Today PCWorld has launched a major update to Smart Answers. When you ask the tool a question, you will now get a longer, more-detailed and better-structured answer that really helps you get the most from our in-depth journalism. What is Smart Answers Smart Answers is a chatbot tool that helps you get more from our content. It’s built using Generative AI and content written by our human editors. The way we interact with content is changing. It wasn’t so long ago you would have sifted through a printed magazine for advice on the latest consumer technology, yet it felt like a revolution when magazines switched to digital and online editions. These days, everything you could ever want to read is on the internet—or just as likely on YouTube or TikTok. The difficulty comes in finding trustworthy, up-to-date information that precisely and immediately answers your question, and most of us tend to rely on search engines and algorithms to figure that out, with varying degrees of success. But faced with a page full of links to visually similar content, you’re still at least one step away from the information you need. Smart Answers is our new reader service that turns content discovery on its head. You control the questions, the answers, and the delivery. It’s like having a PCWorld editor at your beck and call, allowing you to request and receive specific content on demand. So, why wait for the content to find you? PCWorld’s Smart Answers tool is now available in key regions across the globe. Try Smart Answers We’ve worked in partnership with Miso.ai to develop Smart Answers, a GenAI tool (see What is GenAI?) that draws only on Foundry‘s complete catalog of English-language content (written by humans) to answer your natural-language questions. You’ll not only benefit from the expert knowledge of PCWorld editors, but those of Macworld, Tech Advisor and TechHive too, collectively covering the entire consumer technology sphere. Smart Answers is fast and efficient, which means you don’t have to scroll through pages of information to find what you need. You can ask it anything, from what is the best laptop for gaming to which printer should you buy for your home office, or even when is the next CPU family coming out. It’s like having a PCWorld editor at your beck and call… why wait for the content to find you? Ask it a follow-up question, too, or browse the recommended reading for more detail on the topic. Smart Answers is clever enough to work out what you may want to ask next, and it will even show you best pricing for related products and services. Smart Answers has been trained on the type of tech-related questions our readers are likely to ask. Ask it a silly or irrelevant question, and you’ll either get a silly or irrelevant answer, or no answer at all. Our priority is to ensure Smart Answers is able to adequately respond to questions on the topics we do cover. Though Smart Answers is intrinsically linked to our editorial content, our editorial function stands independently. No article published on this site has been created using GenAI. Extensive testing has been conducted by our editors over the two years since we first launched Smart Answers in August 2025, with our feedback used to retrain the model. We wouldn’t be rolling this upgrade out today if we were not confident that the answers it provides are as trustworthy as if they had come direct from our editorial team. This cycle of testing, feedback, and retraining is ongoing and will be important as we continue to add functionality to Smart Answers – and this is just the start of a process that will ultimately put you in charge of your own content experience across Foundry-owned sites. Of course, the real testing comes from you. We’ll be analyzing all search data collected by Smart Answers, and cross-checking the quality of responses, but we’d also love to hear your feedback. You can get in touch with our Director of Content Operations Marie Black or Director of Product and Data Neil Bennett over email. FAQ 1. How does Smart Answers work? Smart Answers is based on a GenAI platform, built by our partner Miso.ai. Unlike ChatGPT, Google Bard and other GenAI tools that source their information from all over the web, Smart Answers has been trained only on content written by Foundry journalists. It responds to queries posed in natural language with a summarized answer and links to related information. 2. What is GenAI? Short for Generative AI, GenAI is a type of artificial intelligence that is able to mimic the neural networks of the human brain and, through machine learning of existing content, generate entirely new content in the form of text, images, video and audio. When given a prompt, such as a piece of natural-language text, the computational power of GenAI allows it to deliver an answer much faster than can the human brain. 