Good morning. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Today I’m reading more about Anthropic’s strange new text watermarking process, watching this historic Joshua Baéz home run recap on repeat, listening to the incredible new Phoebe Bridgers album, and getting stuck into Daniel Mason’s new satire, Country People.
As a reminder, Inbox is the tech newsletter you should be able to read in around 95 seconds. We cover the most important 9to5Google stories from the last couple of days along with a few highlights from around the web. We publish every Tuesday and Thursday, and if you like what you read, please subscribe.
Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column published every Sunday.
⭐️ Starred
I love diving into the category of “news headlines so strange they would make no sense to people even five years ago,” and this one from Bloomberg is a small but vital addition to that corpus: Google Aims to Boost AI With Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data.
According to the article, “Google LLC won a bankruptcy auction for a trove of deidentified business data, software code, and operations records from collapsed low-cost carrier Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., saying it plans to use the assets to improve its artificial intelligence.”
“The tech giant’s $10 million bid includes a vast repository of the defunct airline’s data, including 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats and collaboration records, plus information related to revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, and audits and fraud.”
In a world where unadulterated data sets are increasingly seen as goldmines for AI training, a $10 million payment for “30 million lines of code, development metadata, software models and algorithms… [and] more than 175,000 employee records dating back to 1986” seems like a bargain. Google, which operates its own travel booking service, likely has far more actionable use cases for the information than other frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. And while this is among the first stories of legacy businesses selling their defunct internal records to a tech giant, it certainly won’t be the last.
✉️ Inbox
- Pixel 11 Pro’s ‘HiLight’ is another half-baked feature burdened by bad first impressions. Ben’s Weekender column runs through the history of Google’s Pixel hardware gimmicks and declares HiLight another missed opportunity. It’s a great idea and could be really useful in the future, but right now it’s just too spare to be, well, highlighted on the spec sheet.
- Google’s Tensor G6 in Pixel 11 isn’t a 2nm smartphone chip after all. Not surprising that Google didn’t in fact beat Apple to a watershed 2nm TSMC size reduction, but all indicators point to the G6 being significantly faster and more efficient than the G5.
- Android 17 QPR2 Beta 3 for Pixel rolling out. The latest Android 17 beta release is chock-full of features most users will get in December.
- Gemini 3.7 Flash launches three weeks after last model, live in Spark. Google is trying to distract from its Gemini 3.5 Pro absence with a firehose of Flash releases. 3.7 Flash is reportedly much better than 3.6 Flash for agentic tasks like coding and web dev, but its main benefit is its lower price per token.
- Gemini app gets 3.7 Flash & setting to turn off corner media watermarks. Gemini now lets users disable media watermarks in photos, videos, and audio generated through the app, but only in countries where it’s legal.
- Google hires former Gmail lead to be Chrome’s new VP of Product. Jacob Bank has rejoined Google after five years running an automation startup, Relay.app. He will be working on — what else — making Chrome more AI-centric.
- YouTube now counts video views immediately, ‘from the very first frame’. View counts are about to go up for a lot of creators, but those additional numbers are unfortunately not going to impact Partner Program eligibility, which is about to get a lot more difficult to qualify for.
- Samsung Galaxy design might ditch its ‘core identity’ for a Pixel camera bar – it needs to. Back in the day, Samsung’s camera bar used to run horizontally across its phones, but its devices went through a massive redesign in 2019 with the Note 10 that’s persisted to this day.
🤑 Action items
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing a category of product I really didn’t understand the need for: dedicated AI note transcribers. It’s a saturated market by now, with leader Plaud touting sales in the millions across various form factors like magnetic cards and lapel pins.
The Comulytic Note Pro ($119 on sale) from newcomer Comu touts impressive specs and AI integration beyond transcription. It’s only just thick enough to fit a USB-C port, and offers 45 hours of recording with its 64GB included storage (which feels unnecessarily luxurious). Its tiny OLED display shows the barest of details, including recording time and charging status, but most of the administration is done through the app.
My biggest question surrounding a device like this is its single-purpose nature; your phone already has great microphones and AI-powered transcriptions, so what’s the point of a dedicated option, particularly one that gates its best features behind a $10 to $30 per month paywall?
In its defense, the microphones are excellent at picking up soft or distant voices and producing accurate text from them. The included models, which the company says are powered by OpenAI and Google, can process meetings and actually draft emails or create presentations from them, but the app produces results worse than manually importing the text into Gemini or ChatGPT myself.
The form factor is really the killer feature here: it’s a barely perceptible object, slightly thicker than a credit card, and offloads some of the work from a phone that, during a meeting, may be in use for other things. It also handles meeting translation and summarization natively, which may be useful for some. Still, given the proliferation of free and built-in software solutions for meeting recordings, I don’t really understand the appeal of this product — or category.
🙃 FWD:
This section has some of our favorite stuff from around the internet. Great videos, weird memes, fun reads, recommended apps, whatever. Send us your recommendations!
- I hate getting lost, but I love the feeling of accidental discovery.
- Ever wanted to buy something completely frivolous just for the dopamine hit? There are now websites made specifically for that feeling.
- Last week, the solar eclipse got all the attention, but the Perseid meteor shower put on quite a show itself.
🗑️ Trash
My kids love Bluey; it’s the only show they’ve watched consistently over years and disparate tastes and K-Pop Demon Hunters obsessions.
So when Disney unveiled a 44-second teaser for the forthcoming movie, out August 2027, my heart leapt. I can already see us lining up on opening day, popcorn in hand.
A lot of attention has been paid to the animation style change here, particularly because the show’s hand-drawn look is what gives it so much personality, but I’m staying cautiously optimistic. This is not some throwaway Disney Animation fare: the movie is being created by Ludo Studio, the team behind the show, and is being written as a sendoff to the characters by series creator Joe Brumm.
Here’s hoping.
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Thanks for reading, and have a great day. Talk to you on Thursday.
-Daniel
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