Hasta La Gadget!

Twitter has finally shown off its long-rumored feature for long form writing. The company confirmed that it’s beginning to test a new “Notes” feature, which will allow writers to publish freeform content on Twitter without a character limit.

Notes are essentially blog posts that appear within Twitter without the typical limitations of a tweet. There are no character limits, and writers can embed photos, videos and other tweets within a Note. Writers can also share their Notes via tweets, and their published Notes will appear on their Twitter profiles.

Notes could significantly change how writers interact with their followers, and give them more flexibility than the typical tweetstorm. In a Note announcing the launch, Twitter’s editorial director Rembert Browne wrote that Notes are meant to give writers an alternative to the lengthy threads without having to publish writing elsewhere and share it back to Twitter. “Since the company’s earliest days, writers have depended on Twitter to share their work, get noticed, be read, create conversation — everything but the actual writing,” Browne wrote. “With Notes, the goal is to fill in that missing piece and help writers find whatever type of success they desire.”

For now, the feature is available to a “small group of writers” from Canada, Ghana, the United Kingdom, and the United States, though the company says it will eventually expand the test group as it gathers feedback. Notes is part of a broader push by Twitter to build features for writers. With the change, the company is also bringing Revue, the newsletter company it acquired last year, into its new “Twitter Write” group, which encompasses notes and newsletters. So far, it’s unclear how Revue newsletters may be incorporated into Notes.

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At Amazon’s Re:Mars conference, Alexa’s senior vice-president Rohit Prasad exhibited a startling new voice assistant capability: the supposed ability to mimic voices. So far, there’s no timeline whatsoever as to when or if this feature will be released to the public.

Stranger still, Amazon framed this copycatting ability as a way to commemorate lost loved ones. It played a demonstration video in which Alexa read to a child in the voice of his recently deceased grandmother. Prasad stressed that the company was seeking ways to make AI as personal as possible. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, he said, “it can definitely make the memories last.” An Amazon spokesperson told Engadget that the new skill can create a synthetic voiceprint after being trained on as little as a minute of audio of the individual it’s supposed to be replicating.

Security experts have long held concerns that deep fake audio tools, which use text-to-speech technology to create synthetic voices, would pave the way for a flood of new scams. Voice cloning software has enabled a number of crimes, such as a 2020 incident in the United Arab Emirates where fraudsters fooled a bank manager into transferring $35 million after they impersonated a company director. But deep fake audio crimes are still relatively unusual, and the tools available to scammers are, for now, relatively primitive.

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Creative Assembly is best known for deliberately-paced games like Alien: Isolation and the Total War series, but it’s about jump headlong into the multiplayer action realm. The developer is partnering with Sega to introduceHyenas, a team-based shooter coming to PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PCs in 2023. The title takes its cue from tech headlines, but also doesn’t take itself (or its gameplay mechanics) too seriously.

You join three-person teams to raid spaceship shopping malls for the coveted merch left behind by Mars billionaires. You’ll have to compete against four other loot-seeking teams while simultaneously dealing with security systems, hired goons and zero-gravity. You can not only flip gravity on and off, but use bridge-making goo and other special abilities to claim the upper hand. And yes, it’s pretty silly — you can expect appearances from Richard Nixon masks, Sonic the Hedgehog merch and Pez dispensers.

The creators are currently accepting sign-ups for a closed alpha test on PCs. They’ve also made clear there will be no “pay to win” systems. While that suggests you might have the option of buying cosmetic items, your success should depend solely on talent. It’s just a question of whether Hyenas will be good enough to pry gamers away from multiplayer shooter mainstays like the Call of Duty series or Fortnite.