3. Can I trust Smart Answers? Yes. Smart Answers provides answers based on articles written by Foundry journalists and does not use data from any external sources, which could be unreliable or subject to copyright concerns. Extensive testing has gone on behind the scenes to help train the model, so we are satisfied that it is able to provide reliable information. We’ve also worked hard with partner Miso.ai to eliminate “hallucinations,” which are misleading or wholly incorrect answers that may be given when the answer is not known or the data required to answer the question is incomplete. If Smart Answers is unable to answer your question, it will tell you so. 4. Is Smart Answers a threat to our editorial team? Absolutely not. Smart Answers cannot exist without the expert content written by Foundry journalists. Its ability to stay useful and relevant is entirely dependent on it being able to learn from their content, and thus it is not the first step in some evil plan to replace our team of editors and cut costs. Smart Answers is a supplementary service for our readers, designed to aid content discovery and enhance the user experience. Though we will make revenue from any ads displayed on the page and earn commission on links to purchase some products and services, Smart Answers also costs us money to develop and run. 5. Is Smart Answers being used to create editorial content on PCWorld? No. Editorial articles feed into Smart Answers, but Smart Answers is not used for the creation of editorial articles. But in the future we may use query data to help us come up with article or FAQ ideas. 6. What data is Smart Answers collecting? We are recording queries submitted via Smart Answers to help us understand the information our readers are interested in. Smart Answers also collects anonymized user data that allows us to better understand the interests and intent of readers visiting Foundry websites. Learn more about Foundry’s Privacy Policy, and Miso.ai’s Privacy Policy. Read...

A partnership between Qualcomm and an AI startup promises lightning-quick AI where it’s really needed: searching through and using your photos and videos as a source of information stored locally on your device. Right now, the partnership is a foundational one, predicated for the future. Memories.ai is launching what it calls its Large Visual Memory Models 2.0 in partnership with Qualcomm, with an eye toward releasing it in 2026. At that point, the two companies will begin pitching the LVMM to customers who develop their own applications for smartphones, headsets, and PCs. Could we see a Samsung Gallery on an Android phone, powered by Memories? Conceptually, that’s the sort of relationship that Memories.ai envisions. People aren’t great about remembering the details of an experience, but a visual can serve as a trigger to unlock the surrounding detail. That’s the metaphor Memories.ai is using, like how the image of a hamburger you ate two weeks ago helps bring back all of the details of what you ate, where it was, and who you ate it with, explained Shawn Shen, the co-founder and chief executive of Memories.Ai. The problem Memories.ai is trying to solve is that machines have learned to be great and recognizing the relationships between words and data, but are much less capable when it comes to imagery. “Ultimately, memories will win,” Shen said. Memories.ai develops two pieces of technology: an encoder and the search infrastructure. Memories isn’t actually powering the image or video that you’d pull out or show your friends or family. Instead, it’s capturing a version of the image or video that’soptimized for the information it contains. That data is then passed to the search infrastructure, so that a query like “my group of friends eating dinner in Korea” would return the proper information. Memories provided a demonstration of their technology below, complete with how videos can be searched and queried using natural language. Photo search and photo query The Memories technology is heading in a couple different directions. For now, the partnership seems aimed at simply providing a better version of on-device photo and video search, basically taking something like Google Photos and developing a superior, private version of it. Some built-in photo-gallery apps tag photos with locations or the people they’ve captured; Memories is essentially creating those tags on the fly. Shen said that the encoding technology could run constantly, culling information gleaned from the real world. It doesn’t sound like that constant recording is a plan for handhelds like Qualcomm’s XR platform for smart glasses or other wearables, however. Instead, that could be a function for a security camera. The second major function of the Memories.ai technology is the ability to “talk to it,” in much the same way Otter.ai’s AI transcription service allows you to ask the service questions about a particular transcript. “When was the last time the pizza got delivered? What suspicious events happened around my home? When did my dog knock the vase over? You can interact with all your personal media files recorded from cameras by just having this natural language chatting,” Shen said. Some of this information could be culled from different sources, of course; you could always find out the last time you went to Japan by looking at your calendar or searching out a trip reservation on your email. Memories.ai believes that you’ll find more context than that within a photo or video. Memories.ai’s natural-language interface. The