Technology

Wireless innovation has shaped our digital world. From Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to Z-Wave and Thread, we’ve watched protocols emerge to solve distinct connectivity problems. Now, a new technology is stepping in not to connect devices, but to give them spatial intelligence.

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is quietly transforming how devices understand and interact with their environment. It’s not as flashy as 5G or as familiar as Wi-Fi, but its impact on secure access, real-time location tracking, and automation is profound and increasingly relevant for businesses.

What Is Ultra-Wideband?

UWB is a short-range, low-power wireless protocol that transmits data through very short pulses over a wide frequency band, typically 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. Its defining feature is time-of-flight (ToF) measurement, enabling devices to calculate exact distance and direction between each other with centimeter-level accuracy.

Where Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can tell you a device is nearby, UWB can tell you exactly where it is, how far away, and which direction it’s moving in real time.

RTLS 2.0: Why UWB Is a Breakthrough

Having spent years building and enabling Wi-Fi and BLE solutions used in enterprise RTLS deployments, I’ve seen some of their limitations first-hand. These technologies suffer from environmental noise, RF interference, signal distortion from multipath effects, meter-level error margins, and degraded performance in dense or metallic environments.

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) solves these challenges by using precise time-of-flight (ToF) measurements rather than signal strength. This enables centimeter-level positioning accuracy (typically less than 30 cm), low-latency updates suitable for real-time automation, high reliability in cluttered or reflective environments, and energy efficiency suitable for mobile tags and long-duration deployments.

Why UWB Matters: Strategic Pilots Point to Real Business Impact

Across sectors, a growing number of businesses are no longer just testing UWB; they’re piloting solutions that point to long-term competitive advantage. In corporate campuses, UWB is enabling frictionless, intent-based access control that adapts to hybrid work models and improves security posture.

In healthcare, hospitals are trialing UWB for staff duress alerts, equipment tracking, and patient flow management, solving problems that legacy RTLS couldn’t address with precision. In manufacturing and logistics, early adopters like Siemens and Zebra are leveraging UWB not just for asset tracking but as a foundation for digital twins and automation triggers.

With enterprise infrastructure now supporting UWB through access points from Cisco and Juniper, businesses can deploy it as part of existing network upgrades. Emerging standards like Aliro, FiRa, and the Car Connectivity Consortium are reducing fragmentation, ensuring that today’s pilots evolve into interoperable, scalable deployments.

These pilots aren’t just proving technical feasibility; they’re defining how UWB will power the next generation of access, automation, and location-aware business systems. Today, UWB-based RTLS solutions are being actively adopted in manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare environments by companies like Siemens and Zebra.

These systems provide real-time visibility into the location and movement of assets, materials, and personnel, enabling use cases such as digital twins, workflow optimization, inventory accuracy, and safety enforcement. In hospitals, UWB helps track medical equipment, monitor patient flow, and ensure staff safety. The shift from pilot programs to operational deployments underscores UWB’s growing maturity and proven value across industries.

Enterprise Access Points Now Shipping with UWB

Enterprise vendors like Cisco and Juniper have already integrated UWB radios into their commercial access points, enabling high-accuracy indoor location services for asset tracking, automation, and spatial intelligence. These platforms combine high-speed connectivity via Wi-Fi, basic proximity awareness via BLE, and precise spatial awareness via UWB.

This marks a significant shift toward unified enterprise infrastructure that supports both connectivity and advanced location-aware services.

UWB in the Smart Home: Invisible but Powerful

UWB brings the same benefits to smart homes that it’s bringing to factories and offices:

Hands-free presence detection: Lights turn on as you walk in. Doors unlock as you approach from the outside only. Devices respond based on where you are in the room.

Intent-based automation: UWB goes beyond occupancy; it understands movement, direction, and identity.

Secure, frictionless access: No need to pull out a phone or tap a card. UWB verifies your presence and position securely and invisibly.

The Ultra-Wideband (UWB) ecosystem is being shaped by major industry initiatives focused on interoperability, security, and widespread adoption across homes, vehicles, and commercial spaces. Aliro, part of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, is set to launch in 2025, defining secure and interoperable UWB access control for residential, hospitality, and commercial environments, integrating with Matter and other smart home protocols.

The Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) has developed a Digital Key specification, adopted by automakers like BMW and Hyundai, enabling UWB-based passive vehicle entry and digital key sharing, which is now influencing smart lock and property access solutions.

Meanwhile, the FiRa Consortium develops technical standards and certification programs to ensure UWB remains reliable, secure, and interoperable across access, automation, and tracking applications. FiRa supports both CCC and Aliro profiles under its testing and certification umbrella. Together, these efforts are transforming UWB into a trusted, scalable platform, moving beyond vendor-specific solutions.

