YouTube officially announced that its in-app video sharing and messaging feature is now rolling out to the US, UK, Brazil, and Singapore, bringing the total number of supported countries to 40.

The feature is available to users aged 18 and older who are logged into a YouTube channel. The rollout is gradual, so it may not appear in your app immediately.

How to DM on YouTube?

Once the feature is enabled for you, a messaging icon appears in the top right corner of the app. You can also share any video or Short directly from the Share button while watching.

The catch is that starting a conversation is not as simple as searching for someone. You have to send an invite link first, and that link must go out through a third-party app like WhatsApp, iMessage, or SMS. The other person then accepts the invite and gets added to your YouTube contacts. This extra step is designed to prevent spam and unwanted messages.

Once connected, you can send text messages freely, react to content in real time, unsend messages by long-pressing them, delete entire conversations, and block or report contacts if needed. The only media you can share inside the chat is YouTube content, including videos, livestreams, and Shorts. No images, GIFs, or files allowed.

Why is YouTube bringing messaging back now?

YouTube had a direct messaging feature in 2017, but it was quietly killed off in 2019. Now, it’s back once again in a much bigger way.

The feature has already been available in over 30 European countries since March 2026. YouTube says the positive response from countries where the feature was already live drove the decision to expand. Recently, the platform also added three new podcast features, but they are only for Premium subscribers.

For years, your phone’s Camera Roll has served dual purposes. In addition to helping you revisit special moments, it has also served as an archive for all sorts of things you find online, like recipes, fashion inspiration, travel ideas, interesting quotes, funny tweets, product recommendations, and more. Today, a new app called Pool is arriving to help you finally make sense of this digital clutter.

To get started with Pool, you simply give it permission to access your photos, which are moved into categories it calls “pools.” The pools created in the app are entirely dependent on the products, places, or things that you’ve saved over time, making them specific to you.

The app is one of many reinventing bookmarking in the AI era. Startups like mymind, Fabric, and Raindrop help users organize links, images, or other saved content, but Pool focuses specifically on screenshots and then uses AI to help users rediscover and act on things they intended to revisit later, similar to apps like Captr or Sorti.

Once imported, Pool is able to track down the original link associated with a given screenshot. For instance, if the screenshot was of a product you were thinking of buying, it would link to the retailer’s website. If it was a recipe you saw on Instagram, it could pull up the ingredients and instructions the creator had shared. And so on.

The idea, explained Pool co-founder Maxime Junique, came about because both he and his co-founder Piet Terheyden had faced the same problem: They would screenshot things they wanted to remember, but then could never find them again.

“It sounds pretty obvious, right now, when we say it, but it’s something that we do so naturally — you don’t notice it, necessarily,” said Junique. The founders, who met years ago in a co-working space, asked their friends about the issue. The friends agreed that they would often screenshot and forget things, too, like design ideas or other types of inspiration.

The app was actually the first product to emerge from Spinoff Studio, the founders’ product and design studio, around three years ago. The first version was built in Lisbon over a couple of weeks while the founders lived out of a van, cranking out the landing page, website, and initial build. But they soon realized they needed to build some products that made money first, so they pivoted to B2B SaaS and shelved Pool.

The studio went on to build other products, including the CRM software Waitless, which was acquired last year.

What brought Pool back to life was the maturation of AI. Suddenly, its core idea of making sense of personal, largely unstructured datasets seemed feasible.

“We were like, it seems like a perfect time to go after this idea,” Junique told TechCrunch. “And it also seemed to us like it’s a super untapped, unexplored dataset for AI. Everyone goes after emails, bank transactions, chat logs — all of those productivity-first datasets. Who is going after this really, deeply emotional dataset we all own?”

Pool’s app also treats your screenshots like memories, meaning some of them are more relevant at the moment, while others disappear over time.

For example, if you screenshot the barcode to an event ticket, it could disappear later on after the event has taken place. Meanwhile, if you screenshot a flyer on Instagram about an upcoming event, Pool’s AI agents can help you find where to buy the tickets and link to the ticketing site.

To find things in Pool, you can search or ask its built-in AI assistant for help.

Next up, the founders plan to take this concept into a second, separate app that will operate as a personal assistant of sorts. Pool’s mascot — the little rubber duck you press and drag across the screen to enter Pool at launch — will become part of the brand for this agentic AI app they’re planning.

The founders were in Lisbon when we chatted — no longer in a van! — but were headed to San Francisco in late May to meet with investors. The startup previously raised a pre-seed round of just over $2 million from General Catalyst, Kima Ventures, Paris-based Source Ventures, and other angels, including Winston Du, Julian Blessin, and Thomas Ricouard.