Qualcomm partnership is the first time that the Memories.ai team has publicly partnered with a chip company for on-device searching. “This partnership will enable AI platforms that are not only responsive but also context-aware, able to retain visual information, recognize patterns over long periods, and perform reliably even at the edge of networks,” Vinesh Sukumar, vice president of product management and head of generative of AI at Qualcomm, said in a statement. “Together, we are speeding up our shared goal to deliver smarter, more intuitive intelligence to real-world applications.” Internally, Qualcomm is “super excited” about the partnership, believing that the Memories.ai technology could be used to search within videos and even eventually edit them, employees said. In addition, the Memories model is small enough that it can be run locally on the device, removing the need to be connected to the cloud and also the lag necessary to go back and forth with the cloud while searching. The partnership isn’t specifically identifying which Qualcomm processors are being targeted, but Shen said that the encoding process is run on the local NPU, and the retrieval is essentially like using the CPU to fetch queries from a database. Qualcomm, of course, launched the Snapdragon X2 Elite PC processor this fall, alongside the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for smartphones and other mobile devices. Eventually, Shen said, Memories plans to design its own application. But for now, Memories and Qualcomm intend to start pitching device makers on building the Memories.ai technology into wearables, phones, and cameras beginning in 2026. Read...

Former Metro Bank CIO Louise Leavey urges banks to view technology as a continuous evolution, embracing AI and automation to enhance finance services and resilience. Read...

Technology giant Apple is looking to ensure the Australian power grid contains enough green energy to offset the usage of every single Apple Product used by Aussies. Read...

CrowdStrike launches Falcon XIoT to deliver unified, zero-touch security and real-time visibility for operational technology and IoT environments. Read...

The highly-complex technology is increasingly being tipped to transform computing. Read...

The best soundbars are designed primarily to be heard, not seen. This new aluminum-clad behemoth from Bang & Olufsen, however, demands to be heard and seen, and it arrives with a price tag as lofty as its eye-catching “sculptural” design.   Slated to go on sale next month for a whopping $5,800, the Beosound Premiere from Bang & Olufsen arrives packed with speaker drivers—10 of them—as well as support for immersive Dolby Atmos audio.  Among the Beosound Premiere’s internal speakers are a quartet of 4 x 3-inch “racetrack”-style woofers to supply the bass, a pair of two-inch front-firing speakers, two more side-firing drivers for surround effects, and an up-firing driver sitting beneath 1,925 milled perforations, which pay “tribute to B&O’s 100-year heritage,” according to the company.  In all, those 10 drivers serve up seven channels of audio, ideal for streaming Dolby Atmos soundtracks, while Bang & Olufsen’s “Wide Stage” technology employs “driver-specific acoustic data” to help to boost the perceived width and height of the Premiere’s soundstage, and an Advanced Bass management system is designed to add oomph to the built-in woofers.  Bang & Olufsen’s $5,800 Beosound Premiere soundbar boasts an upfiring driver that sits beneath 1,925 milled perforations.Bang & Olufsen As far as ports go, the Beosound Premiere offers a single HDMI eARC connector that can handle lossless audio piped from a TV-connected Blu-ray player, along with a three-port gigabit ethernet switch (a premium connectivity feature for a soundbar), and dual-band Wi-Fi. You can stream music to the soundbar via Bluetooth as well as Apple’s AirPlay protocol, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and Deezer Connect.  Finally, there’s the Beosound Premiere’s “pure” aluminum shell, with the whole package adding up to a “sculptural masterpiece and bold expression of acoustic artistry,” boasts Bang & Olufsen CEO Kristian Teär.  The nearly 19-pound soundbar will be available in three variants: Natural Aluminum, Gold Tone, and Black Anthracite, while an included stand allows for either placing the unit on a tabletop or mounting it on a wall.  You’ll also be able to add an optional speaker cover, with a fabric cover in grey mélange available for $325, or a pair of wooden covers (oak and dark oak) crafted from single pieces of wood selling for a budget-busting $1,650 each.  If the standard $5,800 configuration of the Beosound Premiere isn’t premium enough for you, Bang & Olufsen is also offering a “Haute Edition” of the soundbar with “precision-milled grooves achieved through an intricate milling process” that takes 17 hours to complete, the company says.   B&O says it’s only manufacturing 25 units of the $15,700 “Haute Edition” soundbars, which will be individually numbered and arrive with their own certificates of authenticity.  This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best media-streaming devices. Read...