At CES 2025, UWB-powered smart locks from brands like Ultraloq and Schlage showcased hands-free auto-unlocking, demonstrating the practical impact of these standards in real-world applications. By aligning technical specifications and fostering ecosystem-wide compatibility, Aliro, CCC, and FiRa are accelerating UWB’s role in smart environments, from homes and cars to commercial spaces, ensuring seamless and secure user experiences.

How UWB Complements, Not Replaces, Other Wireless Protocols

UWB doesn’t compete with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth; it complements them. Each protocol plays a different role in the connected environment:

Wi-Fi provides high-bandwidth data connectivity, and UWB adds precise indoor positioning to the same access point.

Bluetooth (BLE) excels in device pairing and basic proximity with low power and ubiquity, while UWB provides centimeter-level ranging and directionality.

Thread/Z-Wave supports low-power mesh networking, great for automation, and UWB enables intent-based triggers and presence awareness.

NFC provides secure, intentional tap-based access; UWB enables the same level of security passively and hands-free.

The future is multi-protocol. UWB will often be embedded alongside BLE and Wi-Fi, silently enhancing the intelligence of connected experiences.

Why Consumers Won’t Ask for UWB - And That’s OK

UWB isn’t a protocol users will connect to or configure. It’s not trying to be the next Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Instead, it operates invisibly, delivering context, precision, and automation without user intervention.

We already see this with Apple’s AirTag, which uses Bluetooth for wide-area discovery and UWB for pinpoint precision when the user is nearby. That moment when your iPhone tells you to “turn left” or “go five feet forward” to find your keys? That’s UWB at work, providing directional awareness far beyond what Bluetooth can offer on its own.

Similar features are emerging in Samsung’s SmartTag+ and Google’s Find My Device network, leveraging UWB for object finding, room-level location, and even AR guidance. Yet the average user may not have any idea what UWB is, nor do they need to.

In fact, UWB is already embedded in hundreds of millions of smartphones and tracking tags, from iPhones and Pixel devices to select Galaxy models. Consumers benefit from its capabilities every day, without ever needing to know the acronym.

That’s UWB’s strength: It works quietly in the background, making environments more responsive, secure, and aware, without requiring attention, setup, or even awareness. Think:

- Smart locks that unlock as you approach

- Cars that know it’s you before you touch the door

- Lights that follow your movement room to room

- Devices that guide you to lost items with directional arrows

UWB may never become a consumer buzzword, and that’s exactly how it was designed to succeed.

The Bottom Line

UWB is the missing spatial layer in our increasingly intelligent environments. It delivers the precision and context that AI, automation, and access control systems require, but without asking users to do anything differently.

Whether you’re designing smart homes, connected cars, secure campuses, or dynamic retail spaces, UWB won’t be the feature customers ask for. But it will be the reason everything works better.

For forward-looking businesses UWB isn’t optional–It’s foundational.

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As millions of people engage with LLMs, experts are voicing growing concerns that AI tools could provide harmful​ mental health advice.

Artificial intelligence has become a back-office powerhouse and essential resource for sifting through data, optimizing processes, and automating the repetitive. But as AI tools become more accessible, they are no longer just crunching numbers behind the scenes. Executives are increasingly turning to these platforms as a trusted advisor for providing strategic insight and informing business decisions.

Our recent survey found that nearly three-quarters (74%) of executives trust AI’s input over that of friends or colleagues. Even more striking, 44% said they would allow generative AI to override a decision they had already planned to make. These findings mark a profound shift in how leadership decisions are made.

Traditionally, executives have relied on a blend of data, gut instinct, and conversations with trusted advisors. Now, AI is earning a spot in the inner circle, signaling a fundamental redefinition of how leaders pair human insight with machine intelligence to drive better outcomes.

AI as Strategic Co-Pilot

As companies prepare for an AI-focused future, business operations are being rewritten. Companies in every industry are looking for ways to incorporate AI that can help them build even the smallest competitive advantage. As a result, AI is taking on a new role as the C-suite’s strategic copilot, handling tasks like data analysis and recommendations (52%), uncovering hidden risks (48%) and presenting alternate strategic paths (47%).

AI is helping leaders go deeper—to challenge assumptions, test new scenarios, and make more informed decisions about how their business operates. But even in everyday life, AI is finding valuable and exciting uses, with some guardrails.

I’ve used it to help plan family vacations and generate personalized bedtime stories for my children. While it struggles to manage complex scheduling (and the nuances of how I manage my calendar), AI has transformed how I approach and solve many problems, offering a helpful sounding board for tasks in both my personal and professional life.

SAP CEO Christian Klein recently shared that he uses generative AI to preview quarterly earnings results and better understand company performance.

