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• The Govee Sky Ceiling Light shifts according to time, weather, and mood
• It prioritizes flicker-free blue light when you want to concentrate
• It's Matter-compatible, unlike a recent skylight-style light from Philips

Smart lighting company Govee has launched a new smart ceiling light that changes color depending on the time of day, just like a real skylight — and can even use AI to shift its settings to suit your mood.

The Govee Sky Ceiling Light, which debuted at the IFA tech show in Berlin this week, can automatically adjust the light based on time and weather (ideal for rooms without natural light), and can prioritize Govee's sky blue spectrum when you want to feel energized (particularly handy if you're working from home).

A few months ago, Philips launched a new skylight-style light fitting that changes light temperature and brightness to suit the time of day. It looked very realistic, but without true smart home integration (the skylight is operated via a physical remote control), we found its starting price of €499.99 (about $580 / £430 / AU$810) a little hard to swallow.

The Govee Sky Ceiling Light, on the other hand, is Matter-compatible, so it can integrate with your other smart home devices. It's more affordable too, with a list price of $399.99 (about £300 / AU$560).

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However, the Philips lamp has a few extra tricks up its sleeve, including an integrated UV-B module designed to support your body's natural production of vitamin D, and an IP44 rating for use in bathrooms — which often lack real windows. Its rectangular shape arguably looks more like a real skylight as well, particularly in homes with traditional styling.

I can see smart skylights becoming increasingly popular over the coming years, particularly for small homes, and it will be interesting to see how else brands manage to differentiate themselves. The Philips light isn't a Hue product, but it is made by the same parent company (Signify), so I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see a Philips Hue skylight this time next year.

Google is rolling out AI-powered Battery usage summaries to Pixel 10 and Pixel 11 phones to help users understand what may be draining battery life.

The post Pixel’s New AI Feature Can Now Explain What’s Draining Your Phone appeared first on TechRepublic.

• Gemini Audio models power the latest conversational AI in Google Workspace
• Gmail Live can find information buried inside your emails for you
• Users can create Docs and Keep notes with just a brain dump

Google has finally launched the conversational voice features it previewed earlier this May, allowing users to interact with Workspace apps like Gmail and Google Docs by speaking instead of typing.

Much more than just simple dictation, the Gemini Audio models should be able to interpret user intent and retrieve the relevant information.

From launch, the company is supporting its new 'Live' functionality across Gmail, Docs and Keep, but we can expect a fuller rollout as Google continues to tweak the technology based on user feedback and real-world use cases.

Gemini now handles some of your documents and work by voice

Starting with Gmail Live, users can ask things like what gate a flight departs from or what's happening at a child's school during the week, and the model should be able to read and retrieve the necessary information without the user ever having to find the email.

For Docs Live, it's more about generating documents through natural language prompts. Google gave an example of a user giving a 'brain dump' to Gemini, which then goes on to organize the thoughts and produce a structured draft. The tool can also draw information from other Workspace apps like Google Drive, Gmail and the internet.

Keep Live offers similar functionality, turning speech into organized notes rather than simply transcribing a user's thoughts word-for-word.

Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers get first access to Gmail Live and Keep Live, beginning now. Docs Live is limited to Pro and Ultra subscribers, cutting access for Plus members. Business customers are also set to get the updates soon.

"Whether searching your inbox, organizing your thoughts, or brainstorming, the new capabilities in Gmail, Docs, and Keep let you do it all conversationally," Google Workspace Product VP Yulie Kwon Kim summarized.

Trump has asked the Supreme Court to lift the block on his plan for the USPS to restrict mail voting ahead of the midterm elections. And, diesel prices have reached a record high.

(Image credit: Patrick T. Fallon)

Improved mopping, stain removing spray and a physical privacy shutter build on Ecovac’s previous model.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra with advanced computer-use capabilities as Greg Brockman declared the “AGI era” has arrived, though major questions remain.

The post OpenAI Launches GPT-6 Astra as Brockman Says the ‘AGI Era’ Has Arrived appeared first on TechRepublic.

When businesses and governments delegate operational tasks to AI agents, the discussion tends to start with capability. Can AI do what a person can do, such as reconcile accounts, negotiate with suppliers, sign a document or submit a public filing? And can it do so quickly and cheaply enough to justify putting it to work?

These questions matter, but performance is only part of the picture. Once an agent acts independently, different questions emerge; who authorized it, whose interests does it represent, where does its authority end and, perhaps most importantly, who is responsible when something goes wrong?

This is the accountability gap in agentic AI, and a more advanced model will not close it. An agent might be remarkably capable, yet still act with potentially unwanted or possibly even unlawful consequences.

The only way to bridge that gap is through a system with clear permission guardrails and an audit trail that links each agentic action to the person that authorized it, and can tell the difference between a person and a machine in the first place.

Ordinary error at extraordinary scale

When people think about AI risk, they tend to picture a machine breaking free of human control and pursuing goals of its own. The more immediate risk is less dramatic; a system simply getting an ordinary task wrong, again and again, with no clear line of responsibility and accountability.

A person might send an invoice to the wrong customer. An agent connected to the full customer database could send the same invoice to thousands. It might change the wrong field and then repeat the change across an entire market, not because it has become malicious, but because it has misunderstood an instruction and had the access to act on that.

The speed that makes an agent valuable can save a business hundreds of hours, but can also turn a small and recoverable mistake into a serious operational problem.

When an agent drafts an email for someone to review, this ambiguity may not matter very much because the person remains between the software and the outside world.