Google has finally begun adding support for its own internal services to Google Gemini, just a month after Microsoft began offering the same capabilities to Windows testers. Google said Wednesday that Gemini Deep Research can now connect to Gmail, Google Drive, and Chat, along with Docs, Slides, Sheets, and PDF files stored within those services. “This powerful new capability is now available for all Gemini users,” Google said in a blog post on Wednesday. “To get started, just select ‘Deep Research’ from the Tools menu in Gemini on desktop and select your sources. This will begin rolling out to mobile users in the coming days.” On October 10, Microsoft announced that its own Copilot AI could begin reading Gmail and your Google Calendar via a technology called Connectors, which allows you to manually give access to Copilot so that it can ingest and analyze that data. (At the time, this was limited to members of the Windows Insiders testing program.) A week later, Microsoft more formally announced that those same connectors would allow Copilot to access OneDrive files and Outlook contacts, emails, and calendar events, as well as connect to Google services like Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts. Microsoft hasn’t formally said when these additional capabilities would be released to users, however, giving Google a first-to-market advantage. Google In an August livestream, OpenAI and ChatGPT also briefly showed off Gmail integration, though ChatGPT’s connections don’t appear to be as deep or significant right now. However, OpenAI’s DevDay 2025 livestream did reveal that ChatGPT can work with apps like Zillow and Canva and query them for more information. For now, the only point in which the two services don’t seem to overlap is in Google Chats, though that may be a capability Microsoft specifically neglected to call out. In any event, both Microsoft and Google now appear to offer similar capabilities to allow its AI services to deeply search and understand what you can your colleagues are talking about. Read...

Have you noticed how modern laptops seem more approachable than ever? Gone are the sharp, angular edges and industrial plastic of the past. Today’s machines feel sleek, tactile, and… almost inviting! As a very tactile person myself, this shift in design really changes my emotional connection with the tech I use on a day-to-day basis. I bet it’s the same for you, too. The olden days Back in the day (specifically the 80s and 90s), laptops were boxy plastic things with sharp edges and itty bitty screens. Function was at the forefront here and design was more of an afterthought. I’m a millennial and the family computer I grew up playing Myst and Baldur’s Gate on was an IBM, and it was nothing fancy–just a boxy, beige-colored thing. Still, my love persisted because it was my gateway to other worlds. I just never connected with the bland design.  Wikipedia These modern laptops are sleek and elegant. They’re also way smaller than their ancestors. You needed a good amount of arm strength to tote around those older laptops! But now you’ve got the elegant curves of a MacBook Air and the rubberized lids on some Lenovo ThinkPads. This shift is a welcome departure from the unfeeling machines of the past. Laptops are nicer and, well, friendlier somehow!  It’s not just about how laptops look. How they feel in your hands can really change the experience. I’ve felt it firsthand. Connecting with your laptop isn’t as weird as it initially sounds Like I said earlier, I’m a tactile person, it’s just the way I do life. And, as someone who reviews Chromebooks and thinks about laptops a great deal, first impressions can really make or break the experience. That’s extremely important. It was a clunky Dell I picked up for college, nothing to write home about, but unboxing it felt special to me. I don’t remember the exact model or specs anymore, but I do remember picking it up and feeling its weight. It felt comforting in a way as well as substantial and important. Honestly, it kind of felt pretty sleek back then! I’m sure it was considered lightweight for the time (2006 feels like a lifetime ago), but it left a lasting impression on me.  