AI’s influence extends to other roles in the C-suite as well, from automated anomaly detection in financial transactions for CFOs, to streamlining contract reviews and generation of new contracts for CPOs, to COOs needing to evaluate capacity planning and manage variability in market demand.

And, of course, there is always the most common use case of all – summarizing complex documents and topics, and generating subsequent action items.

We’re far from alone. More leaders are beginning to incorporate AI into the highest levels of planning and forecasting.

Critical Thinking and the Human Touch

As AI’s influence in the boardroom grows, so does the trust leaders place in it. Part of this stems from AI’s growing ability to analyze massive volumes of data and provide contextually rich insights. In some situations, AI is usurping the guidance of near and dear advisors as previously mentioned. A trusted colleague might offer valuable perspective, but they haven’t parsed two billion data points before weighing in.

Still, there are limits. While executives should continue to use AI to help with business matters, there’s a risk that critical thinking will be lost rather than enhanced as a result. True strategic decision-making will always require a human touch—which AI can't replicate.

Going forward, executives must strike a careful balance, keeping people involved to help make complicated and high-value strategic decisions, while using AI to enhance their thinking, not replace it.

Building a Foundation for Strategic AI Use

Such heightened reliance on AI will also force organizations to grapple with foundational challenges. The reality is that many companies still lack the reliable data infrastructure needed to support high-trust AI use. Lack of alignment between IT and business teams, patchy system integration and concerns about data quality all threaten to undermine the effectiveness of AI as a strategic advisor.

Companies must establish clear guardrails, like those below, to ensure these tools are used reliably and responsibly, balancing speed and scale with transparency and human input.

• Develop AI literacy across leadership through dedicated training and upskilling programs.
• Prioritize transparency by using platforms that can explain their reasoning in clear, understandable terms.
• Define boundaries for where and how AI should influence decision-making, particularly in ethically sensitive or high-risk areas.

Co-Creation: The Future of Leadership

As AI becomes a true collaborator in the boardroom, the goal isn’t to hand over control. It’s to elevate leadership. In this new era, great leaders won’t always have the right answer, but they will know when and how to ask the right questions—and where to turn for the best insights.

Going forward, we see leadership evolving from command-and-control to co-creation. Those who thrive will be the ones who understand how to blend human experience, emotional intelligence, and machine-derived insight into a cohesive and future-first strategy.

With AI as a loyal advisor, the possibilities for transformative leadership are just beginning.

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When Target decided to enter the Canadian market in 2013, it envisioned a rapid rollout of over 100 stores within two years, supported by a highly automated and sophisticated supply chain system. The strategy looked promising on paper, but the execution was rushed, and the technology behind inventory management and distribution was not properly tested or adapted to the new market.

Stores opened with empty shelves despite warehouses being full of stock, due to systemic data and process errors. The technology-driven supply chain was too rigid and failed to handle the operational realities of a new market and diverse product ranges. Within two years, Target Canada posted losses of over $2 billion and eventually shut down all its stores—a cautionary tale of prioritizing aggressive technology-led execution over a solid, adaptable strategy.

It often seems that organizations are too interested in the new high-tech gear, rather than the root of operations, asking themselves: cloud first? Cyber first? It can be easy to get carried away with the new features and functionalities of a shiny new AI or automation tool.

Without a clear understanding of the underlying problem, even advanced tools become ineffective, leading to wasted investments, poor adoption, and unmet expectations. Businesses need to step back, rethink purchasing decisions, define their wants and, understand the benefits of implementing such tools before making any hefty decisions that will end in a costly write off.

Think value, not hype

Out of all the heralded technology innovations in the last few years, AI has taken the spotlight. Generative tools, such as ChatGPT, have offered instant access to useful information, provided time-saving efficiencies for employees, and allowed tasks to be streamlined. However, this is only the case for companies that use generative AI tools regularly and in the right places.

A survey in 2024 found that only 2% of British respondents actually used generative AI tools on a daily basis - a contrast to the vast number of businesses that are signing up to use this technology. Organizations need to remember that technology without a purpose is a wasted cost that adds to the increasing financial pressures that many businesses are already feeling.

AI hasn’t been the only trend embraced in the last few years. The cloud is a further case in point where the problem-solving capability of the solution often hasn’t been considered. Initially, it is seen as a way to reduce costs though many organizations have been surprised by spiraling costs and integration headaches.

So, rather than following the mindset of ‘cloud-first’, the question should be: “Does cloud benefit my strategy?” Maybe only certain workflows benefit from moving to the cloud or, potentially, the service needs to be used just on certain days. Using the technology selectively and scaling down when it is not required, is part of the strategy that needs to be established to ensure that an organization stays cost-efficient, ensuring real value is gained.

