Pour one out for MSN Messenger, Zune, and more: Microsoft Graveyard gives a salute to the tech giants’ retired creations

Microsoft is an old (in tech terms, at least) company – and a very successful one at that, but not every product it makes is a success.

For every Windows 7, there's a Games for Windows Live. Every Microsoft Office, there's a Clippy.

To help people reminisce and revisit memories of Microsoft products gone by, a group of developers and tech enthusiasts has made an open-source site named Microsoft Graveyard

If that rings a bell, that’s probably because you may have come across Killed by Google, a similar website made by Cody Ogden, another developer and tech enthusiast, but for deprecated and discontinued Google products. Ogden made an analogous website for Microsoft products named Killed by Microsoft, and that heavily inspired the creation of the Microsoft Graveyard. 

Welcome to the (unofficial) Microsoft Graveyard

At Microsoft Graveyard, you can peruse the various products, services, apps, and other creations that Microsoft has launched and ended up ditching – both software and hardware. 

There’s plenty to reflect upon, as many people who have been using computing or mobile products for any portion of their lives have probably come across at least a couple of these. I know I have, and there’s also lots to learn about many of Microsoft’s attempts at innovation through the years (Microsoft Graveyard’s entries are in chronological order). 

The unofficial archive of discontinued Microsoft products was made by Victor Frye and a community of Microsoft enthusiasts, launching last week. The group calls the website “a passion project built because we have lovingly used many of these products before their untimely death.” You can read about products like MSN Messenger, Kinect, and many more. MSN Messenger (also known as Live Messenger) was a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) program used by many kids who grew up at the early stages of the internet as we now know it, and Kinect was a motion sensing gaming controller that was killed off just last year.

Go down memory lane for yourself to read about things like Windows Phone, Zune, the recently “deceased” Cortana, Clippy, and many more. Each entry is headed up with the name of the product, which links to a page where you can find more detail about it (sometimes a Wikipedia page). That followed the product’s lifespan and a paragraph description of the product. 

Clippy

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Go and see it for yourself, maybe even get involved

When you visit the website, you might notice that the first handful of entries are dated into the future and the icons are coffins instead of gravestones. That’s to indicate the Microsoft products that will be joining the rest of the discontinued “dead” products on the list in the near future. This includes products like Windows 10 (which still sees minor tweaks and updates), the Xbox 360 Store, and others. 

If you’re intrigued, I’d urge you to check out Microsoft Graveyard for yourself. As it’s an open-source project on GitHub, you can actually join the fun of compiling, contributing to, and maintaining the website. You can also follow the project’s ongoing development and updates on Threads

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE…

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Assistant with Bard video may show how it’ll work and when it could land on your Pixel

New footage has leaked for Google’s Assistant with Bard demonstrating how the digital AI helper could work at launch.

Nail Sadykov posted the video on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) after discovering the feature on the Pixel Tips app. Apparently, Google accidentally spilled the beans on its tech, so it’s probably safe to say this is legitimate. It looks like something you would see in one of the company’s Keyword posts explaining the feature in detail except there’s no audio.

There will, based on the clip, be two ways to activate Assistant with Bard: either by tapping the Bard app and saying “Hey Google” or pressing and holding the power button. A multimodular input box rises from the bottom where you can type in a text prompt, upload photos, or speak a verbal command. The demo proceeds to only show the second method by having someone take a picture of a wilting plant and then verbally ask for advice on how to save it. 

See more

A few seconds later, Assistant with Bard manages to correctly identify the plant in the image (it’s a spider plant, by the way) and generates a wall of text explaining what can be done to revitalize it. It even links to several YouTube videos at the end.

Assistant with Bard has something of a badly kept secret. It was originally announced back in October 2023 but has since seen multiple leaks. The biggest info dump by far occurred in early January revealing much of the user experience as well as “various in-development features.” What’s been missing up to this point is news on whether or not Assistant with Bard will have any sort of limitations. As it turns out, there may be a few restrictions.

Assistant Limitations

Mishaal Rahman, another industry insider, dove into Pixel Tips searching for more information on the update. He claims Assistant with Bard will only appear on single-screen Pixel smartphones powered by a Tensor chip. This includes the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, and Pixel 8 lines. Older models will not receive the upgrade and neither will the Pixel Tablet, Pixel Fold, or the “rumored Pixel Fold 2”.

