Tech
Apple’s iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 Are Available Now. Here’s What’s New on Your iPhone and iPad
At the moment, Live Translation in Phone and FaceTime only works with one-on-one calls in English (UK and US), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain). Live Translation in Messages has slightly broader language support, including Chinese (simplified) and Japanese. Since there’s now a Phone app on iPadOS and MacOS, you can still take advantage of these features if you answer on those platforms.
Visual Intelligence and the iPhone Screen
Visual Intelligence debuted with Apple Intelligence as a way to have Siri understand the world around you through the iPhone’s camera. It’s now expanding to understand the context of your iPhone’s screen. Very much like Google’s Gemini, Visual Intelligence can identify what’s on your screen and suggest specific actions.
Unlike triggering Visual Intelligence and Siri with the Camera Control or Action Button, to trigger the onscreen contextual mode, you have to take a screenshot (these don’t have to be saved if you tap the X icon on the top left). If you take a screenshot of an invitation someone sent you, for example, you’ll see a suggestion to add it to your calendar with one tap. If you’re looking at a PDF, a screenshot might suggest a summarization so you can get the highlights.
There’s even a feature very similar to Google Lens or Google’s Circle to Search, where you can take a screenshot and then highlight a specific thing on the page you want to search via Google, or through another app that’s installed on your phone that supports the feature, like Etsy. So you can highlight a vase, for example, and then find similar results via Google or similar shoppable vases on Etsy.
New Group Message and Emoji Features
Group chats are finally getting typing indicators and polls (though the latter is exclusive to iMessage group chats). There’s also the ability to add new background designs for messages to make them more personalized. If you’re big on emoji, you might like the new ability to mix two emojis via Genmoji in the keyboard or in Apple’s Image Playground app. (It’s somewhat similar to Google’s Emoji Kitchen.)
A New Games App
There’s a new app in iOS 26! The Games app is now your one-stop shop to see all the games you’ve ever bought on the App Store, and you can launch them right from this app. (There’s even controller support so you can use a mobile controller to move through the user interface.) The app lets you discover new games, see what your friends are playing, and a Challenges tab lets you compete even with single-player games via a leaderboard.
Other Noteworthy Features
There are several other features not mentioned here, but here are a few other highlights.
- Photos: Apple heard your complaints about the Photos app and brought back the Library and Collections tabs on the main page of the app.
- Camera: The Camera app has a new look, with a simplified Photo and Video layout that expands when you move through modes.
- Reminders: You’ll now see suggested tasks, shopping items, or follow-ups based on your emails and texts on your iPhone, powered by Apple Intelligence. There’s also an option to auto-categorize related reminders in a list.
- AirPods Audio and Video Recording: If you have AirPods or AirPods Pro with the H2 chip, you can start recording a video in the iPhone’s camera app by pressing and holding the stem. You can also record audio in high definition in the camera app with those AirPods.
- Maps: Maps will learn the routes you travel regularly and will give you a heads up about delays before you leave the house. Also, there’s now a Visited Places section in the app (you have to opt in, and you can choose how long Maps stores this data, from 3 months to forever).
- Apple Music: In the Music app, there’s now an AutoMix feature that will seamlessly mix one song to the next like a DJ using tools like time stretching and beat matching. Also, if you’re looking at music lyrics, you can now see translations.
- Wallet: Apple’s Wallet app can create Digital IDs with your US passport, which can be used at TSA checkpoints, in apps, and in person. Also, your boarding pass will now feature airport maps, luggage tracking with Find My, and shareable Live Activities so your loved ones can easily receive and see your flight info.
- Image Playground: There are new ChatGPT styles to choose from when generating images in Apple’s image generation app.
- CarPlay: Live Activities are now available in CarPlay, so you can see the status of a friend’s flight as you’re on your way to the airport to pick them up. You can also now react in Messages with Tapback.
The Top New iPadOS 26 Features
iPadOS 26 gets many of the same features as iOS 26, so I won’t repeat things in this section, but let’s take a look at specific new capabilities coming to iPads this fall. As always, you can get a deeper dive from Apple here.
Multitasking Improvements
iPads have become incredibly powerful over the past few years, but multitasking has been lackluster, making them feel inadequate as laptop replacements. That’s changing now with the multitasking changes in iPadOS 26. Now apps support windowing, so you can have multiple apps on the screen in different sizes. Just resize them by dragging a corner of the app and arrange them wherever.