Nothing obliterates the buzz of inspiration more than a bad design. This portable thing, this portal that’ll lead me to people I met role-playing on Second Life and am still friends with today, was something of a comfort to me. I used to cover its lid with decals and kind of see it as part of who I was. Back then, laptops were heavy and boxy, but I still felt a weird little connection to mine. Honestly, my laptop has to feel right for me to get anything done. If the keys are stiff or the palm rest creaks, it’s hard for me to focus. It’s a tiny thing, I know, but it totally changes how long I can actually sit and write. Nothing obliterates the buzz of inspiration more than a bad design. So, what’s pushing this design forward? Our relationship with the tech we use every day didn’t just happen overnight. Design has slowly adapted to fit our changing lifestyles. A few things are pushing this design to the forefront. First, materials have advanced since the 80s and 90s. Now you’ve got polymer coatings and lighter metal alloy frames, the latter of which allows manufacturers to round out (or “soften”) those pointy edges. As for the internal components, they’ve gotten a lot smaller and more powerful. Thermal solutions have improved, too. But people aren’t just using laptops for work now, they’re using them for creation and connection. They’ve become an almost intimate part of our everyday lives. Thomas Armbrüster Many folks (including me) work from home, so having a mobile laptop that can be taken anywhere just makes sense. We want devices that fit into our lives comfortably, not just functionally and that includes cafes and couches. Would you rather curl up in bed with a pointy slab of plastic or something with round edges? Exactly. Feel and aesthetics are just as important as a snappy processor or marathon battery life. In fact, some modern designs are downright weird… and we love it! There’s actually a term for this kind of thing and it’s called human-centered design. It’s all about making technology feel intuitive and approachable as well as functional. There’s some psychology going on behind all that softness, too. As humans, we’re wired to respond to touch–it’s how we explored the world as children. The smoother or softer something feels, the more likely we are to see it as friendly and familiar. Laptops aren’t the only devices getting softer, either. Phones used to be rigid things with all sorts of angles, but now they almost curve into your hand like river stones. Thanks to the rounded design of my husband’s smartwatch, it just gently presses against his wrist instead of digging into it–small, comfortable, and unobtrusive. As technology keeps changing, I can’t help but wonder… How much softer can it get? What does the future look like? I can’t see into the future (not yet at least!), but if I had to guess where this trend is going, I’d say the line between technology and lifestyle will continue to blur. Maybe someday our laptops will respond to our temperature and change color as a result–sort of like a mood ring. Maybe the haptic feedback will generate a unique pattern, letting us know when a loved one has sent a message. That would be cool, sure, but that’s my imagination getting away from me. Softness is here to stay Maybe that’s why I’m so fond of my laptop. It slides right into my routines, I don’t have to bend around it. And the softness? It’s not just in the rounded edges, it’s in the way it makes me want to pick it up and interact with it. Laptops no longer feel cold and intimidating. I hope tech just keeps on getting softer because it transforms something functional into something I actually enjoy holding and using. Read...