Additionally, mobile devices must be running the Android 14 QPR2 beta “or the upcoming stable QPR2 release” although it’s most likely going to be the latter. Rahman states he found a publication date in the Pixels Tip app hinting at a March 2024 release. It’s important to point out that March is also the expected launch window for Android 14 QPR2 and the next Feature Drop for Pixel phones.

No word on whether or not other Android devices will receive Assistant with Bard. It seems it’ll be exclusive to Pixel for the moment. We could see the update elsewhere, however considering that key brands, like Samsung, prefer having their own AI, an Assistant with Bard expansion seems unlikely. But we could be wrong.

Until we learn more, check out TechRadar's list of the best Pixel phones for 2024.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Windows 11 bids farewell to WordPad as Microsoft axes longtime favorite (oh, and Cortana)

Microsoft finally gives its iconic WordPad app the chop as a new Windows 11 Canary build reveals that the long-time word processing app’s time is up. The Canary channel is one of four release channels in the Windows Insider Program, Microsoft’s community that gives testers, developers, and enthusiasts access to try out new versions of Windows and new features to gather feedback and improve them before releasing them to the wider user base. 

In WordPad’s place, Microsoft is directing users to use Microsoft Word to work with rich text files, which feels a little cheeky (more about that in a moment). 

We found out that WordPad was being deprecated a little while back, and now Microsoft is making good on its promises. The company elaborated that no new WordPad developments were being worked on at the time of the announcement, and that future Windows 11 releases wouldn’t include it – which is what has happened with the latest WordPad-less Canary build. 

Microsoft also revealed that the WordPad and People apps won’t be included by default upon a clean install of Windows 11, and you’ll no longer be able to reinstall WordPad at a later date.

Man typing on laptop

(Image credit: Chase Chappell/Unsplash)

Users react

This development comes with a tinge of melancholy for many Windows fans because it has been one of Microsoft’s flagship programs for a long time. For many users, it was their preferred choice for a basic and straightforward simple rich text editor, being included in nearly every version of Windows starting with Windows 95. 

Microsoft recommends “Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt” for users who would like to know what to use instead. 

Of course, the full version of Microsoft Word is part of the Microsoft Office suite, which isn’t free, so recommending a paid-for alternative to a free app they’ve just cut probably won’t go down too well. A much better alternative is LibreOffice Writer, which is part of the free, open-source LibreOffice suite – although I can imagine why Microsoft would be hesitant to send people to a free rival app.

The newest preview build, Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26020, also saw a move that was long expected from Microsoft – giving Cortana the chop. If you’ve already forgotten what Cortana is (or, rather, was), Cortana is Microsoft’s previous effort in its mission to create a personal productivity assistant. 

Now, it’s leaving Cortana in the past and trucking forward with Windows Copilot, its newer and fresher take on the all-purpose digital assistant that’s powered by AI. According to Tom’s Hardware, Microsoft is so keen to make Copilot a hit (unlike the rather unpopular Cortana), it is now requiring partner keyboard manufacturers to have a dedicated Copilot key. 

A final bow for WordPad – or is it?

To some, this move reminds them of when Microsoft wanted to ax Windows Paint. Many users were incensed, which is understandable, in my opinion, as I think Paint is one of the best apps ever made. In the case of Paint, Microsoft actually listened to users’ outcry and made the app available for download from the Microsoft Store. Since then, it’s been developed and upgraded for Windows 11, and even getting its own AI assistant named Cocreator

It’s speculated that if there’s enough uproar about WordPad’s departure, Microsoft might consider doing something similar for WordPad. WordPad is a quality, solid app that’s simple and straightforward, installed by default, quick to load and get going, and offers more features than NotePad for simple text editing. 

It’s safe to say many users are lamenting WordPad’s exit and are hoping it’ll be made available as an optional download. I guess we’ll have to see if Microsoft is actually interested in continuing to give users the option to work more simply and without unwanted AI features, or if it really is committed to dropping popular basic apps in pursuit of its vision of an AI-powered future.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE…

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Hate taxes? H&R Block’s new AI chatbot aims to reduce your tax frustrations

Like a spoonful of mustard or mayonnaise — or perhaps you prefer sriracha? — it seems no software recipe is complete these days without a dollop of generative AI. The groundbreaking technology plays games better than you, writes songs for you … heck, it can even be your girlfriend (to each their own). And now it can help you with life’s most vexing challenge: taxes.