Stakeholders are your best friends

How do businesses pivot to an outcomes-focused strategy? Too often, isolated departments and IT teams deploy technologies based on tech-first mandates with little input from those who will actually use them day-to-day. A shift in perspective is critically important. Organizations should engage key stakeholders closest to the pain points early in the process, allowing their insights to shape the strategy and identify effective, problem-solving tools.

There is a common misconception that successfully transforming an organization's IT infrastructure means rushing into expensive deployments and buying the latest technology or chasing the newest trend cycle. However, just a more selective approach to automation and AI can extend the value of existing infrastructure to suit organizational goals.

From shiny tech to strategic outcomes

It’s easy to be mesmerized by digital transformations or to believe that what your organization is missing is AI automation. But success will rarely start with the tool.

A great deal can be learnt from Target: involve end users in planning stages and don’t be fooled by the hype. Remember, problem first, product second.

Outcomes need to be placed at the heart of every business strategy that way organizations can unlock far more value from the tools they already have, while making smarter, more deliberate decisions about what to adopt next. This might mean refining the use of cloud services or using automation to achieve efficiencies in areas where it makes a measurable difference

Starting with the obstacle and not the tech ensures that the outcome is a more efficient, cost-effective and sustainable approach to digital transformation.

Tech is just the tool. Strategy is the solution.

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The interconnectedness of our digital world brings a wealth of benefits, including the ability to conduct tasks that were once manual with greater speed and convenience. At the same time, society faces an ever-expanding set of dangers, both personally and professionally, on a daily basis. For business executives in particular, the continually evolving threat landscape is now one where the lines between personal and professional, as well as digital and physical, are increasingly blurred.

The latest findings from the Ponemon Institute underscore this new reality. Based on a survey of nearly 600 U.S. security professionals, Ponemon’s new 2025 Digital Executive Protection Report shows a notable increase in attacks targeting business leaders, with survey respondents reporting a rise from 43% in 2023 to 51% in 2025. A combination of factors is driving this trend: executives’ expansive digital footprints, combined with unmonitored and insecure home networks and personal devices, which are often used for work purposes.

The Report also highlights a general lack of cybersecurity training and preparedness among companies to prevent such attacks. As a result, corporate executives are caught in a perfect storm, rich with opportunities for cybercriminals to cause financial and reputational harm – to leaders, their families, and their companies.

The Escalating Risk of Deepfakes

When examining the types of attacks targeting executives that cause the most harm, the Ponemon findings reveal an increase in deepfake impersonation attacks, from 34% of respondents reporting an incident in 2023 to 41% in 2025. Deepfakes are artificial images or videos created by AI, trained on a collection of authentic media samples of the individual being targeted, including still images, videos, and audio clips, all of which are easily found online. The more samples used, the more authentic the deepfake can appear to be.

Given their highly visible public profiles and prolific social media activity, business executives, high-net-worth individuals, and their family members are easy targets. According to the Ponemon survey, the most common deepfakes experienced are impersonation of executives’ trusted entities and urgent demands for payments or information about a detected security breach.

Of those targeted, 28% reported being impersonated by a trusted entity, such as a colleague, executive, family member, or known organization; 21% stated that executives and board members received urgent messages, including demands for immediate payment or information about a detected security breach.

Additionally, 42% of respondents stated that their organizations’ executives and board members have been targeted an average of three times by a fake image, while 66% of respondents indicated that it is highly likely their executives will be targeted by a deepfake in the future.

Survey respondents disclosed that the financial toll of deepfakes is neither known nor measured. However, most respondents cited the cost of staff time spent responding to attacks and the expense of detecting, identifying, and remedying the breach as the most serious financial consequences stemming from such attacks.

Why are deepfakes on the rise?

There are multiple reasons for the increasing number of deepfake attacks. First, the barrier to creating sophisticated and convincing deepfakes continues to drop, given easy access to AI tools and other technologies that power social engineering attacks. According to the Ponemon report, visibility challenges also make it difficult to detect attack tactics, such as deepfakes; half of the respondents stated that their team lacked the necessary insight to prevent a breach.

The report’s findings align with my team’s daily observations on the front lines: the threat landscape is rapidly evolving and expanding, putting a bullseye on the backs of high-profile, high-value executives for both cyber and physical attacks. Over the past few years, we have witnessed an acceleration of sophisticated tactics, such as deepfakes and impersonation scams, that directly target these leaders in their personal digital lives. Hackers understand that executives' personal devices and home networks can be an easy pathway to penetrating corporate defenses.

Securing the company network and infrastructure is critical, but it still leaves gaps. Protecting the organization’s leaders — and their families — is essential to reducing corporate risk, making Digital Executive Protection a non-negotiable security imperative.

How can organizations prevent future incidents?

A multi-faceted, holistic approach that focuses on both robust long-term prevention and immediate damage mitigation is required.