There are lots of rivalries in the PC space. You’ve got AMD versus Nvidia, air versus liquid cooling, even PC versus Mac. But if there’s one thing everyone can agree on? Printers suck. That iconic Office Space scene still hits hard all these decades later because it’s so true. We all hate printers and for good reason. They don’t work as well as they should, the software feels ancient and lacking, the ink runs dry too quickly, the cartridges are too expensive, the papers jam, the business models are predatory and anti-competitive… But hold up! I have some genuinely good news. I actually found a printer that isn’t so bad: the HP LaserJet M110w Wireless Black & White Printer, which surprised me given HP’s reputation in printers. See this printer on Amazon My biggest printer gripes I think we all have a story about a printer becoming our nemesis. Maybe you needed to get something printed off for school or work and the printer decided that now is the time to jam up, or run dry on ink, or fail to connect to the Wi-Fi network. Just setting up a printer can be a real pain, not to mention the Windows XP-style interfaces, the drivers that need to be installed, the clunky on-device controls, or the other number of hoops that need to be jumped. Setting up printers has historically left me clawing at my eyes in frustration at least once during each process. Mark Pickavance Speaking of clunky on-device controls, don’t get me started on the anything-but-intuitive screens and displays. Their crushingly poor refresh rates make every animated menu transition take an eternity, and sub-menu after sub-menu makes navigation as much a chore as whatever work I was trying so desperately to complete. And even when everything seems to be working OK, I go to print and the printer says it’s printing… but it doesn’t. So I cancel the print job…. and it just sits there, stuck in the output queue. What a nightmare. There isn’t a single other piece of technology I own that forces an entire PC reboot just to get it doing what it’s supposed to do. I’m getting so riled up just from reliving all this as I type this up! Mark Pickavance Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for how infrequently I actually need to use a printer. As e-signing and PDF editing have gotten easier, printing has sort of drifted off to the side… which makes it that much more annoying when I do need to print and the ink is dry, the printing head needs cleaning, the tray jams, or whatever. Enter my new favorite HP printer After decades of lackluster performance, obfuscating errors, excruciating setup processes, and spiraling ink costs, I’ve finally found a printer I don’t hate. It hasn’t bothered me once in the months I’ve had it. It connects quickly, doesn’t take long to start up, and so far I’m quite indifferent about its presence in my home and office. Jon Martindale / Foundry The printer in question is the HP LaserJet M110w Wireless Black & White Printer. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it just works. In 2025, that shouldn’t be much of an achievement… but it is! And for that I blame myself just as much as every printer that came before it. Keep it simple, stupid In the past, the printers I bought needed to be all-in-one jacks. I wanted a scanner for work contracts, color printing and gloss paper support for family photos, and fast black-and-white printing for work and school documents. Although past printer designs were undoubtedly awful, one reason this new HP design is so great is that it keeps it simple. The M110w is a monochrome printer—no color printing, no fancy paper support. It only has one paper feed, it doesn’t scan, it doesn’t fax (lol), it doesn’t copy. I use it for D&D character sheets and the odd professional document that still requires a hand signature. Jon Martindale / Foundry And the M110w is a LaserJet, meaning it uses toner instead of ink. Unlike ink, toner doesn’t dry out or clog up printing heads, and toner isn’t super expensive. Plus, it prints fast with higher precision and doesn’t smudge. It’s also the first printer I’ve ever owned that finally feels like it has embraced some modern design philosophies around user interaction and experience. That alone is ungodly refreshing. HP LaserJet M110w Wireless Black-and-White Printer Best Prices Today: $169 at Amazon For example, HP’s app-based setup wasn’t awful. It was already a step up over inputting my Wi-Fi pasword into my previous printer, which only had three buttons to interact with an on-screen keyboard. (That was one of the worst digital experiences I’ve ever had with anything!) So, credit where it’s due: HP’s printing app isn’t bad. I had it set up in less than 15 minutes and printing in under 20. Ultimately, this is all I really need from a printer: work when I need you to, otherwise get out of my way. Don’t frustrate me or cause unnecessary delays that make me late to hand in a report. Please. I can’t believe I don’t hate this printer One reason why I can enjoy a printer like this in 2025 is because of how obsolete so many other printer functions are now. I no longer need to print color glossy photos of my family because there are a million photo printing services that are quality, fast, and affordable. I don’t need a scanner anymore because my phone can double as a scanner easily enough. PDF editing software is so much better in 2025 that I can e-sign just about anything, too. A printer that only prints is perfect now that everything else is handled elsewhere. Jon Martindale / Foundry It’s been a few months now and the HP LaserJet M110w Wireless Black & White Printer been error-free for the most part, plus I’ve printed over 50 pages without running out of toner. When I eventually need to replace it, the cartridge will only be $50. (I’ve spent more than that on a single set of ink cartridges that were already dry by the next time I used them.) Yeah, I don’t hate it. I might even like it. Dear printer, please stay the way you are. If you can provide hassle-free printing for a few more years, maybe I’ll give you a graceful retirement instead of going medieval on you with a baseball bat. Get this printer on Amazon Read...