In mid-December, H&R Block quietly announced AI Tax Assist, a generative AI tool powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. The new offering leverages the tax giant’s decades of experience in tax prep and leans on its stable of more than 60,000 tax pros to answer your thorniest questions about U.S. and state tax laws: Can I deduct this new laptop? Is this a personal expense or a business one? How many roads must a man walk down, before travel is officially part of his job?

We see AI as one of the defining technologies of our time.

Sarah Bird, Responsible AI, Microsoft

In a press preview on Thursday, January 25, in New York City, H&R Block announced another new tool designed to simplify importing last year’s tax returns from the competition. And it offered TechRadar the opportunity to try out the new AI assistant software and talk about the future of tax prep.

“We see AI as one of the defining technologies of our time … but only if we do it responsibility,” explained Sarah Bird, who serves as global lead for responsible AI at Microsoft. (Bird was virtual at the event, a result of possible exposure to Covid.) Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service lets developers easily build generative AI experiences, using a set of prebuilt and curated models from OpenAI, Meta and beyond. Her team helps companies like H&R Block ensure that their tools use the highest quality training data, guide you with clever prompts, and so on. “It’s really a best practices implementation in terms of responsible AI,” she said.

H&R Block notes that the tech will not file or even fill out your forms; it merely answers questions. But if you’re hesitant to even ask AI for tax advice, you have good reason. The tech is notorious for hallucinations, where it simply invents the answers to questions if it can’t find the right answer. Some experts worry that problem may never be solved. “This isn’t fixable,” Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at UW's Computational Linguistics Laboratory, told the Associated Press last fall. “It’s inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases.”

One answer to the problem is starting with the right training data. If the AI has reliable, trustworthy sources of data to pore through, it can find the right answer, saving you from hunting through the Kafka-esque bowels of the IRS to find the instruction form for Schedule B or whatever. And off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) simply don’t have that data, explained Aditya Thadani, VP of Artificial Intelligence Platforms for H&R Block. Ask ChatGPT 4 a question, he noted, and you risk missing out on what’s new: The cut-off date for that LLM's data sources is April of 2023.

“The IRS has released a number of changes since then,” he told attendees at the H&R Block event. “They’re making changes well into December and January, well into the tax season. We’re making sure you get all that information.”

To try out the new system, TechRadar sat down with some sample data and asked a few test prompts: Am I missing any deductions? Can I deduct a car as a business expense? And so on. The chatbot offered reasonable prompts: A few paragraphs of information culled from H&R Block’s deep catalog of data, links to find more information, and so on. The company says it can answer tax theory questions, clarify tax terms, and give guidance on specific tax rules. And crucial to the entire experience: Live, human beings — CPAs even! — are always just a click away.

“When we are not absolutely sure? Don’t guess. Give a response that we are actually confident in,” Thadani said. And if you don’t get the response you are looking for from the AI, you can get it from the tax pro.”

Privacy matters: Who will see your data?

It’s hard to discuss any emerging technology without touching on privacy, and both Microsoft and H&R Block are very aware of the risks. After all, a person’s tax returns are highly personal and confidential – one reason they became such a hot-button in the US presidential elections. Should a company be allowed to train an LLM on your data?

“We’re sitting on a lot of really personal, private information,” Thadani admitted. “As much as we want to use that to answer questions effectively, we have to continue to find the balance.” So the assistant won’t remember you. It won’t ingest your tax forms to answer the questions you pose. And by design, other people won’t benefit from your questions down the road.

The new software also taps into one of the quirks of our modern software assistants. We don’t necessarily talk to them like adults. We’ve been trained to ask Alexa or the Google Assistant halting half-words and phrases. Meanwhile, chatbots can converse in natural language. H&R Block’s tool works fine in either space, Bird explained.

“It’s incredibly enabling because it allows people to speak in words they’re comfortable with,” she said. There’s the real power of technology in a nutshell: “Make a complex thing more accessible to people because the technology meets them where they’re at.”

Now if it could only help us deduct a few holiday pounds from the waistline.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

New Windows 11 update fixes a whole lot of things – but breaks some as well

Windows 11 users who are installing the latest update are having some serious issues, from many accounts.

