Author: Geek Planet

If your AI assistant keeps dropping specifics or talking past the question, you don’t need a new model to get better results. Small changes to better chatbot prompts can clean up a lot of the mess. One fix is mechanical. A Google Research paper highlighted by VentureBeat points to a dead simple move, paste your exact request twice in the same message. It’s meant to raise accuracy on straightforward work like extraction, short answers, and basic rewriting, not long, multi-step reasoning. The other fix is human. Separate research from Northeastern University suggests people get stronger outputs when they prompt with…

TikTok’s fate may be uncertain in the U.S. but many advertisers are simply shrugging and spending anyway, according to a Digiday+ Research survey of brand, retailer and agency professionals.Nearly halfway through its second 75-day countdown to being banned, the platform is still seen as a dependable partner — proof that, in advertising, consistency can sometimes outweigh certainty. More than half (58%) of the 144 survey respondents agreed that they’ll continue spending while TikTok remains in limbo, while just over a quarter (26%) said they are undecided about spending on the platform during this period of uncertainty. “The support we’ve received…

I’m going to be blunt: this shouldn’t have happened. For weeks, the assumption, actually, the understanding, was that the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra shipped with a 10-bit display. That’s not some luxury extra in 2026 for an “Ultra” flagship; it’s a baseline expectation. And yes, even Samsung’s messaging leaned in that direction. Reviewers believed it. Customers believed it. Only after mounting pressure from the community did Samsung finally confirm the panel is, in fact, 8-bit. And that timing? It matters. This wasn’t a clearly spelled-out spec from day one. The clarification came after users dug through documentation, ran side-by-side comparisons,…

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series → AI-powered chatbots are scary smart, thanks to the large language models undergirding them. But they’re only as smart as the data they’re trained on. Two major factors can inhibit the AI chatbots being created by brands and publishers: the timeliness of the bots’ training data and the inclusion of proprietary information in that data set. In the first case, a company would need a way to pass information in real time to an LLM powering its chatbot. And…

Google has quietly reworked Gemini‘s usage limits, splitting the shared pool and boosting the individual caps for the Thinking and Pro models. At launch, both models had the same daily quota, meaning every prompt used for complex reasoning or advanced math and code counted against a single limit. But that’s no longer the case. According to 9to5Google, Google has now split the useage limits, giving each model its own separate allowance. For subscribers on the Google AI Pro plan, the Thinking model now has a limit of 300 prompts per day, while the Pro model remains capped at 100 prompts…

Marketers are adding yet another item on their growing honey-do list for smaller and mid-sized retail media networks. They’re pushing for real-time bidding, a form of programmatic advertising that allows ads to be bought and sold in real time. Instead of retailers setting a fixed cost-per-click or CPM, marketers bid on individual ad impressions and the winner gets the ad space. It’s a push for more control in the retail media ecosystem. Marketers have been spending more and more on retail media, even in light of economic uncertainty. By the end of 2025, retail media is expected to account for…

After nearly 30 conversations with a variety of executives attending Possible last week in Miami, a few topics bubbled to the surface, from a cooling of the merger and acquisition market to the opportunities and challenges of retail media, to the power of sports to unify a divided country and world. These conversations were captured at Digiday’s studio at Possible (Digiday is a media partner of the conference), and the following is a sampling of interviews. For any not here, please visit Possible’s YouTube channel which featured all the interviews. Christopher Vollmer, managing director at MediaLink, said the M&A market…

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have trained a human-like robot named Emo to lip-sync speech and songs by studying online videos, showing how machines can now learn complex human behaviour simply by observing it. Emo is not a full humanoid body but a highly realistic robotic face built to explore how humans communicate. The face is covered with silicone skin and driven by 26 independently controlled facial motors that move the lips, jaw, and cheeks. These motors allow Emo to form detailed mouth shapes that cover 24 consonants and 16 vowels, which is critical for natural speech and singing. The goal…

Google is rolling out its March 2026 Pixel Drop, and this one leans heavily into practical AI. Rather than flashy overhauls, the update sharpens tools Pixel users already rely on, while broader Android updates improve how devices connect and solve everyday problems. As usual, the Pixel Drop targets supported Pixel phones first, but several features extend across the wider Android ecosystem. The theme this time is clear: less novelty, more context-aware help. AI gets more proactive on Pixel One of the biggest refinements comes to Circle to Search. The feature, which lets users circle text or objects on-screen to look…

There’s a shift happening in the display advertising space: Marketers are using and spending more on email this year than programmatic ads — a first for the channel. This is according to Digiday+ Research surveys conducted among marketing professionals annually in the first quarter. Digiday’s survey found that display ads (including email and programmatic ads) are marketers’ second most-used marketing channel this year. Seventy-nine percent of marketer pros told Digiday in Q1 that they currently use display ads (following social media, which 92% of marketers use). That 79% is significant, and it’s an increase over Q1 last year, when 72%…