Amazon has added a new bedtime feature, called Sleep Studio, to its Echo Kids lineup. It gives children access to a curated library of sleep-focused content, including guided meditations, soundscapes, and stories from Calm, Headspace, and Moshi. The feature is included with Amazon Kids+, a subscription that comes bundled with Echo Dot Kids and Echo Pop Kids.

How it works

Parents set up sleep schedules and build playlists through the Amazon Kids Parent Dashboard. About 30 minutes before bedtime, the Echo device automatically starts playing the queued content. Kids can also trigger Sleep Studio themselves by asking Alexa, which Amazon says helps build independent sleep habits.

Amazon’s Echo Glow can also pair with the feature to add a visual cue through color-coded lighting that signals the start of a sleep window.

Content partners and availability

The content library draws from three partners. Calm contributes meditation content, lullabies, soundscapes, and sleep stories. Headspace offers wind-down content developed by child psychiatrists and pediatricians. Moshi, the kids-focused audio brand from Mind Candy, adds bedtime stories set in the Moshi Monsters universe.

Amazon says the feature was designed with child sleep research in mind, pointing to National Sleep Foundation data showing nearly half of US children do not get the recommended amount of sleep. Sleep Studio is now available on the Echo Dot Kids, Echo Pop Kids, and any Echo device with an Amazon Kids+ profile enabled. It gives Amazon’s Echo Kids hardware a clearer value proposition in the children’s tech market, where dedicated sleep apps and smart night lights have carved out a loyal audience among parents.

Amazon was sued on Monday over alleged privacy violations from its Ring doorbell cameras. The class action lawsuit, filed in Seattle by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt, claims that Ring’s Familiar Faces feature stores images of passersby without consent.

Ring announced the Familiar Faces feature last September and faced pushback from consumer protection organizations like the EFF, as well as Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). But the company moved forward with its plans to launch the feature in December.

Familiar Faces lets Ring users identify people who regularly come to their home through AI facial recognition. That way, if a regular guest, like a family member, mail carrier, or neighbor, comes to the door, the device will be able to recognize them and deliver more specific notifications like “Dad is at the door,” rather than “A person is at the door.” Ring users have to opt in to this feature, but privacy advocates noted that the people who walk past these Ring doorbells have not consented to these facial-recognition scans. That same concern is at the center of this class action lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, “Millions of other Americans passed by a Ring ​security camera and unknowingly had their facial recognition information collected.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At the time the feature was released, the company stated that face data is encrypted and never shared; unidentified faces are automatically removed after 30 days.

Amazon’s Ring has a record of concerning behaviors regarding user privacy. In 2023, Amazon settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and paid a $5.8 million fine over allegations that the company’s staff and contractors had improperly accessed private videos from women customers; the FTC’s complaint said that every employee had full access to every customer video, even if the worker had no need to access that footage. Ring has also maintained relationships with law enforcement and once granted police the ability to request Ring footage from users without a warrant.

After airing a Super Bowl ad to introduce Search Party, an AI-powered feature that uses Ring footage to find lost pets, the company faced similar backlash. Days later, Ring canceled its plans to partner with video surveillance company Flock Safety, which has reportedly given footage to ICE and other federal agencies. When Ring founder Jamie Siminoff spoke with TechCrunch after Ring canceled its arrangement with Flock Safety, he indicated that the deal would’ve created too much of a “workload.”

On Tuesday, Elon Musk-owned social network X launched a new feature, “React with Video,” that aims to expand the types of commentary on the platform. The feature is being pitched as an alternative to the Repost button, encouraging users not just to reshare or type their reaction via a Quote Post, but actually record a video response to posts.

The feature is clearly targeting creators, who often build their personal brands by commenting on others’ content and sharing their own thoughts. X, in particular, could lend itself to news influencers looking to garner fame for their hot takes and reactions to current events or politics.

