. You come home, you're like, I've been robbed, but only for one specific thing. All right. I want to hear from everybody. Emma, are you, will you stick around and do some lightning round with us? Yeah. All right, good. All right. We are going to come back and do a lightning round. Emma's going to ship her telly back, and we'll be right back. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who won't give up the peach fuzz currently posing as a mustache on his upper lip. Get him an electric razor.

1:22:45Amazon has early holiday deals on gifts everyone wants. Like the latest kitchen gadgets and toys. And some they don't even know they need. Like that razor. Grab him a mirror, too, so he can see how pretty he is without that dirt on his lip.

1:23:02Every great company's story is defined by moments when their founders make bold decisions. These are high-stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Murilov Boeta, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make or break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcasts.

1:24:11www.thumbtack.com All right, we're back. Let's get to the lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor, whatever that means. Neal is going to be back soon. He'll explain what that means. I'm excited about it. I miss the thunder. The thunder is gone. You'll notice Jake is gone. I killed Jake. No, Jake is out doing Jake things. He'll be back. But he is still very sad about the thunder round, and he continues to post at me from burner accounts about the thunder round. to all of you, I hear you and you're wrong and I don't care and it's the lightning round. Shocking amount of news to get through this week.

1:24:50So let's blow through some of it. Emma, why don't you go first? What's your first lightning round story? So I had a story about how Microsoft is giving its co-pilot AI a face. And this was about as unsettling as the telly is because... Yeah, you've had a tough couple of weeks here. I just like looked at this and I guess they have like there's a bunch of faces you can choose from and they're all like not human. I mean, they're not like realistic human faces. They're like kind of cartoony. And it's just bizarre to see like you click on them and they're like, hello, Emma, how may I help you today?

1:25:32And they're like whole mouth moves. And it's just kind of creepy, to be honest. And I think I'd rather have the little co-pilot bean thing that they used to have or that they were trying before. Like, I'd rather have that talk at me, I think. Jen's out on the bean. The idea of giving AI a face is definitely something we've seen all the tech companies try and sort of tackle with now. I mean, wasn't there the rumor here that the new Apple smart display is going to have like a clippy-like? Like, not clippy, but what's the finder-like face? So, like, because I think one of the keys here is some expression does help with the communication, but does it need to be human or can it just be, you know, some kind of, like, smile?

1:26:19Like, on the Echo devices we're talking about, it's like little smile now pops up to sort of show some interaction. So, you kind of need some feedback, but does it need to be? And, yeah, you're right. These are not, these are kind of creepy looking. characters. Can you stylize them at all? Do you know? Or does it you just choose one of them? Like, can you customize your co-pilot creature? I think you can. You have to just choose one of them. Okay. I can see them in the future, like making letting you customize them. But for now, it's just kind of like, here you go. Like, just where does it come?

1:26:56Like, I have not used a Windows computer in a very long time. So does it like just middle of the screen? Or is it in the corner? Or Where do they appear? I just put it like on a, it's on like the browser. Like I just tried it on the browser and it just is like in the middle of your browser, like a big face that's just like talking to you and you talk back aloud to it. And it's just like, it's just kind of bizarre. Like I can see what they're trying to get at, but like I'm not sure if AI really needs a human face. It is one of those things that I think you're totally right, Emma, that you can like absolutely 100 % imagine the series of decisions that led to the launch of, I think it's called Portraits.

1:27:36And every single one of those decisions was the wrong one. And it's just like, it's because it's like, I think that most people's experiences, you load up something like the chat GPT voice mode, and it has this sort of pulsing thing that gives you this idea that it's listening. And you want something that seems active, right? So it doesn't just feel like you're shouting at a static screen, which feels bad. And so figuring out what those animations should be and how they should work and what kind of character it should be, I actually think is a really interesting exploration. And I know all these companies are doing that in terms of like, what is the tone of voice that these things should have?

1:28:11And what is the character of them? And how should they talk? And should they use words like sus? Like all these different things I think are super interesting and valuable. And I think if you land on like Polar Express level animated people, you have gone wrong. I agree that we should, A, in principle, we should not be training people to think of these things as humans. I understand why the companies want you to do that, and I think it is bad and they should stop. I also think, like, the idea that maybe it should seem like some cool, weird alien bean creature is, like, maybe closer. And there's all kinds of interesting examples in science fiction of these, like, weird objects.

