Eliana Willis

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETAs a tech reporter, I attend events and conferences with other gadget aficionados. A telltale sign that a product is good is when reporters and attendees rave about it and even use their money to buy it. And no matter where I went, I couldn’t escape the glowing Meta Ray-Ban More

J. W. Burkey/Getty Images Passkeys promise a more secure, easier authentication method than passwords. Instead of creating and remembering a password for each account, a passkey is automatically generated for you by the respective website or app. To authenticate your login, you can use a PIN, fingerprint recognition, facial ID, or a physical security key. […] More

Kerry Wan/ZDNETThe Samsung Z Flip 7 More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The Boox Note Air 4C is a color ePaper tablet for notes and reading, available for $500. The tablet’s display is crisp and paper-like, and the included pen is accurate and sensitive, making it easy to create highly detailed sketches. The Note Air 4C isn’t cheap, at $530, and the included […] More

Tiernan Ray / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETGoogle this week made available the latest iteration of its Veo video-generation tool to users of its Gemini artificial intelligence program who have a “Pro” or “Ultra” account.Also: I used Google’s Flow AI to create my own videos with sound and dialogue – Here’s how it wentVeo has been available in preview for some time now. What’s new with the latest implementation is the ability to begin your video by uploading a still image to serve as the initial frame. (ZDNET’s Prakhar Khanna has reported his experience using the capability as a built-in feature of his Honor 400 phone, versus using it through the website as I did.) How to use Veo to generate videos from photosYou give the system a prompt, press enter, and Veo creates an eight-second video using your uploaded photo as a reference point from which to build the first frame of video. Veo adds sound, including music, footsteps, and other incidentals. Videos take several minutes at a time to develop. Also: This interactive AI video generator feels like walking into a video game – how to try itIn my testing so far, I find Veo’s implementation both fascinating and a bit creepy. My results with Veo’s photo-to-video featureI tried several still images I had taken, including a selfie and some street photography. Seeing one’s pictures come to life, if you will, is jarring. It is disconcerting how well it works, and, as the photographer, it’s disconcerting how the result contrasts with one’s memory of the event.Also: This new AI video editor is an all-in-one production service for filmmakers – how to try itThe good aspects are the quality of the video, which is in keeping with the photographic image. Things such as perspective of a scene are generally well maintained, and moving objects in the background are, in some cases, well-orchestrated to be consistent.1. Jogger running along the promenadeHere, for example, is a video I took of a jogger on the East River promenade in Manhattan. I gave Veo the prompt, “Please make a video in which the jogger continues to run into the distance along the promenade.”Below is the original still image followed by the Veo video. More

Chartchai Sansaneeyashewin/Getty Images Windows 11 is about to celebrate its fourth anniversary and runs on hundreds of millions of PCs worldwide. When it debuted in 2021, the new version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system was arguably an incremental change to Windows 10, with a fresh look and feel on top of core code that was […] More

Erikona/Getty Images Our story begins, as many stories do, with a man and his AI. The man, like many men, is a bit of a geek and a bit of a programmer. He also needs a haircut. The AI is the culmination of thousands of years of human advancement, all put to the service of […] More