Announcing the feature, X’s head of product Nikita Bier wrote, “Commentary is one of the most important pillars of X. And sometimes the best way to share your thoughts is with video.”

The feature is currently available on iOS, and the company said it will be rolled out to Android and web “soon.”

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

A spokesperson for X told TechCrunch the company believes the feature could open up a new way for creators to connect with people. Creators will be able to get richer feedback from their audience in the form of facial expressions and tone, for instance, while creators themselves could use the reactions to become a greater part of the conversation.

X has undergone several changes that have impacted creators in recent months. The company in April said it is winding down its Communities feature to focus more on facilitating direct connections, and even attempted to make changes to its revenue-sharing program with creators, some of which had to be rolled back and rethought due to backlash. It’s also rolled out “Paid Partnership” labels for creators and tested ad formats that would connect posts with products.

The Creator Subscriptions feature has had a revamp, too, with new features like exclusive threads and shareable cards. And in April, X cracked down on clickbait by reducing payouts to accounts that circulate low-value content.

X had 550 million users as of March 2026, as revealed in SpaceX’s S1 filing, up from 520 million in December 2025.

mazon was sued on Monday over the facial-recognition feature it recently added to its Ring doorbells, in a complaint that turns on a familiar asymmetry: the person who buys the camera consents to it, and the person walking past the camera does not.

Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident, filed the proposed class action in federal court in Seattle, alleging that Ring’s “Familiar Faces” feature captures and stores images of passersby without their permission. He is seeking at least $5m in damages on behalf of the class, according to Reuters.

Familiar Faces is an optional setting that uses AI to recognise people a camera has seen before, so that a notification can say who is at the door rather than simply that someone is. Ring rolled it out late last year as part of a broader AI refresh of its cameras, with users able to label recognised people and the system cataloguing a set number of faces over time.

For the homeowner who switches it on, that is the convenience. For the delivery driver, the neighbour, or the stranger cutting across the lawn, the suit argues, it means having a faceprint taken and retained with no say in the matter, and no practical way to opt out of a camera they do not own.

That objection is not new, and Amazon’s own conduct suggests it anticipated the legal exposure. The company has said Familiar Faces is not available in Illinois or Texas, the two US states with the strictest biometric-privacy laws.

Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act requires written consent before a company captures someone’s face geometry and allows damages of $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional one, a structure that has made it the most expensive law in the country to fall foul of.

Keeping the feature out of those two states reads, to critics, less like caution than like an answer to a question nobody had to ask out loud.

The Sigwalt complaint sits in a longer line of trouble for Ring. The unit has drawn scrutiny for its facial-recognition ambitions for years, as well as for its data-sharing arrangements with police and a 2023 settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over employee access to customers’ video.

Amazon, which bought Ring for about $1bn in 2018, has tended to frame the cameras as neighbourhood safety tools. The plaintiffs frame them as a privately owned surveillance network that happens to point at the street.

What happens next is procedural. The court has to decide whether the case proceeds as a class action, and Amazon has not yet filed a response to the specific allegations.

An earlier biometric suit against Ring survived a motion to dismiss in 2022, which gives the new claim a precedent to lean on, though not a result. For now there is a filing, a damages figure, and a feature that keeps scanning faces while the lawyers argue over whose consent it needed.

Renaming files is one of those tasks that sounds trivial until you are staring at a folder full of documents or files called Document1, Scan_04182026, and FinalFINALv3. Microsoft is doing something about it.

A new feature, called Copilot Suggested Rename, is on the Microsoft 365 roadmap. It is scheduled to roll out starting June 2026. The AI-powered OneDrive feature reads the content of your file and automatically recommends clear, descriptive file names, saving you time. 

How does Copilot Suggested Rename actually work?

The feature is built directly into the rename dialog inside OneDrive (on web). 

When you go to rename a file, Copilot goes through its content and offers three context-aware name suggestions within the rename dialog. You can pick one with a single click. 