Windows Latest reported that there are bugs in the preview update – so yes, this is an optional update, not something you have to install – that are causing major problems with Windows 11’s interface in one way or another.

For starters, with patch KB5034204, some users are apparently experiencing a glitch where File Explorer – the folders and files on the desktop – is becoming unresponsive. This can lead to the whole desktop going blank (all folders and icons disappearing) for a while, before returning to normal, we’re told. Others are reporting File Explorer crashing while shutting down their PC.

Windows Latest further details reports of icons like the Recycle Bin vanishing, taskbar icons not working, and even the Windows 11 taskbar itself going missing, as complained about on Reddit (plus this is a problem the tech site encountered itself).

The other issue folks seem to be experiencing with KB5034204 is that the update fails to install. There are complaints on Microsoft’s Feedback Hub that the installation process reaches 100%, so looks like it has finished, but then crashes out with a message mentioning missing files. Stop code errors (like ‘0x8007000d’) are also in evidence with these installation mishaps.


Analysis: Out of the frying pan…

Clearly, we need to take into account that this is a preview update, meaning that it’s still officially in testing, and optional patches like this aren’t installed unless you specifically ask for them. As with any pre-release software, you can expect problems, in other words.

Even so, you might want an optional update because it provides a fix for a bug you’re suffering with, and in the case of KB5034204, it resolves a couple of notable issues disrupting video chats and streaming audio (and a misbehaving Start menu, too, plus more besides).

However, in this case, you might swap one problem for another when installing this optional update, and possibly a worse glitch (the wonkiness caused with the Windows 11 interface outlined above seems pretty nasty).

That said, there is a solution (kind of) for the missing taskbar at least, which is to press the Windows key + X – apparently, that sees the bar come back, but its behavior may still be odd going by the various reports around this particular bug.

It’s disappointing to see installation failures popping up again with this preview update, mainly because this was a flaw in evidence with the January cumulative update. It seems that Microsoft hasn’t resolved this yet, then, and the fear is that it might still be present in the February update for Windows 11 (which this preview is an advance version of, as you may realize).

You might also like…

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Apple reveals new Vision Pro advert, as Meta plans Android-style rivalry

A slick new advert for the Apple Vision Pro has just appeared on the official Apple YouTube account, just a few days ahead of the first shipments of the mixed reality headset being sent out to customers. Meanwhile, a new report claims that Meta now considers itself to be the headset's main, Android-style adversary. 

The 68-second video has the usual Apple polish and a lot of the ingredients we've come to expect from Apple commercials – such as a classic pop song, aspirational lifestyles, travel, family and friends. It's called “Hello Apple Vision Pro” and the promise in the caption is that “you can do the things you love in ways never before possible”.

It's actually a helpful preview of some of the features and experiences that the Vision Pro offers: watching movies, working on presentations in a virtual 3D space, making FaceTime calls, bringing up images and video that wrap around your field of vision, and more.

As you would expect from an advertisement, it's somewhat selective in what it shows. There's no sign of the Vision Pro battery pack, and Napoleon is an interesting choice as the featured movie, because Ridley Scott's historical epic is seven minutes longer than the Vision Pro's official estimated battery life. You might need a recharge for the end credits.

More competition

We've already spent some time with Apple's headset for our hands-on Apple Vision Pro review, though not enough yet for a full review. Those first verdicts are going to be interesting, as will the impact of the headset on the augmented/virtual/mixed reality hardware market as a whole.

The Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro are now in direct competition with Apple's new device, but Meta executives don't seem to be overly perturbed by the Vision Pro's arrival. As per the Wall Street Journal (via 9to5Mac), Meta is hoping that the Vision Pro boosts interest in the tech in general, leading to more sales of the cheaper Meta headsets too.

Meta executives are “optimistic”, sources have told the WSJ, with the report going on to say that Meta is hoping to be the Android of the AR/VR/MR space – in other words, the main alternative to Apple, as Google's mobile operating system is on phones and tablets.

According to the WSJ, the Vision Pro has “influenced Meta's thinking” when it comes to embracing mixed reality experiences, and improving natural gesture control – Apple's headset relies on eye and finger tracking, while the Meta devices are primarily operated by physical controllers, with gesture support in testing.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

This new AI-powered iPhone browser trumps Safari by searching the web for you

Sick of struggling to find the answers to your search queries in Safari, Chrome, or any of the other best browsers on iOS? A new alternative has just emerged that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to do the searching for you, potentially helping you find accurate results much more quickly.

