AWS launches QA Studio: Natural language test automation powered by Amazon Nova Act

Amazon has added conversational food ordering to Alexa+, its next-generation AI assistant, enabling users to order from Uber Eats and Grubhub through natural language. The feature rolls out today to Alexa+ customers with Echo Show 8 devices and larger, allowing users to browse menus, customize meals, and modify orders mid-conversation.

Google announced Veo 3.1 Lite, a cost-reduced video generation model priced at less than 50% of Veo 3.1 Fast's cost. The model supports text-to-video and image-to-video generation at 720p or 1080p resolution with customizable durations of 4s, 6s, or 8s, rolling out today on the Gemini API and Google AI Studio.

GitHub's Applied Science team deployed coding agents to automate parts of their own development workflow, testing how AI agents can handle increasingly complex programming tasks. The experiment reveals practical insights into agent-driven development patterns and limitations.

IBM announced Granite 4.0 3B Vision, a 3 billion parameter vision-language model designed for enterprise document processing. The model achieves 86.4% on Chart2Summary and 92.1% TEDS score on cropped table extraction, shipped as a LoRA adapter on Granite 4.0 Micro to enable modular text-only fallbacks.

Google has completed a wide rollout of Ask Maps, a Gemini-powered conversational feature in Google Maps, to all users in the US and India as of this week. The feature answers complex, real-world location-based questions that traditional map search cannot handle, such as finding romantic date spots, scenic running routes, and personalized travel recommendations.

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.