Pool is available now as a free download on iOS.

Cash App already handles a lot of your finances. From money transfers, debit cards, to investments and even tax filing, the platform does nearly everything. Now, it wants to take over another regular part of your life. The company has announced Cash App Mobile, a new unlimited 5G phone plan priced at $40 per month, with taxes and fees included. It runs on AT&T’s network and is powered by Gigs, a company that helps brands launch embedded mobile services. The plan is launching as a pilot for select Cash App users, with wider availability planned in the coming months.

The app you use to split dinner now wants to run your phone

Cash App Mobile includes unlimited 5G data, talk, and text, along with unlimited HD streaming, 10GB of monthly hotspot data within the US, and data roaming in Canada and Mexico. Cash App is also emphasizing the lack of long-term contracts, credit checks, and store visits. The company is advertising it a bit differently from a traditional carrier plan. It is designed for what it calls “Modern Earners,” including young adults, underbanked consumers, and gig workers who may not have steady income patterns but still need reliable connectivity.

The company stated that millions of users already use the Cash App Card to pay phone bills. So it basically saw a recurring payment flowing through its platform and just decided it would rather be the one selling the service.

Owen Jennings, Cash App’s Executive Officer and Head of Business, said the goal is to deliver affordability and convenience by managing mobile service directly inside Cash App. Gigs CEO and co-founder Hermann Frank added that legacy carrier models do not reflect how many people live or earn today.

More convenience for the user

A $40 unlimited 5G plan is not automatically disruptive on price alone. There are already plenty of MVNOs and prepaid carriers that compete in this range. But the appeal is real. For existing Cash App users, managing a phone plan in the same app where they spend, save, borrow, and get paid makes a lot of sense, while the platform gets another subscription-like foothold in users’ monthly lives.

Meta on Wednesday previewed upcoming additions to its video-editing app Edits at an invite-only creator event in L.A., showing off features like a new AI assistant and a desktop version of the previously mobile-only app.

The company also announced other new tools will launch in the app today, such as a “Beta” tab for experiments and expanded audience insights.

Edits first arrived last year as a direct competitor to ByteDance’s CapCut. With the addition of the new and upcoming tools, Meta is looking to both retain and attract new users.

The upcoming AI assistant will help creators analyze their insights and brainstorm ideas for their content. The assistant will use their Instagram data, like their views and video-retention insights, to help them see what’s working and why. It will suggest video ideas based on performance and suggest making content with trending audio.

By integrating an AI assistant directly into Edits, Meta is aiming to keep creators engaged on Instagram as it continues to compete with TikTok and YouTube for creators’ attention. Additionally, by offering creators content ideas, Meta is encouraging more frequent posting, which could, in turn, boost user engagement. Direct access to an AI assistant also gets rid of the need for creators to turn to outside tools like ChatGPT when brainstorming content ideas and understanding performance.

Meta launched a similar AI assistant tool for creators on Facebook last week. It’s worth noting that YouTube and TikTok also offer tools to creators to help them brainstorm ideas. For instance, YouTube Studio features an Inspiration tab that uses AI to help creators generate video ideas, while TikTok offers creators an AI assistant that can brainstorm ideas and uncover trends.

The desktop version of Edits will give creators more precise control over the editing process as well as the ability to work on a larger screen, which can be helpful during more advanced editing workflows. The company says creators will be able to sync their workflows seamlessly between mobile and desktop devices.

The upcoming desktop version will also allow Edits to better compete with CapCut, which already offers a desktop version.

Among the new features launching today is a Beta tab, which will provide creators with early access to experimental features that are still in development and allow them to provide Meta with feedback. The rollout of the Beta tab indicates that Meta wants to better compete with CapCut and accelerate feature development based on what creators actually want and will use.

Creators will also now be able to see more detailed metrics like their audience demographic breakdown and the time of day their audience is the most engaged. The new metrics join the app’s existing analytics, which include data such as how long viewers watch a video, how many followers were gained from a specific video, where users stop watching a certain video, and more.

Additionally, creators can search specific topics within the app’s Inspiration feed to discover reels and templates other creators are making around a given trend or idea. They’ll also be able to create multiple versions of a single piece of content to test what performs best before publishing.

Although Instagram didn’t share specific numbers about how many users Edits has, the company says that content made with the app sees a 10% higher save rate and 2% higher reshare rate compared to content not made on Edits, and that more than half of people watching reels on Instagram are seeing Edits-created content every day. 