Called Arc Search, the app is made by The Browser Company of New York, an outfit that has also made the desktop Arc browser that captured headlines in 2023. With Arc Search, the developer has added a bunch of interesting features that could see it supplant your current favorite browser on your iPhone.

First among them is the app’s 'Browse for Me' feature. When you enter a search query, you can view a standard page of results in your search engine of choice, or you can instead tap the Browse for Me button. This uses AI to gather information from six different sources, then builds a custom web page that displays all the key information you need to answer your search query.

This can include useful photos and videos, bullet-pointed text, and more. It’s a clever way to pull in information from a variety of sources and ensure you stand a good chance of getting what you need at the first attempt, without having to endlessly scroll through useless information and unhelpful websites.

Privacy protections

The Arc Search web browser for iOS running on an iPhone, with various search results displayed.

(Image credit: Future)

Arc Search comes with other handy features besides Browse for Me. For instance, you can tell it to block ads, trackers and GDPR cookie banners on all websites. That’s a great way to protect your privacy by default, although it’s not clear if the app actually opts out of cookies on GDPR banners or simply hides them.

Arc Search will also automatically archive inactive tabs after one day, which might come in handy for people who struggle to control their tab overload (such as yours truly). And there’s a reader mode that strips out unnecessary visual elements to give you a more focused experience.

Some of features aren’t available in Browse for Me, though. For instance, you can’t share your custom pages or copy a link to them, nor can you view them in reader mode. Perhaps these tools will come later.

Regardless, Arc Search is an intriguing alternative to the usual suspects when it comes to iOS browsers, and could make its own claim to the best browser title if it continues to add interesting features. If you want to try it out, it’s free to download on the iOS App Store with no subscriptions or in-app purchases to worry about.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Apple wants to make sure your posture’s right when using the Vision Pro

The first preorders for the Apple Vision Pro will very soon be making their way into the hands of users, but it seems that Apple is making plans to have headsets like the Vision Pro respond to the posture of the person wearing them.

A newly published patent (via Patently Apple) refers to “tiered posture awareness” – a method through which headsets and smart specs could figure out the posture of users, and then make any necessary tweaks to the way content was presented.

So, for example, a virtual 3D environment might be slightly adjusted based on the way the user is standing or sitting, and the surround sound effects applied to audio feeds could also be changed to be as immersive as possible.

The patent also mentions making calculations based on how much strain the headset might be putting on the person wearing it – this information could be used to warn users if their posture is putting too much strain on their body parts.

Future updates

The Apple Vision Pro headset on a grey background

Preorders for the Apple Vision Pro are open now (Image credit: Apple)

It's quite a complex patent, and the usual caveats about patents apply here too: there's no guarantee that these ideas will ever actually be implemented in a product, but they offer an interesting insight into what Apple's engineers are thinking about.

In the hands-on time we've had with the Apple Vision Pro, we haven't noticed any kind of head or neck strain, though these sessions have been rather brief. We'll be running a full test of the spatial computing device just as soon as we're able to.

Something like what's being described in the patent could potentially be delivered to the Vision Pro via a future software update. Alternatively, it might be held back for future versions of the headset, which we've already started hearing rumors about.

Apple will also be hoping that more app developers put out dedicated versions of their apps for the Vision Pro in the future: the likes of Netflix are currently holding back because it's going to take a while for the Vision Pro to make it to the mainstream.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Windows 11’s AI-powered Voice Clarity feature improves your video chats, plus setup has a new look (finally)

Windows 11 has a new preview build out that improves audio quality for your video chats and more besides.

Windows 11 preview build 26040 has been released in the Canary channel (the earliest test builds) complete with the Voice Clarity feature which was previously exclusive to owners of Surface devices.

Voice Clarity leverages AI to improve audio chat on your end, canceling out echo, reducing reverberation or other unwanted effects, and suppressing any intrusive background noises. In short, it helps you to be heard better, and your voice to be clearer.

The catch is that apps need to use Communications Signal Processing Mode to have the benefit of this feature, which is unsurprisingly what Microsoft’s own Phone Link app uses. WhatsApp is another example, plus some PC games will be good to go with this tech, so you can shout at your teammates and be crystal clear when doing so.

