TechCapsules

Tesla announced that its Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD) suite has received regulatory approval in Latvia, marking the technology’s tenth authorization within the European Union. The Latvian Road Traffic Safety Directorate based its decision on the provisional type approval originally issued by the Netherlands’ RDW on April 10, 2026, and on coordinated reviews with other EU authorities. The rollout will soon deliver the Level‑2 driver‑assistance package—capable of controlling speed, steering, braking, lane changes and intersections—to eligible Tesla owners in [...]

The NFL and Apple Music announced that twenty‑five‑time Grammy winner Jay‑Z will headline the Apple Music Super Bowl LXI halftime show on February 14, 2027 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The reveal came during a Monday Night Football broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys‑Philadelphia Eagles game. A press release hinted that Jay‑Z’s wife, Beyoncé, could appear as a special guest, marking her first halftime performance since 2016. Other artists who have toured with Jay‑Z—Blue Ivy Carter, John Legend, DJ [...]

Microsoft announced that the misleading “Windows 11 Speed Test” shortcut, which previously opened Bing’s search page, will be removed in an upcoming Windows 11 update. The shortcut, discovered in early 2023, appeared in the Start menu and led users to a Bing‑powered web page that claimed to benchmark system performance, prompting criticism that Microsoft was covertly promoting its search engine. In a blog post, the company said the feature will be replaced with a genuine performance‑monitoring tool that integrates [...]

OpenAI unveiled “dots,” an always‑on AI personal assistant, at its September developer day, positioning it as the next evolution of its Codex coding tool. Alexander Embiricos, head of the enterprise product team, explained that dots reframes the underlying large‑language model as a single, continuous conversation rather than discrete prompts, aiming for intuitive, proactive assistance. In testing, the assistant flagged calendar conflicts and even detected a drone‑delivery outage before the user noticed, though timing remains imperfect. Unlike Meta’s [...]

Apple expanded Siri AI to five new languages—French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish—during the iOS 27.2 update, increasing the assistant’s reach from a single language to six. The company also announced that four additional languages will be added by year‑end, likely with the upcoming iOS 27.3 release in December, whose beta may appear soon. While Siri AI will support Traditional Chinese, it remains unavailable in China, where Apple plans to launch other AI features later in the [...]

Microsoft released its first firmware update for the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 22, addressing key issues reported since the device’s launch. The update, titled “Microsoft Corporation System Hardware Update (200.0.7.0),” fixes long reboot times and eliminates screen flickering, though ghosting remains. Additional improvements include performance boosts and fewer unexpected restarts. The Ultra, priced at $2,599 and powered by RTX Spark, is expected to receive firmware updates for six years until 2032.

Apple released iPadOS 27.2, adding a new Siri AI feature that appears when users select text with a trackpad or mouse. The contextual “Ask Siri” popup, already present on macOS, also brings back Writing Tools commands such as rewrite and proofread. Siri now supports French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. The update introduces Apple TV user profiles on iPad, anniversary reminders during calls, and yearly App Tracking Transparency prompts for EU users. The Health app redesign will return [...]

Bedrock Robotics secured $600 million in a Series C round, valuing the autonomous‑vehicle startup at $4.1 billion. The funding, led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, follows the company’s first commercial deployments of self‑driving excavators at sites in Nevada, Texas, and a large civil project with Zachry Construction. Founded in 2024 by former Waymo and Anki leaders, Bedrock has raised nearly $1 billion to date and plans to expand its kit‑based autonomous system across construction sites to address operator shortages. [...]