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Finally, texts between Android and iPhone users can be end-to-end encrypted
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At long last, Android and iPhone users will be able to send each other end-to-end encrypted text messages. On Monday, end-to-end encrypted messaging is starting to roll out in beta for conversations between iPhone and Android users running the most up-to-date software. End-to-end encrypted (e2ee) messaging is an important privacy feature that makes users far less susceptible to surveillance by hackers, governments, or the companies that make these communication platforms. When these messages are sent between devices, they’re encrypted while in transit, making it near-impossible for anyone else to intercept and read the message. But until now, messages sent between iPhone and Android devices could not be end-to-end encrypted (e2ee), even though iMessage has been encrypted since its launch in 2011, and Android users have been able to communicate among themselves via e2ee since 2021. Over the years, iOS and Android users have had clunky communications — Android users can’t use Apple’s proprietary iMessage, but Apple refused to support RCS messaging, a more sophisticated upgrade to decades-old SMS texting, since 2020. Now the industry-standard texting protocol, RCS brings features like typing indicators, read receipts, emoji reactions, longer message lengths, and encryption to text messages. But Apple didn’t support RCS until 2023, once it finally caved due to regulatory pressure. Google had urged Apple to support RCS texting to make communication between their devices more seamless — this was such an issue that people sincerely thought about “green bubble stigma,” referring to the color of the message bubbles that iPhone users receive from Androids. Until Apple started supporting RCS, it was a common headache for iPhone users to get texts from their Android-using friends that would break group chats, or result in terrible quality multimedia sharing. Now, Apple’s long-awaited support of e2ee on RCS helps further close the gap between green and blue bubbles. End-to-end encrypted RCS messaging has only begun to roll out in beta, so users may not have access just yet. If a conversation between Google and Apple devices is encrypted, the users will see a lock icon that indicates that the chat is protected. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos. You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal. View Bio
OpenAI said Thursday that its API will now include a number of new voice intelligence features designed to help developers create apps that can talk, transcribe, and translate conversations with users. The company’s new GPT‑Realtime‑2 is another voice model, built to create a realistic vocal simulation that can converse with users. However, unlike its predecessor (GPT-Realtime-1.5) this one is built with GPT‑5‑class reasoning that OpenAI says was created to deal with more complicated requests from users. The company is also launching GPT‑Realtime‑Translate which, just as it sounds, is designed to provide real-time translation services that “keep pace” with the user, conversationally. The feature includes more than 70 input languages (that is, the languages that it can comprehend) and 13 output languages (the languages it relays to the speaker). Finally, the company has also launched a new transcription capability, GPT-Realtime-Whisper, which gives users live speech-to-text capabilities that are captured as interactions occur. “Together, the models we are launching move real-time audio from simple call-and-response toward voice interfaces that can actually do work: listen, reason, translate, transcribe, and take action as a conversation unfolds,” the company said. Who will these updates be good for? Companies that want to expand customer service capabilities are an obvious target. However, OpenAI also notes that its new features will assist with a wide array of areas, including education, media, events, and creator platforms, among others. As useful as these tools seem from an enterprise perspective, it also seems plausible that they could be misused. The company said it has built guardrails to stop its new features from being abused to create spam, fraud, or other forms of online abuse. Certain triggers have been embedded in the system so that “conversations can be halted if they are detected as violating our harmful content guidelines,” OpenAI said. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 All of the new voice models are included in OpenAI’s Realtime API. Translate and Whisper are billed by the minute, while GPT-Realtime-2 is billed by token consumption. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com. View Bio
Anthropic just announced a new feature called “Dreaming” at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco. It’s part of Anthropic's recently launched AI agent infrastructure designed to help users manage and deploy tools that automate software processes. This “dreaming” aspect sorts through the transcript of what an agent recently completed and attempts to glean insights to improve the agent’s performance.Folks using AI agents often send them on multi-step journeys, like visiting a few websites or reading multiple files, to complete online tasks. This new “dreaming” feature allows agents to look for patterns in their activity log and improve their abilities based on those insights.The feature’s name immediately calls to mind Philip K. Dick’s seminal sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which explores the qualities that truly separate humans from powerful machines. While our current generative AI tools come nowhere close to the machines in the book, I’m ready to draw the line right here, right now: no more generative AI features with names that rip off human cognitive processes.“Together, memory and dreaming form a robust memory system for self-improving agents,” reads Anthropic’s blog post about the launch of this research preview for developers. “Memory lets each agent capture what it learns as it works. Dreaming refines that memory between sessions, pulling shared learnings across agents and keeping it up-to-date.”Courtesy of ClaudeSince the spark of the chatbot revolution in 2022, leaders at AI companies have gone full tilt into naming aspects of generative AI tools after what goes on in the human brain. OpenAI released its first “reasoning” model back in 2024, where the chatbot needed “thinking” time. The company described this release at the time as “a new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond.” Numerous startups also refer to their chatbots as having “memories” about the user. Rather than the fast storage that’s typically referred to as a computer’s “memories,” these are much more human-like nuggets of information: he lives in San Francisco, enjoys afternoon baseball games, and hates eating cantaloupeIt’s a consistent marketing approach used by AI leaders, who have continued to lean into branding that blurs the line between what humans do and what machines can. Even the ways these companies develop chatbots, like Claude, with distinct “personalities,” can make users feel as if they are talking with something that has the potential for a deep inner life, something that would potentially have dreams even when my laptop is closed.At Anthropic, this anthropomorphizing runs deeper than just marketing strategies. “We also discuss Claude in terms normally reserved for humans (e.g., ‘virtue, ’wisdom'),” reads a portion of Anthropic’s constitution describing how it wants Claude to behave. “We do this because we expect Claude’s reasoning to draw on human concepts by default, given the role of human text in Claude’s training; and we think encouraging Claude to embrace certain human-like qualities may be actively desirable.” The company even employs a resident philosopher to try to make sense of the bot's “values.”And this isn’t just me being nitpicky about wording. How we talk about these machines impacts what we think they can achieve. “As a fallacy, anthropomorphism is shown to distort moral judgments about AI, such as those concerning its moral character and status, as well as judgments of responsibility and trust,” reads a research paper published in the AI & Ethics journal. By not using more distanced language about bots, users run the risk of overly trusting the tools and projecting qualities onto them that aren’t really there.Much like our AI overlords need to spend more time actually watching the sci-fi movies they allude to, I think the powerful people leading these companies should spend more time reading these classic sci-fi novels as well.Near the end of Dick’s
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