I strongly recommend a prevention strategy that encompasses comprehensive defense in depth, including implementing robust email security protocols, establishing strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all accounts, and deploying secure password managers, along with continuous monitoring of home networks and devices.

Key to this approach is minimizing executives’ digital footprints, proactively monitoring their personal devices and home networks for threats, and educating them and their families on best practices for online safety.

In the aftermath of any attack – whether a deepfake impersonation leading to fraud or a sophisticated phishing attempt – critical steps should be taken swiftly, such as conducting data broker removal, initiating credit freezes, disputing fraudulent charges with financial institutions, and securing compromised accounts to prevent further financial loss or data exfiltration.

To adequately secure individuals against today's – and tomorrow’s – sophisticated cyber threats, extending comprehensive privacy and cybersecurity far beyond the corporate perimeter is critical. Digital Executive Protection is necessary to safeguard leaders and their families across every facet of their connected lives – from their personal smart devices and online accounts to entire home networks and smart home technology.

The rising tide of deepfake attacks, as revealed by the Ponemon Report, underscores a critical shift in the cybersecurity landscape: executives are now prime targets, their digital lives serving as a vulnerable gateway to enterprise compromise. This escalating threat, fueled by easily accessible AI and a widespread lack of comprehensive personal security training, demands a holistic and proactive approach.

Organizations must extend robust digital executive protection to their leaders and their families, encompassing everything from digital footprint reduction and device hardening to advanced threat monitoring and rapid incident response, giving them peace of mind that they are safe from escalating cyber and physical threats.

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Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit were brought crashing into the 21st century in December 2024 with their latest adventure, Vengeance Most Fowl. The film challenges our growing dependence on smart technology in the form of a robotic garden gnome, built by Wallace to support his gardening business, which is then hacked by the Kubrick-esque Feathers McGraw for his own nefarious purposes.

One of the more interesting but less commented on parts of the film shows Gromit cautiously entering his house and being greeted by what he thinks is Wallace’s reassuring voice, only to be confronted with Feathers and the robotic gnome.

Technology’s ability to mimic linguistic patterns, to clone a person’s voice and understand and respond to questions has developed dramatically in the last few years.

This has not gone unnoticed by the world’s criminals and scammers, with the result that social engineering attacks are not only on the rise but are more sophisticated and targeted than ever.

What are social engineering attacks?

Cybercriminal social engineering manipulates a target by creating a false narrative that exploits the victim’s vulnerability (whether that is their willingness to trust people, their financial worries or their emotional insecurity). The result is that the victim unwittingly but willingly hands over money and/or information to the perpetrator.

Most social engineering scams consist of the following stages: (1) making connection with the victim (“the means”), (2) building a false narrative (usually with a sense of urgency or time limitation) (“the lie”) and (3) persuading the target to take the suggested action (e.g. transferring money or providing personal details) (“the ask”).

Usually, stage 2 (the lie) is where most people spot the scam for what it is, as it is difficult to build and sustain a convincing narrative without messing up eventually. We have all received text messages, emails or social media messages from people purporting to be our friends, long-lost relations in countries we have never been to, or our banks, asking us to provide them with personal information, passwords or money.

Historically, such communications were easy to spot, as they bore the hallmarks of a scam: generic greetings and signatures, spelling mistakes, poor or unusual grammar and syntax, inconsistent formatting or suspicious addresses.

Liar, liar, pants on…f-AI-re?

However, the rapid sophistication of generative AI tools means that it is increasingly easy for criminals to craft and sustain plausible false narratives to ensnare their victims; the “lie” or stage 2 in the social engineering scam. Companies and law enforcement agencies are scrambling to stay ahead of the technological advances and are working hard to predict developments which will be used for social engineering.

One potential use case for generative AI in this area is a dynamic lie system, which would automatically contact and interact with potential victims to earn their trust before moving to stage 3 (the ask). This would be particularly useful for “advance-fee” or “419” scams. These scams work by promising the victim a large share in a huge amount of money in return for a small upfront payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum.

The AI-based dynamic lie system could automate the first wave of scam emails to discern whether the potential victims are likely to ‘take the bait’. Once the system identifies an engaged individual who appears persuaded by the communication , it can then pass the control to the human operator to finish the job.

Another development which has already gained traction is the use of AI to clone human speech and audio to carry out advanced types of voice phishing attacks, known as “vishing”. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has warned about scammers using AI voice cloning technology to impersonate family members and con victims into transferring money on the pretext of a family emergency.

Current technologies allow voices to be cloned in a matter of seconds, and there is no doubt that with advancements in deep learning, these tools will only become more sophisticated. It would appear this form of social engineering is here to stay.

Do androids dream of electric scams?