There are native window tiling options—a flick to the left or right will tile apps to the sides for easier split-screen, and you can even split apps into thirds or quarters. The familiar traffic light buttons from macOS are also available now on apps, and if you press and hold them, you’ll see more options to arrange apps with a tap. Swipe up and hold, and your apps will spread out in Exposé mode, and you’ll be able to revisit your grouped apps later, even if you switch to a full-screen app. There’s now also a menu bar you can pull down from the top in any app, though the available options will depend on the app.
Best of all, iPadOS now lets you handle more tasks in the background. Previously, if you were rendering a file in Final Cut, you’d have to keep it open for the render to complete. Now, that task can be done in the background, allowing you to switch to other apps for a true multitasking desktop experience.
A Better Files App
The Files app has a new design that offers more info at a glance. There are resizable columns, collapsible folders, and you can set default apps for opening specific file types. You can also customize folders with different colors and emojis to make them visually distinct. Speaking of, you can put folders in the dock for speedier access.
Preview App Comes to iPad
Apple’s Preview app from macOS is now available on iPadOS, allowing you to open, edit, and mark up PDFs or images. It works with the Apple Pencil, making it great for filling out text fields and signing documents.
Other Noteworthy Features
- Phone: There’s now a dedicated Phone app on iPad. Calls made to your iPhone can be routed so you can answer from the iPad, and you’ll be able to take advantage of new features like live translation and call screening, too.
- Journal: The Journal app, originally an iPhone-exclusive app, is now on iPadOS. It now supports the Apple Pencil, so you can make your journal feel even more personal with your own handwriting.
- Audio recording: There’s a new input chooser that lets you pick the right microphone for each app, handy if you’re connecting external mics to the iPad.
- Notes: You can capture conversations from the Phone app as audio recordings with transcriptions.
The rise of e-commerce has brought unprecedented convenience to consumers, but it has also created fertile ground for deceptive practices in online marketplaces. A growing body of research is now focusing on the detection of fake or misleading product reviews, often referred to as spam reviews. These are deliberately written to either unfairly promote a product or damage a competitor’s reputation.
These reviews frequently use fabricated profiles or carefully crafted language, making them difficult to distinguish from genuine customer feedback. Moreover, the use of large language models, colloquially known as generative AI, are now being used to generate authentic-seeming spam reviews.
The impact of spam reviews is significant. Consumers may be persuaded to purchase low-quality goods, while legitimate businesses suffer reputational harm. Ultimately, this might erode trust in digital marketplaces. However, distinguishing between authentic opinions and deceptive ones is difficult.
For their article published in the International Journal of Services, Economics and Management researchers have turned to computational opinion mining, which involves analyzing text to extract sentiment and meaning, to detect patterns indicative of fraudulent activity.
Traditional techniques include filtering for suspicious keywords, monitoring abnormal posting patterns, assessing reviewer credibility, and employing verification tools such as anti-spam CAPTCHAs.
More recently, advances in machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), which allows a computer to interpret human language, have enabled automated systems to detect the subtle linguistic and contextual cues that often reveal fabricated content.
The researchers explain that central to their approach is the creation of ground truth datasets. These are curated examples of real and fake reviews. These datasets provide a reference for training machine learning models to recognize subtle indicators of deception, including unusual writing styles, sentiment inconsistencies, or anomalies in sentence structure.
The new approach then combines multiple algorithms into a hybrid classifier. A deep learning framework, such as a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is adept at identifying complex patterns, is paired with a traditional statistical classifier. The accuracy rate of this hybrid is between 96% and 99% when tested on standard datasets.
As global e-commerce continues to expand, accurate spam detection systems will become increasingly important in maintaining the reliability of digital marketplaces, reinforcing transparency and trustworthiness.
More information:
Pallavi Zambare et al, Enhanced accuracy of detecting fraudulent product reviews using a fusion machine learning approach, International Journal of Services, Economics and Management (2025). DOI: 10.1504/IJSEM.2023.10061262
Citation:
Detecting fraudulent product reviews with enhanced accuracy (2025, September 15)
retrieved 15 September 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-fraudulent-product-accuracy.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly versatile—from route planning to text translation, it has long become a standard tool. But it is not enough for AI to simply deliver useful results: it is becoming ever more important that it also complies with legal, ethical, and social norms. But how can such norms be taught to a machine?