1:28:52Like, I was just watching Elio, the Pixar movie that just came out that nobody saw. Delightful movie, by the way. Highly recommend it. And there's this really cute little, like, blobby alien that just, like, follows him around through most of the movie. And I was like, that's what I want my AI to be. Like, forget the rest of this. Just give me a little jellyfish-looking alien that talks to me in every language known to man. And I'm in. The floating around part would be great, too. Oh, yeah. I wanted to sort of just, like, kick it up here next to me. It just hangs out. Yeah. That's the dream. Yeah.

1:29:21Yeah, but co-pilot portraits is not it. That's all I know for sure. While we're on the subject of slightly creepy AI, my first lightning round thing is this new Sora app that OpenAI put out this week. Slightly creepy? Fair. We're going to talk more about Sora over time because it's still, it's an invite-only app that most people have not had access to. But I think the idea is essentially, it's TikTok, but everything is AI generated is what it's going to be. This is like the vibes app that Meta put out, which is essentially the same thing. It's just like what if Facebook was all AI, which AI would point out is just what Facebook is now.

1:30:00But also this question of like, will you as a person want to spend your days scrolling through a bunch of AI generated content is the big question that these companies are trying to answer right now. But the thing that happened this week, two things that I think are really interesting. One is Sora 2, the model that powers all of it, appears to be so good it's going to be terrifying, like in some really big and important ways. And I think we've been burned by how good the demo videos are before. So I am withholding a lot of judgment until we actually see what this stuff looks like in real life.

1:30:37But like the videos that we've seen are nuts. Like truly, I think, I don't know how you guys feel, but I'm a relatively sophisticated viewer of both real and artificial stuff. And I had a really hard time distinguishing what was and was not AI from these things and like people talking and recognizable people in these videos, which goes to the other thing I think is really interesting, which is this idea that is inside of the Sora's app called Cameos, which is basically the idea is that you as a person upload a video that you take on your phone or whatever. You upload a video to the app with your face in it.

1:31:15And what that then does is give everyone else on the app permission to use your face in generated videos. And there's a really interesting like permission structure in that, which is like it can't do anything until I add myself to the corpus of data. But once I do, I become fair game in the model with which to, you know, do any kind of deep fake you want. I just think that's a really interesting way to think about this kind of permission that is messy and problematic in a whole bunch of ways, but it's apparently what they're headed for. But it does feel like I have been reluctant to say and feel like we are heading towards some, like, truth is unknowable and everything is a disaster.

1:31:55But, like, looking at these Sora videos, it was unnerving. I don't know. Did either of you experience that looking at this stuff? Yeah, I did see, I don't know, I think, I don't know if it was Sam Altman or somebody else, they posted, like, a video of, like, an AI-generated gymnastics routine. or like a clip from that. And like AI has notoriously like had trouble generating this because it shows like gymnasts with like three arms or something. Yeah, they'll do like one normal flip and then they like do like a weird fly off of the map. But it seems like Sora, like I didn't, it looked like a real clip.

1:32:31Like this one looked legit and it was kind of unsettling and just not great. I think one of the I mean, it's terrifying that all of this is getting so real. But one of the kind of the flip side that makes it even more terrifying to me is that when the fake stuff gets so real, it means that no one believes the real stuff either. It's like the fake news dichotomy that we've ended up in. It's like, you know, you've got to trust your sources, which is always something, you know, reliable sources. But with this, it's like, if you don't believe, you can't believe anything anymore. And that just puts you in like an existential crisis.

1:33:13Like my daughter is 14 and she spends a fair amount of time on TikTok. And she can tell right away when something's AI. It's like, it's now like a new skill that our youth are learning. Totally. Which is a good skill. But this is what I've said to her. It's like, is there going to be a point where you can't tell the difference? And when you get to that point, nothing is real. That was this, the Sora 2 videos. And again, these are just demo videos. Like God only knows how accurate this is to what most people's actual experience will be. That would, these are the first time that I have looked at them and like I've had to watch them several times before you could clock anything that looked like AI.