The feature also shows up in the post-upload toast notification, the pop-up that appears when you upload a single supported file, so you could rename it immediately after it lands in OneDrive.

Which file types does it support?

Copilot Suggested Rename works across a wide range of formats. Microsoft Office documents, including Word (DOCX), PowerPoint (PPTX), and Excel (XLSX), are all supported, along with PDFs, Markdown files, and images. 

That, I’d say, covers the overwhelming majority of files most people actually store online. The feature is currently in development. And yes, It is a web-only feature for now, meaning it will be available for personal and business OneDrive users on the web, while the desktop or mobile rollout might follow. 

In my opinion, file naming has been a low-priority problem ignored by desktop and computer, widely ignored, and genuinely annoying at scale. Microsoft building AI-powered rename suggestions directly into the OneDrive rename dialog is the right place to begin. 

Apple is reportedly preparing to turn the iPhone into an even bigger financial hub with a new built-in bill splitting feature designed for group dinners, travel expenses, and shared payments. According to a report from Mark Gurman, the company plans to announce the feature at WWDC next week as part of iOS 27.

The new tool would allow users to photograph a restaurant receipt, automatically calculate individual shares including tax and tips, assign items to specific people, and send payment requests directly through Apple Cash. The feature is expected to work inside both the Wallet app and Messages, with payment approvals also supported through the Apple Watch.

Apple is quietly expanding its financial ecosystem again

The bill-splitting tool represents another major step in Apple’s long-running effort to deepen the iPhone’s role in personal finance. Since launching Apple Pay in 2014, Apple has steadily expanded into financial services with products like Apple Card, Apple Cash, savings accounts, and Tap to Pay for businesses.

This latest addition appears aimed directly at younger users who increasingly manage shared expenses digitally instead of using cash or traditional banking tools.

The system reportedly works by scanning a receipt using the iPhone camera, identifying individual items, calculating tax and tip allocations, and then generating payment requests automatically. Users can then settle balances through Apple Cash without needing separate third-party apps.

Apple is also reportedly working on custom digital pass creation inside Wallet, allowing users to generate their own event passes, gym cards, and digital credentials directly on-device.

Apple’s move also puts it in direct competition with established expense-sharing and peer-to-peer payment platforms. Splitwise, one of the most widely used bill-splitting apps globally, has surpassed 10 million monthly active users and has helped users manage more than $90 billion in shared expenses since 2011.

Meanwhile, Venmo continues to process more than $275 billion in annual payment volume, while Cash App reports roughly 57 million monthly active users. By integrating bill splitting directly into Wallet, Messages, Apple Cash, and Apple Watch, Apple is attempting to remove the need for separate apps altogether and keep more financial activity inside its ecosystem.

Apple’s biggest advantage, however, may be integration. Unlike standalone apps, the new feature would be deeply built into iOS, Messages, Wallet, Apple Watch, and Apple Cash simultaneously.

Why this Matters

Apple appears increasingly focused on making the iPhone central to everyday financial activity. Bill splitting may sound small compared to AI announcements or hardware launches, but these kinds of ecosystem features often strengthen long-term user retention more effectively than flashy upgrades.

The move could also pressure third-party expense-sharing apps that currently rely on convenience as their biggest selling point. If Apple can make splitting payments frictionless across iPhones, many casual users may stop downloading separate apps entirely.

At the same time, Apple’s financial expansion has faced challenges. The Apple Card partnership with Goldman Sachs has struggled financially, and Apple previously shut down its buy-now-pay-later offering less than a year after launch.

What happens next

Apple is expected to officially reveal the new bill-splitting feature during WWDC alongside broader iOS 27 announcements focused heavily on AI, Siri upgrades, and Apple Intelligence. The update is also expected to include AI-powered photo editing tools, a redesigned Siri experience, and deeper Wallet integration across Apple devices.

If the feature works smoothly, Apple may end up doing what it often does best: turning a separate app category into a built-in iPhone feature that millions of users adopt simply because it is already there.