At TU Wien, a new approach has now been developed. By combining machine learning and logic, autonomous agents can be trained to follow predefined norms. It is even possible to establish a hierarchy of these norms—declaring some to be more important than others. At IJCAI 2025, an AI conference held this year in Montreal, Canada, this work was recognized with the Distinguished Paper Award.
Trial and error
Teaching AI new abilities sometimes works a bit like teaching tricks to a pet: reward if the task is performed correctly, punishment if the response is wrong. The AI tries out different behaviors and, through trial and error, learns how to maximize its reward. This method is called reinforcement learning and plays a key role in AI research.
“One could try to teach AI certain rules by rewarding the agent for following norms. This technique works well in the case of safety constraints,” says Prof. Agata Ciabattoni from the Institute of Logic and Computation at TU Wien. “But this wouldn’t work, for instance, with conditional norms (‘do A under condition B’). If the agent finds a way to earn a reward, it might delay finishing its actual job on purpose, to have more time for scoring easy points.”
Norms as logical formulas
The TU Wien team chose a fundamentally different path, inspired by old philosophical works: norms are still represented as logical formulas, but agents get a punishment when they do not comply with them. For example, “you must not exceed the speed limit” is translated as “if you exceed the speed limit you get a punishment of X.” Most importantly, each norm is treated as an independent objective.
“The artificial agent is given a goal to pursue—for example, to find the best route to a list of destinations. At the same time, we also define additional rules and norms that it must observe along the way,” explains Emery Neufeld, the first author of the paper. “The fact that each norm is treated as a different objective allows us to algorithmically compute the relative weight that we have to assign to these objectives in order to get a good overall result.”
With this technique, it becomes possible to encode even complicated sets of rules—for instance, norms that apply only under certain conditions, or norms that depend on the violation of other norms.
Flexible norms
“The great thing is that when the norms change, the training does not have to start all over again,” says Agata Ciabattoni. “We have a system that learns to comply with norms—but we can then still adjust these norms afterwards, or change their relative importance, declaring one rule to be more important than another.”
In their paper, Ciabattoni and her team were able to show that this technique allows a wide range of norms to be imposed, while the AI continues to pursue its primary goals.
More information:
Preprint paper: Combining MORL with Restraining Bolts to Learn Normative Behaviour
Citation:
AI learns to follow predefined norms through a combination of logic and machine learning (2025, September 15)
retrieved 15 September 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-ai-predefined-norms-combination-logic.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
A new study in Acta Psychologica finds that South Korea’s new law requiring mobile games to disclose loot box probabilities is more effective than industry self-regulation.
Researchers Leon Y. Xiao (City University of Hong Kong & beClaws.org) and Solip Park (Aalto University) analyzed the 100 top-grossing iPhone games in South Korea.
They found that:
- 90% of games included paid loot boxes.
- 84% of games with loot boxes disclosed probabilities—compared to just 35% in the Netherlands and 64% in the UK.
- Only 41% of disclosures were easy to find, meaning many players may fail to access the information and remain confused or uninformed.
South Korean regulators have backed the law with active enforcement, identifying noncompliance and forcing companies to fix mistakes. Separately, fines were levied against major South Korean publishers like Nexon for misleading disclosures.
“South Korea is showing the world that loot box regulation can work—but only when actively enforced,” said Xiao. “Industry self-regulation has failed globally. If governments really want to protect players, we need enforceable laws with real penalties.”
The authors call on other countries to follow South Korea’s lead in actively enforcing video game regulations, but also to strengthen standards so that disclosures are clear, accessible, and independently evaluated for accuracy.
More information:
Leon Y. Xiao et al, Better than industry self-regulation: Compliance of mobile games with newly adopted and actively enforced loot box probability disclosure law in South Korea, Acta Psychologica (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.105490
Citation:
South Korea’s loot box law shows strong results, but players still left in the dark (2025, September 15)
retrieved 15 September 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-south-korea-loot-law-strong.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Source: Surging Giants calling up top prospect
Detecting fraudulent product reviews with enhanced accuracy
Apple’s iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 Are Available Now. Here’s What’s New on Your iPhone and iPad
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