Google Maps' Ask Maps feature now widely available in US and India with Gemini integration

Alibaba has released Qwen3.5-Omni, an omnimodal model handling text, images, audio, and video with a 256,000-token context window. The model reportedly outperforms Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro on audio tasks with support for 74 languages in speech recognition, a 6x increase from its predecessor. An unexpected emergent capability: writing working code from spoken instructions and video input, which the team did not explicitly train.

OpenAI released a plugin that embeds its Codex coding assistant directly into Anthropic's Claude Code, the market-dominant code IDE. The plugin offers standard code review, adversarial review, and background task handoff capabilities, requiring only a ChatGPT subscription or OpenAI API key.

Microsoft released the Harrier-OSS embedding model family, comprising three variants with 270M, 600M, and 27B parameters. The largest model achieves 74.3 on the Multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark. All models support 32,768 max tokens and multilingual inputs across 40+ languages.

Google has released Lyria 3 Clip Preview, a music generation model available through the Gemini API as of March 30, 2026. The model generates 30-second audio clips from text prompts or images at $0.04 per clip, with a 1,048,576 token context window.

Google has released Lyria 3 Pro Preview, a music generation model capable of producing full-length songs with verses, choruses, bridges, vocals, and timed lyrics from text prompts or images. The model features a 1,048,576 token context window and charges $0.08 per generated song through the Gemini API.

GitHub has disabled Copilot's ability to insert promotional tips into pull requests following developer backlash. The feature, which injected Raycast ads into over 11,400 pull requests without explicit developer consent, was enabled when Copilot was mentioned in PRs it didn't create. GitHub's product manager acknowledged the decision was a mistake.

Microsoft has released Harrier-OSS-v1, a family of multilingual text embedding models trained with contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. The 0.6B parameter variant achieves a 69.0 score on the Multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark with support for 32,768 token context windows and 45+ languages.

Alibaba's Qwen division has released Qwen 3.6 Plus Preview, a free multimodal model available via OpenRouter with a 1,000,000 token context window. The model claims stronger reasoning and more reliable agentic behavior compared to the 3.5 series, with particular strength in coding and complex problem-solving tasks.

Google's Gemini Live is experiencing persistent voice quality issues following the recent Gemini 3.1 Flash Live update. Users report that voice options like "Capella" (British female accent) have deteriorated significantly, with speech patterns changing dramatically during conversations and audio artifacts like crackles and pops becoming prominent.

Microsoft is expanding Copilot Cowork availability and introducing a Critique function that enables one AI model to review another's output. The update also includes a new Researcher agent claiming best-in-class deep research performance, outperforming Perplexity by 7 points, and a Model Council feature for direct model comparison.

Microsoft has enabled its Copilot Researcher tool to simultaneously leverage OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude through two new features: Critique, which uses GPT responses refined by Claude, and Model Council, which displays side-by-side outputs with agreement/disagreement analysis. Both features are rolling out in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Frontier early access program.

Amazon Web Services unveiled an agentic AI system for streaming platforms combining Nova Sonic 2.0 (real-time speech model), Bedrock AgentCore, and the Model Context Protocol. The system delivers two core capabilities: context-aware movie recommendations based on mood and viewing history, and real-time scene analysis including actor identification and plot summaries.