Edits is free to download on iOS and Android.

The AI assistant announced today is currently in testing with attendees of Thursday’s creator event, while the desktop version of Edits is “coming soon,” Meta says. The rest of the features are launching to everyone today.

OpenAI plans to roll out a revamped version of ChatGPT in the coming weeks — one that will serve as a “super app” with coding tools and AI agents, according to the Financial Times.

The company’s goal is reportedly to become more competitive with Anthropic, particularly among business customers, and to get closer to profitability before an IPO. That means turning ChatGPT into a gateway leading free users to products they might actually pay for, such as coding product Codex. In fact, the FT quotes one senior OpenAI employee as declaring, “Chat is dead.”

Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s core product and platform, said the company is working towards a product “where you have your own personal agent that is capable of helping you … across everything in your life, be it personally or at work.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because there have been reports about OpenAI’s super app ambitions since last year.

In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that these plans represent a major strategy shift for the company after launching a variety of standalone products in 2025; OpenAI executives now say they’re abandoning “side quests” like video generator Sora.

OpenAI is reportedly preparing a major transformation of ChatGPT that could fundamentally change how people interact with artificial intelligence. Instead of remaining primarily a conversational chatbot, the company now wants ChatGPT to evolve into a “super app” powered by AI agents capable of managing tasks across both personal and professional life.

According to a report by the Financial Times, OpenAI executives increasingly believe the future of AI lies not in chatbots that simply answer questions, but in intelligent systems that actively complete tasks for users. The company’s long-term vision reportedly includes AI agents capable of organizing schedules, booking travel, writing software, generating content, and managing workflows across multiple services and platforms.

OpenAI executive Thibault Sottiaux reportedly described the goal as creating a “personal agent” that can help users “across everything in your life.” That vision would allow users to interact with ChatGPT through smartphones, desktops, websites, and potentially even vehicles, turning the platform into a much broader digital assistant ecosystem.

OpenAI is betting big on AI agents and enterprise growth

A major part of the strategy revolves around Codex, OpenAI’s coding-focused platform, which has reportedly grown to more than five million weekly active users. Internally, OpenAI appears increasingly convinced that coding tools and AI agents capable of taking actions on behalf of users could become far more valuable than traditional chatbot interactions.

To support that shift, the company is reportedly redesigning ChatGPT’s mobile and web interfaces to highlight coding, image generation, and integrations with third-party services. Partner applications from companies like Canva and Booking.com may also become more deeply integrated into the ChatGPT experience as OpenAI pushes toward a more connected AI ecosystem.

The changes also reflect mounting pressure inside the AI industry. Competition has intensified rapidly as rivals, including Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google, continue expanding their own AI-powered products and enterprise offerings. While ChatGPT remains one of the world’s most recognizable AI products, OpenAI is under increasing pressure to prove long-term profitability and diversify revenue streams beyond free chatbot usage.

Enterprise customers are becoming especially important to that effort. Reports suggest business-focused products already account for a significant portion of OpenAI’s revenue, and the company is reorganizing internal teams to prioritize enterprise growth over some consumer-oriented initiatives.

ChatGPT may eventually become much more than a chatbot

The broader implication is that OpenAI no longer sees ChatGPT as just a messaging interface. Instead, the company appears to be positioning it as a central operating layer for future AI-powered computing experiences.

If successful, the shift could reshape how users interact with software entirely. Rather than opening separate apps for productivity, communication, coding, travel, scheduling, and search, people may increasingly rely on a single AI assistant capable of handling multiple tasks conversationally and autonomously.

At the same time, OpenAI is also strengthening relationships with policymakers and regulators as AI becomes more politically and economically significant. Reports indicate the company plans to provide the U.S. government with early access to some AI models under a voluntary framework introduced by President Donald Trump. Discussions around potential government stakes in AI companies have also reportedly involved OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as officials explore ways to distribute AI-driven economic gains more broadly.

The overhaul of ChatGPT is reportedly expected to roll out gradually through updates to the app and website in the coming months. If OpenAI succeeds, ChatGPT may soon evolve from a chatbot people occasionally visit into a constantly present AI assistant woven into everyday life.

A team of researchers at Georgia Tech has developed a new smartphone-based system that could dramatically simplify how people interact with robots. Called COBALT, the platform allows users with little to no computing experience to remotely control robot arms from virtually anywhere in the world using just a phone and an internet connection.

