Most people access Google's search and AI products through a browser, but you've got some new options today. Google has been testing a Windows search app for some months, and it's now officially available . Over on the Apple side of the fence, Google has focused its efforts on designing a native Gemini app. That one is also available widely today with the same features you get in the Gemini web interface.

The "Google app for desktop" first arrived on Windows in a beta form last September . It was pretty rough at first, and Google couldn't even update the app's early versions, forcing users to uninstall and reinstall new builds. That won't be a concern with the official release, which brings assorted search capabilities to your Windows PC.

You can open the Google app by pressing Alt + Space at any time. The compact search UI floats on top of whatever you're doing, allowing you to instantly search the web and (with authorization) your local files and apps. Web results look like what you'd get in a browser, right down to the inclusion of AI Overviews and AI Mode.

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Robots such as Boston Dynamics’ four-legged Spot can now accurately read analog thermometers and pressure gauges while roaming around factories and warehouses. Those improvements come courtesy of Google DeepMind’s newest robotic AI model that aims to enhance robotic capabilities for ‘embodied reasoning’ when interacting with physical environments.

The new Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 model announced on April 14 performs as a “high-level reasoning model for a robot” that can plan and execute tasks, according to Google DeepMind. This model also unlocks the capability of accurately reading instruments such as complex gauges and doing visual inspections using sight glasses that provide a transparent window to peek inside tanks and pipes—a performance upgrade that came about through Google DeepMind’s ongoing collaboration with robotics company Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics has a keen interest in testing both quadruped and humanoid robotic workers in a wide range of industrial facilities, including the automotive factories of the robotic company’s corporate owner, Hyundai Motor Group. The company’s robot “dog,” Spot, is being trialled as a robotic inspector that roams throughout industrial facilities to check up on everything. Such inspection duties require “complex visual reasoning” to interpret the multiple needles, liquid levels, container boundaries and tick marks, along with text, in various instruments.

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NBA fans sat on the edges of their seats as last night’s game between the Miami Heat and Charlotte Hornets went into overtime. That excitement quickly shifted to confusion, frustration, and outrage when Amazon Prime Video, the only place where the game was available to watch, subsequently cut out for almost two minutes.

As reported by ESPN , Prime Video started showing a message that read “technical difficulties” seconds after cutting off the game’s commentator in the middle of a sentence. Viewers missed a Hornets possession that included a score by LaMelo Ball. By the time the stream came back online, 22.1 seconds of playing time had passed, per ESPN, and viewers were dismayed.

“Tell me the game didn’t just cut off?!!? Am I trippin?? WTH,” LeBron James, a Los Angeles Lakers player who previously won two championships with the Heat, said , adding a face-planting emoji, on X.

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The Godzilla franchise is going strong in 2026, with Apple TV's Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (part of Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse ) and the pending release of Toho's Godzilla Minus Zero , the hotly anticipated sequel to 2023's critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One . Toho unveiled the first short teaser at Cinemacon, and it has now been released online for our viewing pleasure.

(Spoilers for Godzilla Minus One below.)

Director Takashi Yamazaki wanted to return to Godzilla's filmic roots with Minus One , setting the events in postwar Japan and tapping into the monster's symbolic representation of the Japanese perspective on the 1940s nuclear holocaust—while also incorporating all-too-human themes of guilt and redemption. The film followed Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who was trying to flee from duty when Godzilla attacked the small garrison where he was hiding. Koichi's courage failed him, and he ended up one of only two survivors, wracked with guilt for failing to act.

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The US Space Force is still dealing with the near-term implications of the second grounding of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket in less than two years. The experience is likely to influence how the Pentagon buys launch services in the future, a three-star general said Tuesday.

The Vulcan rocket is one of the two primary launch vehicles the Space Force uses to put satellites into orbit, alongside SpaceX's Falcon 9. Despite a backlog of nearly 70 launches, ULA's Vulcan has flown just four times since debuting in January 2024.

On two of those flights, the Vulcan launcher suffered anomalies with one of its solid rocket boosters. One of the booster's exhaust nozzles blew off in the first incident in October 2024. The same problem appeared to occur again on a Vulcan launch in February of this year. The rocket continued flying after both incidents, ultimately reaching each mission's targeted orbit.

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Netgear is the first major vendor of consumer routers to obtain an exemption from the US government's sweeping ban on foreign-made routers.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday announced an exemption for Netgear's Nighthawk and Orbi routers, and its cable gateways and modems. It came about three weeks after the FCC said it would no longer approve consumer-grade routers made at least partly outside the US, except in cases where the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security determines that the router does not pose national security risks.

Under the new router ban, the Trump administration decides—through an opaque process in which it's unclear why any particular company receives an exemption—which companies' devices can be sold to consumers. Netgear, which is based in the US, was able to move quickly through the multi-agency approval process.

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Adobe has been putting task-specific AI tools and features into its creative productivity applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere at a breakneck pace, but the latest product from the company—a chat-based interface that can handle complex, multi-modal projects across several applications—marks a significant shift in how users can think about its suite of tools.

You could imprecisely but defensibly call it a sort of "Claude Code for creative apps." On one hand, it's meant to provide experienced creatives with an efficient way to offload mundane tasks across multiple apps. On the other, it's meant to reduce the "barrier to entry" for inexperienced or casual users, in the wake of tool complexity that the company says has previously "widened the gap between idea and output."

Adobe has offered chat-based prompts within individual apps before and in other Firefly interfaces. It has also offered access to generative models under the Firefly brand before. What's different here is that Firefly AI Assistant (as they call this new interface) promises to work across numerous Adobe Creative Cloud apps and to actually orchestrate workflows across them, checking in regularly with the user for suggestions and questions. As with similar tools we've already seen for programming and the like, users can interject mid-task with clarifications or additional information.

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The risk to almost a million US jobs is too great to allow imports of Chinese vehicles, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. In an interview, Farley spoke with Fox News about rising car prices and global competition, telling Brian Kilmeade that China's spare production capacity is so large that it could easily absorb the roughly 16 million new vehicles sold in the US, with room to spare.

"First of all, the Chinese have huge direct support for their auto companies," Farley said, while noting that China has the ability to build an additional 21 million vehicles a year on top of the 29 million that are expected to roll off Chinese production lines in 2026. "They have enough capacity in China to cover all the manufacturing, all the vehicle sales in the United States," Farley said.

"Manufacturing is the heart and soul of our country, and for us to lose those exports would be devastating for our country," he continued, before pointing out the cybersecurity worries about Chinese cars. "All the vehicles have 10 cameras. They can collect a lot of data," he said.

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In 2024, we learned that the third and final season of Good Omens wouldn't be a full slate of episodes like the prior two seasons. In the wake of allegations of sexual assault against creator Neil Gaiman, the streaming platform decided to go with a single 90-minute episode to wrap things up—the equivalent of a TV movie. (Gaiman continues to deny the allegations but stepped back from the project.) Now we have the official trailer to get us ready for the big finale next month.

(Spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

As reported previously , the series is based on the original 1990 novel by Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett . Good Omens is the story of an angel, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), and a demon, Crowley (David Tennant), who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon. Season 2 found Aziraphale and Crowley getting back to normal, when the archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) turned up unexpectedly at the door of Aziraphale’s bookshop with no memory of who he was or how he got there. The duo had to evade the combined forces of Heaven and Hell to solve the mystery of what happened to Gabriel and why.

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