1:33:54And like maybe the youths will be better at this than we are. Like hopefully they will be. But I would have said we were a long way away from it being really impossible for anyone to tell. And now suddenly it feels like it's closer than I realized, which is pretty scary. All right. That's my deep existential crisis for the week. Jen, what's your first lightning round? It's Fat Bear Week!

1:34:28I don't know why I'm surprised this is what you think. It's so exciting. I've missed the entire week, thanks to Google and Amazon. But I did get to see or hear, thanks to Justine's wonderful reporting, most important story she's reported on ever, sorry, that there was a champion crowned. And now for those of you who sadly are not familiar with Fat Bear Week, It's one of my favorite weeks on the internet. It is when a group in Alaska live streams all of the brown bears coming to the Katmai National Park, where they converge on, I forget the name of the river, but one of the big rivers where all the salmon are jumping up, and the bears just stand there and let the salmon jump in their mouths.

1:35:19It's amazing. And they're doing this to get fat for the winter. Sam, honestly. Yeah, that's right. So this group is a conservancy nonprofit. It's called explore.org. They have webcams set up and they track the bears when they arrive because they arrive relatively, you know, normal, healthy bear looking. And then over the time, they get fatter and fatter and fatter because they're just eating salmon, eating salmon. And you get to vote on the champion fat bear. And this winner this year was Chunk, which is a great name, Bear 32. And it's just the most delightful thing on the internet. Like I spent most of my summer watching the eagles in the nest in California that was live streamed.

1:36:06There were these three and then two baby eagles that were hatched. And you got to watch them get raised and then fly the nest. And it was so amazing. And then this, watching brown bears coming to the rivers and feeding and fighting. And, like, there's a lot of, you know, it's like real housewives type stuff going on. And I literally, most years, I will just, I have two monitors. And one monitor will be live feeds of brown bears in Alaska eating salmon. And it's just so soothing and great and fun. And I was so excited. I was excited. But Chunk, weighing in at 1 ,200 pounds, an impressive. Good for Chunk.

1:36:48He got, one of the reasons he won, I think he got the sympathy vote because he had sadly had a broken jaw. Oh, Chunk. And, you know, any kind of injury like that could be technically, could definitely be fatal for an animal if it's not able to feed. And then the winter comes. because what bears do, obviously they go and hibernate for the winter and they need all the extra blubber from the salmon to keep them through the winter. And if they don't eat enough, they could die. So it's, you know, it's real survival of the fishiest out there, but also great YouTube viewing. Very good. We all root for Chunk.

1:37:22My favorite thing about this story was there was a comment on Justine's story, which is very good, and we'll put in the show notes. There was basically like, I don't know why this is on theverge.com, but I like it. And somebody else just responded to that comment and was like, webcams are tech. Yes. Hell yeah. I'm in. Yeah, that was why I asked Richard, the news editor, I was like, can I post about the eagle nest? And he's like, but it's a webcam. It's just a webcam and cute baby eagles. Neel Eye in the past has approved stories because there's a phone there and that's good enough. Sometimes it's good enough.

1:37:56This is what tech brings. We do whatever we want. This is the good stuff tech brings to us. 100%. I love it. I cannot recommend Chunk enough to everyone. Emma, what's your next one? Yeah. So my next one was that Waymo now supports YouTube music. And I chose this because I got to go to Waymo for the first time recently. You're just living in the future over here. I really are. Were there ads in the car? Oh. Now I don't even remember that because I was too busy staring at the steering wheel. Well, I hate about New York cabs. the ads i can never turn them off that oh yeah they don't have ads in waymos though i don't remember i'm sure they're coming if they don't yet exactly how was your waymo experience was it everything you dreamed of it was actually like really cool and i was just like they integrated like spotify earlier now it's youtube music but i just wanted to like say that the music that you here when you first like get into the Waymo it's very like soothing and it's like I can't imagine like like rocking out in there because I feel like you need the relaxing music like elevator music kind of it's like lo-fi music like you just need that so you don't like freak out that nobody's driving the car and like I feel like it's very it's very relaxing because sometimes at one point like the Waymo was making a right turn and I was just like, holy crap, like, I don't know what's going to happen to me after this.

