Google opens up its smart home to everyone and will make Google TVs home hubs

Chromecast with Google TV will soon become a Google Home hub to control local and cloud-based smart home devices. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge Google has announced that it’s opening up API access to its Google Home smart home platform. This means that any app maker — smart home-related or not — can access the over 600 million devices connected to Google Home and tap into the Google Home automation engine to create smart solutions for their users inside their own app.The Hom

Maezawa in 2022. | Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had once planned to take eight artists on a flight around the Moon aboard SpaceX’s Starship. But now, with Starship still in development the flight already indefinitely delayed, Maezawa says he has canceled the trip.
The X account for the flight, called dearMoon, announced the news on Friday, followed by posts from the billionaire himself. In those, he said he had signed on in 2018

Image: Hyundai The Hyundai Ioniq 5 will reportedly be the first car rolling out of the company’s new Georgia factory this fall. Moreover, company CEO Jose Muñoz tells Automotive News he expects the US-made version will net buyers the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which the South Korea-made vehicle isn’t otherwise eligible for (outside of a leasing loophole).
Hyundai will start producing the Ioniq 5 at the Georgia plant in October, but the company won’t be making bat

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge It sounds like Apple’s WWDC plans go beyond sprinkling AI fairy dust on everything (though that’s going to be a big part of it, too). Besides Siri gaining new AI-powered app control, the company also plans to overhaul things like the Settings apps for iOS and macOS, Control Center, Messages, Mail, and more.
A new, “cleaner” Settings app UI will mean better organization and improved search, Mark Gurman writes in his Power On Newslet

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Nvidia just gave the PC gaming industry a reason to shrink its biggest graphics cards and produce smallish cases. It’s not what I expected, but I think it might actually help. Read before you judge, friends — I was definitely ready to call out some Nvidia BS, but I’ve mostly come around.
When leakers revealed last month that Nvidia would help steer its graphics card partners toward smaller gaming PCs, I began to daydream. Might we finally see a g

G-Assist is a real tech demo from Nvidia. | Image: Nvidia When Nvidia first announced G-Assist it was an April Fools’ prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now, seven years later, G-Assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners.
Project G-Assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it&rsquo

Nvidia leans into RTX AI PCs. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia and AMD are gearing up to launch gaming laptops that include the AI Copilot Plus features that Microsoft just announced for Qualcomm-powered laptops. At Computex today, Nvidia briefly teased that “RTX AI PC” laptops are on the way from Asus and MSI that will eventually include Copilot Plus PC features.
“Newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chi

Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 40, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, send me all your recommendations immediately, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about Shein and Reese Witherspoon and Hollywood Ponzi schemes, journaling in Papery, testing Lazy for all my link dumps and notes, drinking a lot of Poppi soda, developing a mac and

Minecraft is 15 years old, so it’s only natural that Lego should honor the anniversary with a set just for the game’s many adult fans. The company has started taking preorders for The Crafting Table, a 1,195-piece 18-and-up build, as Jay’s Brick Blog writes. The set will cost $89.99 in the US when it’s released on August 1st.
Lego says the set will include “familiar biomes, favorite mobs and hidden Easter eggs.” As the name suggests, the kit looks like an in-

Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images Boeing, NASA, and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) are now targeting a June 2nd, 12:03PM ET crewed launch for Boeing’s Starliner capsule after scrubbing it just minutes before liftoff on June 1st. If the Sunday launch happens, it will be the first time Starliner, which has faced multiple delays, will have flown with human beings on board.NASA says the ULA is currently investigating why a computer, called a ground launch sequencer, didn’t enter “

Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images Boeing, NASA, and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) are now targeting a June 2nd, 12:03PM ET crewed launch for Boeing’s Starliner capsule after scrubbing it less than 4 minutes before liftoff on June 1st. If the Sunday launch happens, it will be the first time Starliner, which has faced multiple delays, will have flown with human beings on board.NASA says the ULA is currently investigating why a computer, called a ground launch sequencer, didn’t enter

Scarlett Johansson at Cannes in 2023. | Photo: Laurent Koffel / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Researchers at Arizona State University found that Scarlett Johansson’s voice does indeed sound like “Sky,” OpenAI’s currently discontinued GPT-4o voice, according to NPR, which commissioned the comparison. After using AI models developed to analyze vocal similarities to compare Sky to roughly 600 other actresses, the lab reportedly found Johansson’s voice was “more si

Image: Netflix Lara Croft’s next adventure — well, one of them, anyway — will start streaming this fall. Netflix announced that its animated Tomb Raider adaption will hit the service on October 10th. The show is called Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, and it picks up right after the most recent video game trilogy, which culminated with Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018. Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter in the MCU) will star as Croft.
Here’s the setup:
Following the event

Image: Toho International Godzilla Minus One is officially streaming worldwide on Netflix as of today, everywhere except Japan and France, according to film distributor Toho International in a release shared with The Verge. You can also buy ($14.99) or rent ($5.99) HD digital copies of your own, either in color (Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play) or black and white (Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play).Written and directed by Takashi Yamakazi, Godzilla Minus One goes back to the giant radioactive kaiju&rs

Image: Toho International Godzilla Minus One is officially streaming worldwide on Netflix as of today, everywhere except Japan and France, according to film distributor Toho International in a release shared with The Verge. You can also buy ($14.99) or rent ($5.99) digital copies, either in color (Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play) or black and white (Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play).
Written and directed by Takashi Yamakazi, Godzilla Minus One goes back to the giant radioactive kaiju’s origins.

As you can see here, Sauron’s fortress of evil is sure to look great beside your modern art collection and West Elm furniture. | Image: Lego You can now own Sauron’s tower from The Lord of the Rings — well, the Lego version at least. Starting today, June 1st, Lego Insiders can purchase the massive Barad-dûr set for $459.99 before it becomes publicly available to everyone else on June 4th. Lego Insiders will also receive Lego’s exclusive Fell Beast set, which comes w