“If there’s one job that generative AI can’t steal, it’s con artist.” So said Stephanie Carruthers, Global Lead of Cyber Range and Chief People Hacker at IBM in 2022. Fast forward 3 years and Carruthers has changed her position. Our concerns about AI are not just limited to the impact on the workforce but have now expanded to include AI-based bots which can craft tailored social engineering attacks to specific targets. As Carruthers notes, “with very few prompts, an AI model can write a phishing message meant just for me. That’s terrifying.”

Currently AI is being used by threat actors as an office intern or trainee to speed up completing the basic tasks required to carry out social engineering attacks. Carruthers and team did some experiments and found that generative AI can write an effective phishing email in five minutes. For a team of humans to write a comparable message, it takes about 16 hours, with deep research on targets accounting for much of that time.

Furthermore, generative AI can churn out more and more tailored attacks without needing a break, and crucially, without a conscience. Philip K. Dick noted that for his human protagonist, Rick Deckard, “owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one”, but in an increasingly digital criminal underworld, maintaining a fraud has never been easier.

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• Google’s NotebookLM now supports Video Overviews in dozens of languages
• The upgrade gives Video Overviews the same language options as the Audio Overviews
• NotebookLM creates its summaries from actual uploaded documents

Google’s NotebookLM first debuted its AI-powered research tool with Audio Overviews capable of making AI-produced 'podcasts' with digital hosts. The logical extension into Video Overviews followed, with a synthetic voice accompanied by a series of slides that include text and illustrations. However, that capability was only available in English until now.

NotebookLM Video Overviews are now available in more than 80 languages. For most people, that translates to translatable versions of video walkthroughs based on your uploaded notes and linked source materials. The AI professor is already there and is now a multilingual expert as they present your own content in everything from Tamil to Polish and beyond.

These aren’t AI summaries scraped from the web or hallucinated based on a vague prompt. NotebookLM is grounded in the actual material you upload. Everything the AI says, in video or audio, is pulled directly from your documents, not from generic training data.

Of course, the video in this context isn't a cinematic masterpiece. The slides are not fully animated explainers. This isn’t TikTok for term papers; it’s more like PowerPoint for people who don’t want to make PowerPoints. The goal is clarity, not spectacle.

Global AI video

That's not the only global upgrade to NotebookLM, though. While Audio Overviews had been available in many languages recently, they were limited to brief highlights. Now, everyone gets the complete audio AI experience as an alternative to the video option.

For those who might want to read a white paper while driving or cooking, this is enormously practical. It won’t win a Grammy, but it might just help you understand a textbook or complex report. Professionals working internationally could use it to summarize a week’s worth of meeting transcripts as shareable videos or audio recaps from Catalan to Portuguese. No need to rely on a colleague’s English comprehension.

If you want to see how AI can digest and explain your collection of academic papers, blog posts, and YouTube videos, you can produce a narrated video by uploading your sources as usual, then clicking on the Video Overview button. Shortly, a video of approximately seven minutes will be ready for you to share, download, or use as you wish.

That’s not to say this solves everything. The AI can still struggle with nuance, for instance. But the reliability of the presentations is valuable on its own. Now, they just look good too.

You might also like

• I tried using NotebookLM’s new AI Video Overviews and ended up with some usefully informative, but rather dull PowerPoint presentations
• Google will turn those long documents into your next favorite podcast
• I fed NotebookLM a 218-page research paper on string theory and the podcast results were mind-blowing

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AI-generated music is becoming more widespread but not necessarily popular. And that's just the publicly acknowledged AI music. Now, artists are dealing with seeing their name and voice attached to music they never performed or approved of, even if they passed away decades ago.

The most recent high-profile incident occurred when English folk singer Emily Portman heard from a fan who liked her new release, except the album, Orca, though released under her name, was entirely fake. The whole thing had been pushed live on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and other major platforms without her knowledge or consent.

A post shared by Emily Portman (@emilyportman)

A photo posted by on

Portman took to social media to warn her fans about what was happening. The fact that the AI could mimic her artistic style well enough to trick some fans just added to the creep factor. It took weeks for Spotify to address the problem, and you can still see the album on Spotify even if the music is gone.

Portman joins a litany of acts, from pop artist Josh Kaufman to country artists Blaze Foley, who passed away in 1989, and Guy Clark, who died in 2016, in having her work mimicked by AI without her approval.

It seems we’ve moved past the novelty of AI remixes and deepfake duets into digital identity theft with a beat. The thieves are often good at being quiet in their releases, able to score whatever royalties might trickle in.

Further, even getting the music taken down might not be enough. A few days after the initial incident, Portman found another album had popped up on her streaming page. Except this time, it was just nonsense instrumentals, with no effort to sound like the musician.

AI's future sounds

Having scammers use AI to steal from actual artists is obviously a travesty. There are some blurry middle grounds, of course, like never-real musicians pretending to be humans. That's where AI-generated “band” Velvet Sundown stands.