1:39:31Yeah, I feel like everybody I know who takes a Waymo describes their first experience as like, oh my God, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die. And then by about the third one, you kind of just get used to it. Yeah, yeah, it's true. But yeah, I mean, I just think I could totally like see like how people do jam out in the Waymo because nobody's in the car and you can just like kind of party in there and go crazy. But I just I do like the relaxing music that they play by default. Yeah, I tend to agree that like, it should probably not try to distract me with my favorite songs. But I also feel like, listen, Waymo and YouTube, owned by the same company.

1:40:08And these people need to have a meeting with each other so that it knows when I get in the car and it plays the music that I like the second I step into the vehicle. This is the most obvious thing in the world and Google will never do it and I I will just be angry about it forever. Yeah, I was abused at one of the comments on the quick post for this because somebody was like, of course, it's like the most Google thing ever to integrate their own service, like after doing Spotify and iHeartRadio. Yeah, like, oh, God, every once a year, everyone who works for Google should be required to all meet each other.

1:40:44Yes. In a Google home. Exactly. All right. My next one is, I mean this sincerely, maybe the single most exciting product announcement for me personally that has happened this year, which is that Spotify will now let you exclude a single song from your algorithm and taste profile on Spotify. so recently uh i have a i have a two and a half year old who only wants to watch toy story 100 of the time this morning i'm pretty sure he faked sick for i think the first time ever so that he because he wanted to stay home and watch tv and i saw through him and he's not here but anyway uh his favorite song on earth is the third song from the toy story soundtrack which is called i will go Sailing No More.

1:41:35And it's the one where Buzz finds out he's a toy and then tries to fly out the window and falls down. And Arthur, my son, likes to stand there with his Buzz and act out this whole thing as we play the song 700 times in a row. So all of this is to say, I Will Go Sailing No More is going to be the number one song on my Spotify raps this year. It's going to be the song all of my other recommendations are based on. I get Discover Weekly recommendations every week now by bands called like fart poo poo pee pee. And like, it's just this is my life now. And so the idea that I'm going to be able to go in and say exclude this from my profile.

1:42:10This is not representative of my actual taste is so exciting. And every other service needs to have this. Like if I watch a YouTube video that I don't want to influence the rest of my YouTube videos, I want to be able to be like, I didn't like that one. Pretend you never saw that I saw it. Like, I want that on every service. And it makes me so happy that it exists on Spotify. Oh, completely agree. I need it on Netflix because for some reason, even though my kids have their own profiles, my daughter loves to watch all her sort of anime, K-pop type movies and shows online. Literally everything I have is Asian influenced for all of my watch list now.

1:42:47And it's like some of it's great, but it's, you know, I also, you know, give me a good CSI. Come on. But yeah, I agree. I had the same issue with Spotify. I ended up having to get the separate accounts with the kids and spend the extra money. That's in your future, David. I just want the button. I want one button that says, this is not the person I aspire to be. Take this out of my profile. And then I want another button that is like, I would like to be more like the person who watches and listens to this. Please show me more of this. More of these. Yeah, like when I come across like a gardening video on TikTok, I want a button that is like, hell yeah.

1:43:21More of these. You know what I mean? Yeah, I want to be the person who watches this video. So show me more of this video. No, I agree. The opt-out button should be everywhere. Yeah. I didn't watch this because I liked it. Please leave me alone with it. But it needs to exist everywhere. And I'm thrilled that it exists on Spotify. Jen, you're up last. What's your last thing? Yeah, just to bring it back full circle, I guess, to all the Amazon announcements. We didn't dive into this because there was a big surprise, actually. This was quite a big surprise for the Ring. Ring, the Amazon-owned video doorbell camera company.

1:43:59Jamie Siminoff, who has recently returned, came out on stage at the event and introduced a boatload of new cameras, nine in total. All 2K and 4K, which they've never done before. So 4K is a huge jump. So, you know, they're just leapfrogging the nest there who just went to 2K. 2K, now they've gone to 4K. And there's a new ring battery, sorry, a ring doorbell. There's two versions of that, 2K and 4K. These are wired. They're all wired cameras. Again, the higher resolution, you need a bit more power. This is all feeding into the Alexa Plus AI as well. So you've got two new doorbell cameras, new design, nice, quite sleek, a little slimmer, still not a good design, I'm afraid.