But when it can send the message, submit a declaration or move money, it matters a great deal. Imagine asking an assistant to book one flight and, instead of giving them a company card with an appropriate spending limit, handing over your passport, bank card and office keys. You may trust the assistant completely, but the permissions bear no sensible relation to the task.

Define the boundaries, solve the problem

AI agents cannot hold citizenship or legal personhood, but they can be linked to natural persons in legally sound ways. For example, a reliable identifier could trace the agent's activity back to the person responsible for deploying it. Combined with clear permissions and mandates that make the terms of its authority visible and auditable, this would allow AI agents to carry out a range of operations and transactions in a more controlled way.

These controls could be very precise. An agent might be allowed to view financial information but not change it, prepare a payment but not approve it or order from named suppliers without exceeding a fixed amount. Its permissions might last for one transaction, one working day or the duration of a particular contract, after which it would expire without relying on someone to remember to switch it off.

Withdrawing that authority should be equally straightforward. If a company ends its relationship with an agent, changes supplier, or discovers that something is wrong, it should be able to cancel the it’s access without changing the credentials of the person behind it.

The agent’s legally anchored mandate in the various realms of these controls has a longer shelf life than any individual AI model, which will be upgraded, replaced and combined over time, often without the customer seeing much more than a new version number.

Putting the idea into practice

Estonia has decided to work through these questions now. In June, the government began developing a state-backed registration system for AI agents that will be available to both Estonian citizens and the country’s global community of entrepreneurs. The goal is to explore how Estonia’s fully digital state, where all public services are available online, can be opened to the emerging wave of AI-powered businesses.

Under the current proposal, a person would receive a registered numeric identifier that could be linked to one or more agents acting on their behalf. Operations performed by an AI agent are treated as operations performed by a machine, for which the natural person, the identity anchor, is liable. The AI agent can only operate within the limits of the authorizations granted to it.

For transparency, private service providers also need to know whether an operation was performed by a person or by a machine acting on their behalf. This allows them to apply appropriate controls, restrictions and risk models.

Built for delegation

The approach draws on more than two decades of digital government. Estonia’s system of personal identifiers and digital identities already allows people to act on behalf of others with clearly defined permissions.

An accountant can file a client’s taxes, an adult can manage an elderly parent’s affairs through the health portal, and several people can use a corporate bank account with individual rights and limits. In principle, the same framework could support mandates for AI agents.

This would give users greater confidence that safeguards are in place to protect the responsible person from foreseeable errors by an AI agent. It would also help close the accountability gap as agentic activity increases.

Before AI agents are given executive powers, they need a technically and legally binding framework that records who they represent, what they can do and who remains responsible for their actions.

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• Tottenham Hotspur just confirmed plans to migrate from VMware to HPE, saving 85% off its bill
• CTO Rob Pickering revealed that Broadcom-era changes are largely to blame
• The stadium is also undergoing a broader HPE upgrade

Tottenham Hotspur has phased out VMware at its stadium as part of a major infrastructure overhaul. By moving to HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, the London football team managed to cut virtualization costs by more than 85%.

According to Ars Technica, CTO Rob Pickering explicitly pointed toward the commercial changes following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware.

But for Tottenham, the migration was just one part of a major data center and networking refresh, with the company also shifting its server, storage and networking infrastructure – incidentally, to HPE.

Tottenham moves from VMware to HPE, saves 85%

Though the team didn't reveal how much it paid for which products with VMware, Pickering did say the saving was a "significant amount" and "north of 85%."

"The issues with the Broadcom takeover of VMware are well-known in terms of the commercial changes to their structure and the way that they engage with clients," he added.

Tottenham also confirmed that integrating virtualization, infrastructure and automation into one single operational stack ultimately led to more value than simply swapping one virtualization vendor for another to save money, hence the decision to go all-in on HPE.

Earlier this summer, HPE announced that it would be offering prospective customers a year's free HPE Morpheus VM Essentials for customers switching from VMware to help ease the cost involved with migration. Its Zerto migration software was also confirmed to be part of a $1 package.

It's unclear whether Tottenham Hotspur took advantage of those offers.

At the same time, the stadium is also said to have started a major network upgrade toward Wi-Fi 7 and HPE Aruba Central in a stadium with around 20,000 network access points and connections.

More broadly, Tottenham Hotspur isn't the only business turning its back on VMware – UK supermarket giant Tesco also confirmed plans to dump 40,000 VMware licenses.

Aqara is expanding from the home security world into smart lighting, and the results could challenge popular brands like Govee.

Germany's AfD's TikTok-fueled rise in Saxony-Anhalt is raising fears the country could see its first far-right governor since World War II.

(Image credit: Jens Schulter)

Research published in the journal Science illuminates a "missing piece" in the biological understanding of profound autism and offers new targets for drug development.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute)

Plus: George Santos is back in the news!

After years of fighting over who gets to use the beach, and where, in Walton County, Florida, public-use advocates are calling for a state constitutional amendment to finally settle the matter.

(Image credit: Erich Martin for NPR)

The Education Department gathers a massive tranche of civil rights data about public school students. It's now available but harder to parse than in the past.

Research suggests around half of all women in the menopausal transition years experience symptoms, like red, watery or gritty-feeling eyes. Hormonal shifts play a role, as do a lot of other factors.

President Trump is again hoping to use economic pressure to force Iran to the negotiating table.

NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with New York Times reporter Emily Badger about the Trump administration's plans to move forward with construction of a triumphal arch.

The Trump administration has said it will end the tax-exempt status for universities with programs that help racial minority students.

The price of diesel has reached an all-time high, a result of the war in Iran and Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries. That will matter across the supply chain.

(Image credit: Brandon Bell)