Voice Clarity is on by default – after all, there’s no real downside here, save for using a bit of CPU juice – but you can turn it off if you want.

Another smart addition here is a hook-up between your Android phone and Windows 11 PC for editing photos. Whenever you take a photo on your smartphone, it’ll be available on the desktop PC straight away (you’ll get a notification), and you can edit it in the Snipping Tool (rather than struggling to deal with the image on your handset).

For the full list of changes in build 26040, see Microsoft’s blog post, but another of the bigger introductions worth highlighting here is that the Windows 11 setup experience has been given a long overdue lick of paint.

Windows 11 Setup

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Analysis: Setting the scene

It’s about time Windows setup got some attention, as it has had the same basic look for a long time now. It’d be nice for the modernization to get a touch more sparkle, we reckon, though the improvement is a good one, and it’s not exactly a crucial part of the interface (given that you don’t see it after you’ve installed the operating system, anyway).

We have already seen the capability for Android phone photos to be piped to the Snipping Tool appear in the Dev channel last week, but it’s good to see a broader rollout to Canary testers. It is only rolling out, though, so bear in mind that you might not see it yet if you’re a denizen of the Canary channel.

As for Voice Clarity, clearly that’s a welcome touch of AI for all Windows 11 users. Whether you’re chatting to your family to catch up at the weekend, or you work remotely and use your Windows 11 PC for meetings, being able to be heard better by the person (or people) on the other end of the call is obviously a good thing.

You might also like…

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More

Google’s impressive Lumiere shows us the future of making short-form AI videos

Google is taking another crack at text-to-video generation with Lumiere, a new AI model capable of creating surprisingly high-quality content. 

The tech giant has certainly come a long way from the days of Imagen Video. Subjects in Lumiere videos are no longer these nightmarish creatures with melting faces. Now things look much more realistic. Sea turtles look like sea turtles, fur on animals has the right texture, and people in AI clips have genuine smiles (for the most part). What’s more, there's very little of the weird jerky movement seen in other text-to-video generative AIs. Motion is largely smooth as butter. Inbar Mosseri, Research Team Lead at Google Research, published a video on her YouTube channel demonstrating Lumiere’s capabilities. 

Google put a lot of work into making Lumiere’s content appear as lifelike as possible. The dev team accomplished this by implementing something called Space-Time U-Net architecture (STUNet). The technology behind STUNet is pretty complex. But as Ars Technica explains, it allows Lumiere to understand where objects are in a video, how they move and change and renders these actions at the same time resulting in a smooth-flowing creation. 

This runs contrary to other generative platforms that first establish keyframes in clips and then fill in the gaps afterward. Doing so results in the jerky movement the tech is known for.

Well equipped

In addition to text-to-video generation, Lumiere has numerous features in its toolkit including support for multimodality. 

Users will be able to upload source images or videos to the AI so it can edit them according to their specifications. For example, you can upload an image of Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and turn it into a short clip where she smiles instead of blankly staring. Lumiere also has an ability called Cinemagraph which can animate highlighted portions of pictures.

Google demonstrates this by selecting a butterfly sitting on a flower. Thanks to the AI, the output video has the butterfly flapping its wings while the flowers around it remain stationary. 

Things become particularly impressive when it comes to video. Video Inpainting, another feature, functions similarly to Cinemagraph in that the AI can edit portions of clips. A woman’s patterned green dress can be turned into shiny gold or black. Lumiere goes one step further by offering Video Stylization for altering video subjects. A regular car driving down the road can be turned into a vehicle made entirely out of wood or Lego bricks.

Still in the works

It’s unknown if there are plans to launch Lumiere to the public or if Google intends to implement it as a new service. 

We could perhaps see the AI show up on a future Pixel phone as the evolution of Magic Editor. If you’re not familiar with it, Magic Editor utilizes “AI processing [to] intelligently” change spaces or objects in photographs on the Pixel 8. Video Inpainting, to us, seems like a natural progression for the tech.

For now, it looks like the team is going to keep it behind closed doors. As impressive as this AI may be, it still has its issues. Jerky animations are present. In other cases, subjects have limbs warping into mush. If you want to know more, Google’s research paper on Lumiere can be found on Cornell University’s arXiv website. Be warned: it's a dense read.

And be sure to check out TechRadar's roundup of the best AI art generators for 2024.

You might also like

TechRadar – All the latest technology news

Read More