News

X, Formerly Twitter, Has Introduced Voice And Video Calls

Only premium subscribers can make calls at the moment, but all users can receive them.

Published

3 years ago

October 26, 2023

x formerly twitter has introduced voice and video calls

X, the social media company previously known as Twitter, has added voice and video calls to the platform in a bid to expand its product offering.

While only premium subscribers can make calls at present, all accounts can receive them, the X website noted yesterday. The features will be available first on iOS but will soon come to Android as well.

Users can control who can call them using options in the direct messages settings. To call another X user, they must have sent you a direct message at least in the past, X said.

Elon Musk explained that X users would be able to make video and voice calls without sharing their phone numbers. The new features are a direct shot at Meta, owners of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

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Musk has made several sweeping changes to Twitter since his acquisition. In December, the platform launched Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service that indicates if a user is verified and offers Edit Tweet, 1080p video uploads, and longer tweets.

In July, Musk changed the name of Twitter to X, a move analysts say has wiped between $4 and $20 billion from the company’s value.

News

At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value

Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.

Published

2 weeks ago

May 20, 2026

Nour Nasir

at io 2026 sundar pichai concedes ai must deliver real value

Google

Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.

Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.

The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.

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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.

What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.