The project, developed at Georgia Tech’s People, AI & Robotics (PAIR) Lab, transforms smartphones into motion controllers for robotic arms. Users simply move their phones in different directions, and the robot mirrors those movements in real time. Basic tasks such as grabbing, moving, and releasing objects can be performed through simple on-screen controls, making the experience feel more like playing a mobile game than operating industrial machinery.

Ayush Agarwal, a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing who leads the COBALT research team, said the system was intentionally designed to make robotics accessible to beginners rather than experts. During testing, participants from countries including India, Indonesia, and Pakistan remotely controlled robot arms located inside Georgia Tech’s lab despite having no prior robotics experience.

Researchers believe crowdsourcing could shape the future of robotics

The broader goal behind COBALT extends beyond convenience. Researchers believe the platform could solve one of robotics’ biggest challenges: collecting enough real-world training data to improve AI-powered robotic systems.

Modern robots require enormous amounts of policy training data to learn how to perform physical tasks reliably. According to Assistant Professor Animesh Garg, who directs the PAIR Lab, simulation alone is not enough to train robots for large-scale deployment. Instead, researchers envision a crowdsourced network where millions of smartphone users passively contribute operational data by remotely interacting with robots.

Garg compared the idea to tapping into the nearly five billion smartphone users worldwide. By lowering the barrier to entry, the team hopes to create a scalable global system capable of accelerating robotic learning and automation.

The technology could also have major educational implications. Georgia Tech researchers recently demonstrated COBALT to students from Midtown High School in Atlanta, allowing them to remotely operate robot arms using smartphones. The simplicity of the interface could make robotics education more accessible in classrooms without expensive equipment or specialized hardware.

A future “gig economy” for robots may not be far away

The researchers also believe COBALT could eventually support entirely new forms of remote work. Garg described the possibility of a robot-powered gig economy where people remotely operate assistive robots in homes, warehouses, or factories from anywhere in the world.

In practical terms, that could mean a factory robot autonomously handles most tasks but requests human assistance when it encounters a difficult situation. Instead of requiring on-site workers, remote operators could briefly take control through their phones before handing the operation back to the AI system.

Agarwal said user studies showed smartphones were preferred over VR headsets, keyboards, or traditional controllers because they felt more intuitive while still providing high-quality control data. The system also minimizes latency by using WebRTC technology, similar to platforms like Zoom and Google Meet, ensuring that robot movements and live video streams remain responsive even across long distances.

The research paper on COBALT is being presented this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Vienna, where the team is showcasing not just the technology itself, but the large-scale remote operation network built around it.

Most apps are designed to keep you on them as long as possible, especially content consumption apps where you scroll a never-ending feed of content. 

Dreambeans, a new experimental app from Google Labs, does the opposite. It gives you a small collection of AI-illustrated stories each morning and sends you off to live your actual life.

What kind of stories does Dreambeans actually generate?

While you sleep, the app collects the required data from your Google apps and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Google Photos, YouTube, along with your search history, and curates them into a set of 10 to 14 personalized stories.

The stories are lifestyle suggestions based on your interests and activities. They could contain a coffee shop suggestion near where you live (based on the places you’ve searched), insights about an upcoming vacation marked in your calendar, or ideas related to a hobby YouTube keeps surfacing.

Some stories include an action, such as a link to buy a ticket or book a show.

Every story is illustrated with AI-generated artwork personalized using Google Photos and Nano Banana 2. If a Dreambeans story involves you or people you know, the app uses your Photos face grouping and includes them in the scene. 

Who can use it and what is the catch?

For now, Dreambeans is only available to Google AI Ultra subscribers aged 18 and older in the United States, on both Android and iOS devices. To me, it looks like Google is keeping the audience deliberately small, as the AI Ultra is its most expensive subscription tier. It costs $100 per month. 

And yes, privacy-conscious users can choose which services connect to the app and delete their data at any point through the in-app settings. Dreambeans choices do not affect preferences in Gemini or AI Mode either. 

The app also includes a feedback system. Since it is in the experimental phase, the app might show some irrelevant stories or inaccurate visuals. Whether users trained on years of infinite scroll will actually want a daily content limit is the real experiment here, I’d say. 

If you have spent any time scrolling Instagram Reels or TikToks, you have come across a video format in which a creator overlays their video on top of the content they are talking about. This has become a popular format with creators, as these videos often go viral. 

X, a platform that has become a home for unnecessary outrage, wants to ride this wave of trendy reaction videos by allowing users to record them directly inside the app. The feature lets creators react with video on X posts, giving them even more opportunity to express themselves. 

Commentary is one of the most important pillars of X. And sometimes the best way to share your thoughts is with video.