The creators later admitted the origin of the AI band, but only after millions of plays from a Spotify profile showing slightly uncanny images of bandmates that didn’t exist. As the music was original and not directly ripped from other songs, it wasn’t a technical violation of any copyright laws. The band didn’t exist, but the royalties sure did.

I think AI has a place in music. I really like how it can help the average person, regardless of technical or musical skills, produce a song. And AI tools are making it easier than ever to generate music in the style of someone else. But, with streaming platforms facing 99,000 uploads a day, most of which are pushed through third-party distributors that rely on user-submitted metadata, it’s not hard to slip something fake into a real artist’s profile. Unless someone notices and complains, it just sits there, posing as the real thing.

Many fans are tricked, with some believing Orca was really Emily Portman’s new album. Others streamed Velvet Sundown, thinking they’d stumbled onto the next Fleetwood Mac. And while there's nothing wrong with liking an AI song per se, there's everything wrong with not knowing it is an AI song. Consent and context are missing, and that fundamentally changes the listening experience.

Now, some people argue this is just the new normal. And sure, AI can help struggling artists find new inspiration, fill in missing instrumentation, suggest chord progressions, and provide other aid. But that’s not what’s happening here. These are not tools being used by artists. These are thieves.

Worse still, this undermines the entire concept of artistic ownership. If you can make a fake Emily Portman album, any artist is at risk. The only thing keeping these scammers from doing the same to the likes of Taylor Swift right now is the threat of getting caught by high-profile legal teams. So instead, they aim lower. Lesser-known artists don’t have the same protections, which makes them easier targets. And more profitable, in the long run, because there’s less scrutiny.

And there's the issue of how we as music fans are complicit. If we start valuing convenience and novelty over authenticity, we’ll get more AI sludge and fewer real albums. The danger isn’t just that AI can mimic artists. We also have to worry that people will stop noticing, or caring, when it does.

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Samsung’s massive, in both price and size, micro-RGB TV is barely two weeks old, but it’s making waves for those two factors as well as the promised visual quality. The 115-inch Micro RGB Samsung Vision AI Smart TV – yes, a long formal product name for sure – is out in Korea right now for 44.9 million KRW and will soon be up for order in the United States at $29,999 with more markets to follow.

I had the chance to check one out in person at Samsung’s new headquarters in New Jersey. While it wasn’t a formal testing session, it was clear from my first look that Samsung's micro-RGB tech here is creating immersion on a grand scale with picture quality to rival even the best OLED TVs.

I also had the chance to view it after seeing the similarly sized and priced, but notably different 115” Class Samsung QN90F Neo QLED 4K TV. And while that TV looks sharp and bright, the new micro-RGB TV's picture is much more controlled and realistic. Samsung even created a custom Micro RGB AI Engine to handle visuals in the $30,000 TV, specifically for the likes of upscaling and enhancing colors.

(Image credit: Future/Jacob Krol)

The tech here is reflected in the name of the product category – micro-RGB TV – and it’s the first consumer release from Samsung. It uses micro-scale LEDs for the TV's backlight, which is comprised of individual, quite tiny red, green, and blue modules. That’s the key difference here – like the best mini-LED TVs, it still uses the core principles of LCD technology, but swaps white or blue backlighting for red, green, and blue micro-scale LEDs that can be more accurately controlled. All, of course, in a quest to deliver the best picture quality.

So while this isn’t at the same level as Samsung's The Wall microLED tech, the 115-inch micro-RGB TV is a stunner, with the ability to produce vivid, rich, and crisp colors that don’t skew super bright and end up oversaturating or blowing out a particular visual. While Samsung only had test content running on the micro-RGB TV, it looked great from all angles, not just a direct head-on view. Even at extreme angles to the left or right in the lifestyle set-up space, the micro-RGB delivered a vivid view, with reds and blues especially popping.

Having also seen the 115-inch Neo QLED 4K TV, I can confidently say it outperformed it in terms of visuals, at those angles and even head-on. It simply looked a step above, offering more accurate, realistic interpretations of colors that could still pop and get bright without skewing them out of reality. It has more than four times the dimming zones compared to top mini-LED TVs, and significantly greater color accuracy.

(Image credit: Future/Jacob Krol)

Contrast points for more stark or ones that require black were a bit more minimal in the test footage. However, since it can turn off those individual LEDs, it didn’t offer lesser performance there.

Of course, Samsung’s 115-inch micro-RGB TV won’t be for everyone. $30,000 is a lot for a TV, especially a first-generation of sorts, and even though it’s still LCD-based, the excitement here is around the use of individual red, green, and blue micro-scale LED modules in the backlight. The pictures here don’t really do justice to the experience of viewing this, but I’m really excited about where micro-RGB is going. It does undercut Samsung’s own The Wall, which is true microLED and costs a ton more, so seeing that bits of that tech are starting to trickle down might make for more exciting developments in this space.

