Amazon's Alexa+ launches Early Access in UK with British localization

Adobe is rolling out Firefly Custom Models in public beta, allowing creators to train AI image generators on their own artistic assets. The tool preserves visual consistency across character designs, illustrations, and photography styles without exposing training data to Adobe's general models.

Amazon is rolling out Alexa+, its AI-powered conversational assistant, to the UK as the first market outside North America. The company is offering free early access to new Echo buyers and plans to reach hundreds of thousands of customers in the coming weeks. After the beta period ends, Prime subscribers will get free access while non-Prime users will pay £19.99 per month.

Okta has released Okta for AI Agents, a management platform that addresses three core requirements: discovering deployed agents, monitoring their activities and access permissions, and terminating agent access when needed. The platform integrates with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Google, and AWS to import agents and their metadata, while providing continuous background scanning for unmanaged agents.

Google is testing a UI redesign for its Gemini app that moves the Temporary chat feature from a navigation drawer icon to a prominent button on the homepage. The change aims to make privacy-focused conversations more discoverable while maintaining Temporary chats' core privacy guarantee: conversations aren't stored in history, used for model training, or personalization.

Google Deepmind has expanded the Gemini API to enable multi-tool chaining, allowing developers to combine built-in tools like Google Search and Google Maps with custom functions in a single request. Results from one tool now automatically pass to the next through context circulation, eliminating the need for separate sequential handling.

Perplexity has released Comet, its AI-powered browser, as a free standalone app for iPhone users. Originally launched on PC at $200 per month, the iOS version joins recently-released Android and existing Windows and Mac versions. The browser combines web browsing with AI assistance for summarization, research, and task automation.

Google has expanded Personal Intelligence, its hyper-personalized Gemini mode, from $20/month subscribers to all users. The feature integrates data from Gmail, Search history, Google Photos, and other Google services to provide contextual assistance, though it remains entirely opt-in.

OpenAI released GPT-4o mini on July 18, 2024, a compact multimodal model with 128,000 token context window priced at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. The model achieves 82% on MMLU and claims to rank higher than GPT-4 on chat preference leaderboards while costing 60% less than GPT-3.5 Turbo.

Amazon Nova 2 Lite expands context window to 1 million tokens, introduces extended thinking with developer controls, and adds native tool use and web grounding. AWS claims Nova 2 Lite surpasses Nova 1 Pro on multi-step reasoning while costing 7x less and running up to 5x faster.

Midjourney has released an early version of V8 for community testing, achieving roughly 5x faster image generation and introducing native 2K resolution via --hd mode. However, premium features including --hd, --q 4, style references, and mood boards cost four times as much as standard generation, with Relax mode unavailable at launch.

Meta's recently acquired AI startup Manus launched a desktop application enabling its AI agent to directly access local files, tools, and applications on personal computers through a 'My Computer' feature. Previously cloud-only, the move positions Manus to compete with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that sparked recent industry momentum. Unlike OpenClaw's free, MIT-licensed offering, Manus operates as a paid subscription service.

DuckDuckGo's Duck.ai chatbot platform now includes OpenAI's GPT-5 mini for free users and GPT-5.2 for subscribers, both with reasoning capabilities. The platform continues to anonymize all conversations by default, stripping metadata before routing chats to model providers including Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI.