First Look

Slack, the workplace messaging app used by millions of teams, has launched Slackforce Surfaces, a feature that lets you ask Slackbot to build interactive dashboards, reports, polls, and presentations directly inside a conversation, according to The Verge.

You describe what you need in plain language. Slackbot pulls data from connected apps like Google Drive or Salesforce and builds it for you on the spot. Colleagues can view, interact with, and comment on the result without leaving Slack.

It is aimed at teams who currently export data into separate tools to make sense of it, a friction point most office workers will recognise. There is no mention of independent testing; the examples come from Slack's own marketing materials.

It is available now to all Slack users, including free tier. Live data connections arrive in October. Slack says the AI only pulls from sources you have already authorised.

Honest read: Worth trying if your team already lives in Slack, but the most useful features need connected apps set up, so the benefit depends heavily on how your workspace is configured.

GPT-Live-1 is a voice model from OpenAI that listens and speaks at the same time, rather than waiting for you to finish before it responds. It was first built into ChatGPT; it is now available to developers building their own voice-powered apps and services, according to OpenAI.

Traditional voice systems stitch three separate tools together: speech-to-text, a reasoning model, then text-to-speech. Every handoff adds delay and creates new ways for the conversation to fall apart. GPT-Live-1 handles all of that inside a single model, which means it can react to interruptions in real time instead of losing track of what was being said.

According to OpenAI's own evaluations, it outperforms its predecessor GPT-Realtime-2.1 on Full Duplex Bench — a test for how naturally a voice agent handles conversation flow — by 30 percentage points, though this evaluation was not independently verified.

It is aimed at developers, not general consumers. Pricing is not specified in the announcement.

Honest read: Worth watching if you build anything voice-related — real-time interruption handling is a genuine gap in current voice tools. If you are not a developer, this one is not for you yet.

Premiere Pro is Adobe's professional video editing software, used by editors in broadcast, film, and online production. Adobe has now added a Generative Media panel that lets editors generate video clips, music, sound effects, and soundscapes without leaving the timeline, according to The Verge.

The change is about access, not entirely new capability. Editors highlight an empty gap on the timeline and generate context-aware content directly in place. They can pick from multiple underlying models, including Adobe Firefly, Google Veo, Runway, Luma, and Kling, depending on which style fits the project.

New audio tools in beta can separate overlapping speakers, automatically lower music volume when someone is talking, and adjust dialogue and background sound independently. After Effects is also getting a plain-language AI assistant in beta.

This is aimed squarely at working editors, not hobbyists. Premiere is a paid subscription product. There is no free tier for these features.

Honest read: Worth watching if you edit video professionally — cutting between external AI tools and your timeline is genuinely painful, and this solves a real problem. Whether the generated output is good enough to use in real projects depends on testing Adobe has not yet made independently available.

Roland — the Japanese company behind decades of drum machines and synthesisers — has released Melody Flip, an AI music tool that works as a plug-in inside a DAW (digital audio workstation, the software musicians use to record and produce), according to The Verge.

It is aimed at producers who want a creative starting point, not a finished song. You pick a genre from around 250 themed collections, set tempo and key, and it generates loops: melody, chords, bassline, drums. You can also feed it a reference track to build from. What you cannot do is describe what you want in words — there is no text prompt here.

The outputs are MIDI data (raw note instructions rather than audio), intended to be pulled into your own project and reshaped. The built-in sounds are basic by design.

This is not for casual listeners or people who want Suno-style "type a sentence, get a song." It is for working musicians who want a sketch to react to.

Pricing and availability were not disclosed in the announcement.

Honest read: Worth watching if you produce music and struggle with starting from a blank project — but worth ignoring if you were hoping Roland had found a reason to recommend generative AI to people who already dislike it.

OpenAI has launched a direct integration between ChatGPT for Healthcare and Epic — one of the most widely used electronic health record (EHR) systems in the US — along with a Healthcare Public Data plugin, according to OpenAI's announcement.

The integration lets clinicians pull authorised patient information into ChatGPT and ask questions in plain language: what changed since the last visit, which labs need review, whether there are unresolved referrals. The public data plugin connects directly to sources including PubMed, DailyMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Medicare coverage data.

This is aimed squarely at clinical teams, not individual patients. The product requires an organisational subscription and a supported Epic deployment — it is not something a GP can sign up for independently.

OpenAI says the company partners with physicians across 60 countries who have reviewed more than 700,000 model responses as part of ongoing evaluation work.

The tool is available now for qualifying healthcare organisations.

Honest read: Genuinely useful if your organisation already runs Epic and has the compliance infrastructure to support it — for everyone else, this is worth watching rather than acting on.

Gemini Notebook is Google's AI note-taking tool — think of it as a workspace where you gather sources and ask questions across all of them at once. The new "Expert Intelligence" feature connects it to your Google Play Books library, so books you have already purchased become queryable sources alongside your own notes.

In practice: you could ask a management book how to handle a difficult conversation with a direct report, or pull recipes from a cookbook into a structured plan. More than 100,000 titles from publishers including Penguin Random House and O'Reilly Media support the feature at launch. Google has also worked with 15 authors — including Michael Pollan and Steven Pinker — to create author-curated notebooks with additional context.

Books you have not purchased stay visible as source labels only, with a link to buy. The feature will expand to Google's AI Mode in Search and the main Gemini app.

There is no standalone cost listed beyond owning the books. Gemini Notebook is free.

Honest read: Worth trying if you already buy books on Google Play — querying a reference book rather than flipping through it is genuinely useful. If your library lives elsewhere, there is nothing here yet.

Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash is Google DeepMind's updated video generation model, available now through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. It is aimed at developers building video tools, not general consumers.

Three things changed meaningfully. Scene extension now looks back at up to 10 seconds of prior footage before generating new footage, where the previous version only referenced the final second — so longer sequences hold together visually. You can also specify both the opening and closing frame of a shot, letting the model fill in the movement between them. And draft previews now render at 360p, which Google says is up to 60 per cent faster and a third of the cost of the standard output — useful for testing ideas before committing to a full render. Final output can go up to 4K.

Pricing is not stated on the product page. Access is through the Gemini API, with no mention of a free tier.

Honest read: Worth watching if you build video workflows — the keyframe control and extended scene memory are genuinely useful additions, not cosmetic ones. Not relevant to anyone outside developer tooling.

Gradio is a Python library widely used by researchers to turn AI models into simple web interfaces. Its new feature, gr.Workflow, lets you build multi-step AI pipelines by connecting components visually on a canvas — each step processes a result and passes it to the next, and you can see every intermediate output as it runs. The same pipeline also becomes a REST API (a way for other software to call your app directly) automatically, with no extra code.

It supports chaining models hosted on Hugging Face, running Python functions locally, and parallel processing — where one input fans out to several models simultaneously. There is also support for running models on a GPU inside a Hugging Face Space.

It is free and available now as part of the Gradio library. You will need a Hugging Face account to deploy to Spaces.

Honest read: Worth trying if you already build with Gradio — the automatic API exposure is genuinely useful. If you have never touched Python, this is not your entry point.

Slack Code is a new feature that gives teams a dedicated space to build software alongside AI coding agents, without switching between separate tools, according to The Verge.

You tag an AI agent — Claude Code, Devin, GitHub Copilot, or others available in Slack's marketplace — inside a code channel. The agent takes on a task, and everyone on the team can watch it work, review the changes it makes, see a live preview of the output, and approve before anything ships. Channels archive themselves automatically when the work is done, leaving an audit log.

It is available today on any Slack plan, free or paid. The founding partner agents work with Slack Code's channels from day one.

Who it is for: teams that already use Slack and want to bring AI-assisted coding into the same place as their other conversations, rather than managing a separate tool.

Honest read: Worth trying if your team already lives in Slack — the audit log and approval step before code ships are genuinely useful guardrails. If your team does not use Slack, there is nothing here that justifies switching.

Meta AI is a chatbot from Meta — the company behind Facebook and Instagram — that competes with ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Until now, it lived mainly in mobile apps and on the web. According to The Verge, Meta has now launched a standalone Mac desktop app.

The headline feature: you can share your screen with it. Point it at a document, a spreadsheet, or a browser window, and it can answer questions or draft content based on what it sees. It also supports dictation across all apps on your Mac.

For businesses and creators, the app connects to Instagram, Facebook, Google Workspace, and Meta ad accounts. It can analyse post performance and suggest what to publish next, or generate reports and presentations from your account data.

The app is free. It does not yet offer the deeper computer control that ChatGPT and Claude's Mac apps provide — those can take actions on your machine; Meta AI can only see and respond.

Honest read: Worth trying if you are already in the Meta ecosystem and want a desktop AI assistant, but it trails competitors on capability until screen interaction becomes two-way.

Qwen 3.8 27B is a vision-capable language model (an AI that can process both text and images) from Alibaba, licensed under Apache 2.0 — meaning you can use and modify it freely, including for commercial work. At 27 billion parameters (the internal numbers that shape how a model responds), it sits in a sweet spot: capable enough to be useful, small enough to run on a well-specced laptop.

Blogger Simon Willison tested it on two machines and found the results impressive — but complicated. By default, the model is set to its highest reasoning mode, which causes it to overthink even trivial requests. In testing, a simple drawing prompt took 21 minutes and burned through tens of thousands of reasoning tokens. Switching reasoning off brought that same task down to two minutes. Alibaba's own benchmarks look strong, though independent evaluations have not yet reported in.

It is a 17GB download. Free to use.

Honest read: Genuinely good model, but switch the reasoning setting to low or off for anything routine — the default is set for complex tasks and will waste your time on simple ones.