1:44:46But it looks like a doorbell. That's what Jamie Siminoff said to me afterwards when I commented on this. I'm like, this was a chance for a big redesign. He's like, it looks like a doorbell. That's what it needs to do. So your doorbell isn't something you use, which is a good point. But yeah, so these come in. You've also got new floodlight camera, new outdoor camera, new indoor camera that are all 4K. There are 2K options for some of these as well, plus POE options, which are more for professional installs. But I know some of our listeners are handy with the sort of the more permanent installs.

1:45:19POE is a great solution if you can do it. So these are all announced. along with something called retinal vision, which sounds like the worst. I'm sorry, it's the worst. That's just vision. That's all. That's what vision is. I thought it was like an eye scanner at first. Yeah, I know. I was like, that would be cool. Like, so you're it does what? It's like, do I need to go to the eye doctor? What's going on? What's going on? Basically, it's a fancy way of describing AI, enhancing the video feed. So you will supposedly get much better video quality, which again is feeding into the Alexa Plus and the AI.

1:46:01So you can get new, there is text descriptions now on the Ring video doorbells and the cameras. So you'll get a description of what's happened as opposed to just, hey, there's, you know, right now you might get person detected or motion detected. And you will also, because they introduced facial recognition for the first time to Ring cameras. So you now could get an alert that says, hey, David's at your front door. If you're going to come visit sometime, David, that would be great. Emma, telly has arrived at your front door. Telly has arrived at your front door. Yes, they've come to make sure you're watching your telly.

1:46:37So this was all these big upgrades for Ring that are things that people have been wanting for a while, especially the new increased resolution. The facial recognition feature, you know, some people love it. Some people don't. Obviously, you don't have to turn this on. It is all cloud-processed, but whereas some, I think Nest does most of its, Apple does most of its local, I think some of Nest's local, Google Nest. So that was all interesting. But the star of the show was, I would, was the dog, as we mentioned. They do, you know, tech companies do love to use pets and kids to keep us interested.

1:47:16But there's a new feature called Search Party. And what this does is when you lose, if you lose your dog, or just dogs now, cats coming soon, you can send out an alert in the Ring Neighbors app, which is a separate app. It's kind of like Nextdoor. Like Nextdoor, but only for crime. And yeah, any ring cameras in your neighborhood will get so that they can the image can be recognized. The image of your dog can be recognized by any local cameras. And then if the AI, this is all AI based, sees your dog on someone else's camera, that ring owner will then get an alert saying we've spotted this lost dog on your camera.

1:48:05Would you like to, you know, get in touch with the owner, take the dog home? You know, they can then decide what they're going to do. So the idea is this AI, neighborhood AI is working to help find your lost dog. So it's a neat idea. I was very excited when they first showed the dog on the screen thinking, we're finally getting the fetch pet tracker from 2019. But no, this is far more technically advanced than just a little neat pet tracker, which was very cool because it was one of the first devices they announced for Sidewalk. What happened to Sidewalk? Every time, yeah, like you say, you know, all the rings will talk to each other.

1:48:48And I'm like, oh, didn't Amazon make a big splash about how it was going to connect all of its devices and build a whole new Internet out of all of your connect? Is this that? No, this has got nothing to do with sidewalk. Jen, don't do that to me. That's not nice. I know. I think sidewalk is a really interesting idea. And that's why I was excited about this pet tracker from six years ago. I was excited six years ago, making that clear. Because I've used a lot of pet trackers and they use GPS or cellular, which where I live, both of which are very unreliable and also expensive. whereas the idea of Sidewalk is it's a free, low-power, local network that uses already existing infrastructure, all those many, many millions of Echo devices out there.

1:49:35But nothing has really come of developing products for Sidewalk. There are a few that came out, but you don't really hear much about them. Ring never did. It's Petracker. I asked Jamie about the Petracker, and he said, you know, it was something they wanted to do, But he said this is easier in many ways because it's very hard to get 100 % penetration on pets, pet trackers. Whereas, you know, we have a lot of ring doorbells already out there. And this only works on outdoor cameras, obviously. But, I don't know, I mean, you also have to have ring cameras. So, whereas that's probably likely. It's got one of the larger market penetrations that your neighborhood would have them.