Today we’re launching a whole new way to make them:
React with Video

Tap the repost button and start recording with green screen, split screen, or… pic.twitter.com/iF3f8wctbK

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) June 2, 2026

If you ever felt that a text reply wasn’t enough to express your outrage, this new feature will be right up your alley.

How does React with Video work?

The feature dubbed “React with Video” appears as one of the options in an overlay menu when you hit the Repost button on a post. When you tap on it, X opens the post in the background with your video overlayed at the top. 

You can then hit the record button and start recording your thoughts. I like that you get the option to pause the recording, giving you ample time to recollect your thoughts. Once you are finished recording your thoughts, you can hit the checkmark button to preview your content. 

If you are happy with the result, you can post it as a reaction reply to the original post. 

What are your options when reacting with video?

It seems that X has put considerable thought into developing this feature, giving users ample customization options. By default, your video appears as an overlay, where X automatically removes your background. You can resize the video and move it to any part of the screen. 

If the original post has media attached, you can choose to make it full-screen and hide the text. This will come in handy if you want to focus more on the image than the post’s text. You can also choose to show your video in other styles, including picture-in-picture and split-screen modes. 

If you love making reaction videos, this will considerably decrease the effort required to create them. As for why anyone would choose to spend time on such an endeavor, that’s a question only they can answer.

The mall is making a comeback.

As younger people return to American shopping malls in greater numbers, a startup called “The Mall” is bringing the concept online with an app that lets users create a personalized virtual mall from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.

The idea itself is simple, if not novel. But its arrival now feels more timely, as customers face an increasingly fragmented online shopping landscape that has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands.

That challenge is what first inspired The Mall’s co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker, whose background includes working at companies like Tom Ford and Karla Otto. At her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace, Konsker spotted a larger issue in the fashion and marketing space.

“Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up [their] emails for newsletters, and trying to be able to track brands and piece all that information together in real time,” Konsker said. “It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.

Konsker connected with co-founder and CEO Sreya Halder, who studied computer science at Stanford, as part of a female founders circle in Los Angeles.

“We were both super aligned on creating this world where everyone has access to all of the brands that exist on the internet,” noted Halder. “As a founder, I was looking at other apps — like Letterboxd, Goodreads, Spotify — and they’ve created these databases for all of those creative outlets — for music, movies, books. And fashion, and shopping, didn’t actually exist, so we started out wanting to build [something] like a Spotify, but for shopping,” she said.

The pair founded The Mall in October 2025, with a focus on bringing together fashion brands under one digital roof.

Instead of partnering with brands or using APIs, The Mall uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs, and tracking product and pricing information within its own app. This scraping is frequent enough to keep an eye out for sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then alerts users to via push notifications.

At launch, users create their own virtual mall by adding their favorite brands upon signing up, which allows them to immediately track any changes. While The Mall’s current database includes more than 10,000 brands, consumers can add any other brand they want, simply by sharing the brand’s Instagram or TikTok account. (The Mall will determine if there’s a matching e-commerce site and then scrape its catalog, adding those items to its database.)

On the back end, the startup uses LLMs (large language models) and its own custom models to label everything it pulls into its system, which allows users to search for specific products and drops.

When users are ready to buy, a browser page opens inside the app, taking users to the brand’s e-commerce site to check out. There’s no traditional affiliate model involved here, the company says. Instead, The Mall is meant to work more as a discovery tool.

As users build their collections of brands, they can choose to have them discoverable by others or kept private. The founders see the potential for this to work as a discovery tool among friends and among people who follow creators for their fashion sense.

“As you dig in, you’ll end up going down this rabbit hole and finding more and more things from brands that you never would have seen or heard of unless they delivered an ad to you,” Konsker noted.

Users can also discover possible lower-priced alternatives to specific products, she said. “You can look at a piece and then see what is similar to this piece across any brand in the world. So you can see if a piece is priced a little bit lower or higher in different colorways,” Konsker added.

The Mall is a free app for consumers. The company plans to make money by building a data tool for brands that will allow them to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands are thinking about their seasonal assortments, and help them plan.

“Over time, we see those two paths crossing, where once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, then it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have sponsored billboards and…weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in these recommendations and in your feed,” Halder said.

This B2B product is expected to launch later this summer. Data shared with brands is anonymous and aggregated. It doesn’t contain personal details, the founders confirmed.

The Mall has been in early beta testing with 4,500 testers and is now launching on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. (If you know someone with access, they can invite you. There isn’t a set number of invites per user.)

The Mall should be broadly available by the end of the summer. The app is currently a free download on the App Store.