today's ai news is dominated by google's io 2026 announcements, where the company doubled down on agentic ai across its products. meanwhile, spotify is making moves in ai-generated audio, and a mysterious startup called hark landed a massive funding round. we also have practical tools for data scientists and a look at alternative search engines as google shifts its approach.
- google io 2026 agentic ai era - google introduced gemini omni, gemini 3.5 flash, and agentic tools across search, shopping, and developer platforms, signaling a major push into ai agents.
- spotify adds elevenlabs ai audiobook creation for authors - spotify's new beta tool uses elevenlabs voice ai to let authors self-publish audiobooks directly, expanding its audio content beyond music and podcasts.
- hark raises $700m for secretive ai assistant - ai lab hark raised a $700 million series a to build a universal ai interface with models and hardware, but details remain scarce, raising eyebrows in the industry.
- six search engines to try as google shifts to ai - as google moves to ai-driven search, alternatives like kagi, duckduckgo, and startpage offer ad-free or privacy-focused experiences with optional ai features.
- datasette agent brings ai chat to sqlite data - a new extensible ai assistant lets users query datasette databases through conversation and generate charts via plugins, making data exploration more accessible.
also today, spotify launched a desktop app for ai-generated personal podcasts and added ai podcast creation tools, while an ai therapy app called the path raised $14.3 million. on the research side, a new governance layer improves language model training stability, and a neural estimator speeds up decoding in masked sequence models. for developers, a curated list of small language models under 7b parameters on hugging face offers practical starting points.