1:50:19But it's kind of locking it into one ecosystem. Whereas, yeah, Sidewalk does work today. Like, I have it using it in my home, and it helps keep devices sending notifications when the internet goes down. So when the internet goes down, I still get alerts from my Ring cameras because it's using Sidewalk. It's a great system. It's a great network. It helps extend connectivity outside of your home without using Wi-Fi. But yeah, nothing. They don't seem to have done much with it recently. I'm hoping to get an update one day. Whatever. Panos, if you're listening, give me sidewalk. Everything will be fine.

1:50:57I will say the search party thing is like in this context, they're very smart to talk about this with pets because if they're like, we will track your children around the neighborhood. All of a sudden you have, we can follow you from house to house. Sounds really creepy. But in the like, we're just going to use it to find your lost dog way. It's like, oh, this is just a good thing. This is like, welcome to the double-sided coin of all of Ring's everything. If you look at it one way, it's nice and helpful and good. And if you look at it another way, it is just a horrible dystopia for snitching on each other about everything.

1:51:31Especially now that you've added the facial recognition. Ring, this is what we do. I will say, though, Ring is, at least in my neighborhood, everywhere. wear yeah we've we spent the summer house hunting and it's like just that i started just clocking the percentage of places that we would go that would have a ring and it's like i mean most places now seem to have some kind of smart doorbell like i more of more often than not i feel like the places we go have smart doorbells and most of those are rings like ring is just the default player in this category which is nuts yeah which is why i wish they would come up with some nicer designs.

1:52:07Because you go to these gorgeous houses, I'm sure. I mean, you live in D.C. I'm sure there's some lovely old houses there, and then they'll have this bright stainless steel looking thing with a big blue ring. I know you can get face plates, and there's the Elite that can kind of be installed properly, but most people don't do that. They just stick the big battery-powered one on the front door, and it's glaring there at you, which is part of the point, I suppose. If you see it, you know you're being watched. It's something. Yeah. Emma, are you a smart home person? I have a smart doorbell. It's not a ring.

1:52:39It's a Eufy. But yeah, there's a lot of rings around my neighborhood. I could definitely vouch for that. Yeah, the Neighbors app is just forever like a weird, sketchy, dystopian place that I do not enjoy. All right. It's time for us to get out of here. We have been talking about ads for too long. We've gone way over. Thank you both for doing this. This was very fun. I know it's been a truly nuts week and month, frankly, for both of you. And it appears it's not over. Like, Tech-temper is a real thing, but I think Tech-tober is coming fast. So it's going to be busy. We'll have to do this more. Thank you both for doing this.

1:53:20This was a lot of fun. We'll be back on Tuesday. Jen, you and I are going to have some more smart home stuff to talk about. It all just keeps happening. And I think actually, you and I are going to be doing a lot of fun smart home stuff this fall. So stay tuned for all of that. I'm moving at some point, so I'm just going to like ask you for help on smart home things that I can try and convince my wife to install in our house to absolutely no success. It's going to be great. But until then, a couple of things before we go, by the way, one, call the Vergecast hotline 866-VERGE11, email vergecast at theverge.com.

1:53:49I genuinely want to know all of your feelings about Telly. If you've gotten a Telly, tell us what you think about Amazon stuff, all of your feelings. Also, Version History, our new podcast is launching this Sunday, October 5th. If you are subscribed to The Verge Cast on any podcast platform or to The Verge on YouTube, you'll get it automatically. But also subscribe to The Verge History feed. That's like one huge way that we make this thing work is by building its own feed itself. Go find that. We'll link it in the show notes. Thank you for listening. And I'm genuinely curious what you think about that show after you hear it this weekend.

1:54:19So get at me. All of your thoughts. I want to hear them all. All right. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Tuesday and Friday. we got so much more. The news just never stops. We got weird AI apps to test. We got all kinds of stuff to do. Until then, that's the Virgcast. Rock and roll.

1:54:44Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you.

1:55:22Like Tea Time U. Mmm. Or this Tea Time U. Or even this tea time you Said you hear about Dave Or even tea time tea time tea time you So update on Dave It's up to you We'll take the laundry Rinse, it's time to be great