Text generated by artificial intelligence often has a particular vibe that gives it away as machine-generated, but it has become harder to pick out those idiosyncrasies as the tech has improved. We may be seeing a similar evolution of generative AI audio. Google has announced a new AI audio model called Gemini 3.1 Flash Live—as the name implies, it's designed for real-time conversation. It's rolling out in some Google products starting today, and developers will be able to start building their own chatty robots with the model, too.

Google says this AI is much faster and produces speech with a more natural cadence, aiming to solve a long-running issue with AI-generated speech. Like a chatbot, there's always a delay between input and output in generative audio systems. Longer delays and unnatural inflection make conversations feel sluggish and harder to follow. Researchers generally believe 300 milliseconds of latency is about the limit for optimal speech perception, but Google has not specified any particular delay for Gemini 3.1 Flash Live. It just vaguely has the speed you need.

But benchmark numbers? Google has plenty of those, which it claims show that 3.1 Flash Live will be a more reliable way to have audio-to-audio AI conversations. For example, a big gain in the ComplexFuncBench Audio shows the new model is better at complex, multi-step tasks. Gemini 3.1 Flash Live also tops the charts in the Big Bench Audio test, which evaluates reasoning with a set of 1,000 audio questions.

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Many of our graphics card reviews early last year and in the early 2020s focused on the difficulties of reviewing and recommending graphics cards when the manufacturer-suggested price points effectively didn't exist. Now, reviews of any new PC component have to contend with the much more broadly awful market for consumer PC parts as AI data center-fueled demand for RAM and flash memory chips drives up prices for DDR5 kits, SSDs, and GPUs.

In our August 2025 system guide, 32GB of DDR5 and a decent 2TB SSD would run you less than $200. Today, you'd pay between three and four times as much for similar components.

This is the context that Intel's Core Ultra 200S Plus chips—the $199 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and $299 Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, still codenamed Arrow Lake just like the originals—have launched into. They're solid performers, they're reasonably power-efficient, and for heavy multi-threaded workloads, they're a better value than what AMD can offer for the same price (though even years-old non-X3D AMD chips retain a small edge in games).

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Following backlash, OpenAI won't be rolling out an erotic version of ChatGPT any time soon.

According to the Financial Times , the controversial plan has been shelved "indefinitely" as OpenAI "refocuses" its attention on "core products."

Insiders told FT that OpenAI mulled scrapping the "adult mode" plan entirely, as even its own advisors warned that ChatGPT users could form unhealthy attachments, which might harm their mental health. One advisor chillingly suggested that the tweak risked turning ChatGPT into a "sexy suicide coach."

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Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan.

Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d'Artagnan, is best known as a character in The Three Musketeers , written by Alexandre Dumas and eventually played by both Gene Kelly and future Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy —but he was a real French military officer and spy. D’Artagnan died during a siege, and the whereabouts of his body have remained a mystery for more than 350 years. But an archaeologist in the Netherlands recently unearthed a skeleton from the floor of a 17th-century church that could actually be d’Artagnan.

“ It is only the dead who do not return”

The ground beneath the centuries-old Saints Peter and Paul Church subsided earlier this year, cracking a few of the blue tiles that pave the chapel’s floor. During repairs, church staff decided to have a look beneath the floor to see if there was any truth to the rumor that d’Artagnan—famous French Musketeer and inspiration for a series of swashbuckling novels—lay buried beneath their church. It turns out that there actually was a skeleton buried under the church floor, and there’s a decent chance it’s d’Artagnan himself.

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Chevrolet provided flights from Albany, New York, to Las Vegas, Nevada, and accommodation so Ars could check out the new Grand Sport. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Chevrolet has developed something of a modern tradition with recent generations of the Corvette: As a new generation approaches, the company rolls out the Grand Sport . It's intended to be a sort of "sweet spot" version of the ’Vette, pairing the go-fast bits of the higher-spec machines with the entry-level motor found in the Stingray.

If that pattern holds, the mid-engined, eighth-generation Corvette may be nearing the end—because this is the new Grand Sport. This one, though, is different. It comes with an all-new V8 at its heart, one with substantially more power and torque than the current base Stingray. If that's not enough, you can also get it with the ZR1X's electric motor and battery. That model is called the Grand Sport X, and it's the effective replacement for the first all-wheel-drive hybrid Corvette.

Yes, the E-Ray is dead, three years after Chevrolet raised eyebrows by putting a hybrid system where many said it didn't belong. But you can't argue with that system's all-weather capability. It lives on in the new Grand Sport X, which pairs a 186-horsepower (139 kW) electric motor on the front axle with a new V8 at the rear.

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Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early . Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105° F (40° C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western US expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1 . Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent , meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

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Drone startup BRINC announced Tuesday a significant upgrade for its law enforcement drones. BRINC’s newest model, Guardian, will have Starlink connectivity on every unit—a first for commercially available drones.

This new model, which will enter production later this year, has a flight time of over an hour and can reach a top speed of over 60 miles per hour. BRINC calls it the “first drone that can pursue vehicles.”

Additionally, Guardian can carry numerous payloads from its charging “nest,” including a floatation device, a defibrillator, epipens, the overdose-reversal drug Narcan, and more. The nest can also robotically swap batteries in about a minute, the company claims.

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NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration's space policy.

But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program's official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world.

The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA's rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

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Reddit will require accounts that exhibit “automated or otherwise fishy behavior” to verify that a human runs them, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a Reddit post today. The verification process aims to combat unwanted bots from flooding Reddit at a time when AI bots are poised to take over the Internet .

“As AI becomes a bigger part of the Internet, we want to make sure that when you’re on Reddit, you know when you’re talking to a person and when you’re not,” Huffman said.

Human verification will only occur if Reddit suspects that an account is a bot. This is “rare” and won’t apply to “most users,” Huffman emphasized. If the account cannot prove that it's human, it “may be restricted,” he said.

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