(Image credit: Future/Jacob Krol)

Alongside it being Samsung’s first micro-RGB TV, this 115-inch size also comes with the brand's VisionAI tech onboard for smarter features – like asking what something is while you’re watching content – but also handles the upscaling to ensure content looks great on this grand scale. You’ll also find Samsung’s Art Store here, and you do get access to a rotating allotment of photos and art to display, even if you don’t subscribe. Although I didn’t get to try any gaming or watch F1 races, the TV does support a 144Hz refresh rate.

If you get the chance to see this TV in person, I would take the opportunity to – it's certainly one of the best I've seen in quite some time.

For now, Samsung’s 115-inch micro-RGB TV is available in Korea at 44.9 million KRW and will soon be available in the United States for $29,999. You can sign up for more details on that launch here, and the company has confirmed it should roll out to more markets in the coming months. Just make sure you have the space for it.

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• Best Buy Marketplace sells DVD and Blu-Ray discs
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• Available in-app and online from today

We've been saying for ages that reports of the death of movie discs are premature, and it looks like Best Buy agrees with us: it's launching a new online marketplace that'll sell DVDs, Blu-Rays and UHD Steelbooks as part of a doubling of its online offering.

If you're thinking, "Hang on, didn't Best Buy stop selling disc-based movies in early 2024?", you're right: they did. Citing the changing way we enjoy entertainment, Best Buy announced in late 2023 that it'd stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays in its stores and online after the holiday season, though it continued to sell the best 4K Blu-ray players afterward.

So what's going on? As FlatpanelsHD reports, this isn't a reversal: you're not going to see the DVD or Blu-Ray aisles return to your local store. The new marketplace is online and features third-party sellers, and those sellers will be the ones offering DVDs, Blu-rays and Steelbooks.

Oppenheimer's 4K Blu-Ray sold out in its first week at many major retailers. (Image credit: Universal Pictures)Why the death of the disc isn't inevitable

Caring about movies on Blu-ray isn't just nostalgia. Some movies simply aren't available to stream, and the ones that are don't stream in the same quality as you'll get from the best Blu-Ray editions. That's because streaming uses compressed media formats, and that inevitably involves loss, something particularly apparent with movie soundtracks.

There's also the ongoing worry with streaming that what's available today won't be available tomorrow as licensing deals expire or bean-counters decide to cut back the catalog. And of course, different movies are on different streamers, and with prices of streaming services ever rising – Apple TV+ upped its prices just last week – cutting back on your streaming subscriptions means losing access to a lot of movies and shows.

I'm not being naive: the days of disc-based media being the world's favorite home entertainment option are over. But for serious movie fans – and people with serious home cinema setups – it's still a superior experience. Just ask Christopher Nolan.

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• Compact colorful laptop concept designed by Microsoft employee offers fresh ideas for portability
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In his spare time, Braz de Pina, Principal Product Designer at Microsoft, comes up with some amazing hardware concepts that we wish were real, and shares these on his website, and Behance and Instagram pages.

Although he came up with the a_77 compact laptop concept over a year ago, I’ve only just stumbled across it and wanted to share the device with anyone else who might have missed it.

The a_77 started life as a simple 3D model of a small keyboard. De Pina then added a screen and ports, eventually shaping the model into a fully realized laptop.

(Image credit: Braz de Pina)Copilot key

The process gave the device an unusual form that looks very different from traditional designs.

The keyboard itself is the defining element. It features a 65% layout with function keys along the top, an oversized escape key, and a bright orange power button.

A Copilot key sits beside the spacebar (even though this isn’t an official Microsoft product, he works there, so a Copilot key was always going to be part of the design), while a ThinkPad-style nub below the Enter key offers cursor control.

Speakers sit along the bottom edge, making the most of the compact frame.

The screen, which de Pina says is touch-enabled, doesn’t stick to standard aspect ratios such as 16:9. Instead, it resembles an enlarged smartphone display, giving the device an unconventional but still practical format.

This choice, paired with the small footprint, makes the laptop feel both portable and approachable.

The a_77’s appearance is where it breaks most from current design trends.

Instead of metallic finishes, it uses plastic in bold colors including yellow, blue, and white.

Fan vents line the sides and back, and four USB-C ports are split evenly across both edges.

Its compact size makes it easy to imagine carrying in a jacket pocket, and USB-C charging would do away with the need for a bulky external charger.

Even though it is only a concept, the a_77 shows how laptops can be reimagined to carry personality as well as function, something that I’d personally love to see a lot more of.

Via Yanko Design

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