This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.

"How does that make you feel?"

I get asked this a lot in therapy. Plenty of life events, big and small, have triggered this question. Three weeks ago, it was the fact that I had to ask my therapist for her consent because I was wearing the Amazon Bee Frontier during our session.

That first week, I didn't really have an answer. A lot had changed since I first tested Bee, an always-recording AI wearable, early last year. The ele …

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It's impossible to paint a full picture of what Audio Intelligence on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 will be right now. The watchOS 27.3 developer beta just dropped earlier this afternoon, and these features are meant to be lived with in day-to-day life. We're definitely going to do that over the next few weeks at The Verge. That said, here are some initial impressions.

What's newly available today is Live Rewind and Siri Recap. The former lets you see a transcript of the last 15 seconds, while the latter provides high-level summaries of your conversations. (The other two Audio Intelligence features have been available for the last f …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Starting today, Siri can tune into the Apple Watch's mic with Audio Intelligence features that are available in the new watchOS 27.3 developer beta rolling out now. The two new additions are Siri Recap, which uses "ambient listening" to generate summaries of your conversation, and Live Rewind, which generates text transcripts of the last 15 seconds of audio your watch's mic detected.

Apple is also releasing its redesigned Health app for testing today in the iOS 27.3 developer beta, and announced expanded language support in global English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turki …

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In this economy, how often does a product get less expensive before its debut? That just happened with the Google / Xreal Aura, the lightweight 95-gram glasses with a tethered Android XR compute puck and multiple virtual screens that just went on sale today. Xreal and Google have just announced the headset costs $1,099 through the end of the year, down from the $1,279 that Xreal was charging for early preorders last month.

I expect that's because at $1,279, they were going head to head with Meta's VR Glasses, and that's tough competition for Google and Xreal's new product. The Xreal Aura has one of the widest fields of view for transparent …

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Last week, I sank into my living room couch and watched a bedraggled, nihilistic Matthew McConaughey take a drag of a cigarette in season 1 of True Detective. "You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we've done, or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again." I assume most people aren't thinking about fitness trackers or gadgets while watching that scene. But in that moment, I couldn't help but think about the Fitbit Edge on my wrist.

The $179.99 Edge is a modernized version of the 2014-to-2020 era of fitness bands - your Charges, your Altas, your Inspires. If you've ever owned one, you already know the va …

Read the full story at The Verge.