Discord Announces Social SDK For Game Developers - DTH
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These are the Daily Tech headlines for Monday, March 17th, 2025. I'm Sarah Lane.

Discord announced a new social SDK that lets game developers integrate social features directly into their games, like friends lists, cross-platform messaging, and voice chat. Players can send game invites through Discord, but you don't actually need a Discord account to use the new features.

They work with C++ on Unreal Engine and Unity on Windows 11 Plus and macOS. Console and mobile support coming soon. TheoryCraft Games, Facepunch Studios, and Tencent Games are all using it.

Google announced that Chirp 3, that's its speech-to-text and HD text-to-speech model, is coming to the Vertex AI platform next week. Last week, the company announced Chirp 3 will offer eight new voices across 31 languages, supporting assistants, audiobooks, support agents, and voiceovers, with usage restrictions to prevent misuse.

On Friday, Google also announced it's replacing Google Assistant with Gemini on most Android phones later this year, although phones running Android 9 or earlier with less than 2 gigs of RAM will keep Assistant. Google says it plans to expand Gemini to watches, cars, tablets, headphones, speakers, displays, and TVs.

Roblox announced Cube3D, which can generate a 3D object from a text prompt. Cube3D tokenizes 3D shapes, similar to how a language model can predict text. Roblox tells The Verge it's trained on a combo of licensed public and Roblox ecosystem data. The company says it plans to expand this to image inputs, making it a multimodal model integrated with existing AI creation tools.

According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, shipments of foreign-branded smartphones in China dropped 21% year-over-year in January. Apple's performance is a big part of this trend since it's the largest foreign phone maker in China. Overall smartphone sales in China fell 14.3% to 27.24 million units in January.

Alphabet is spinning off Tara, that's T-A-A-R-A, a laser-based internet project from its Moonshot Incubator X, not to be confused with X the social network. Tara's technology transmits data using light beams at 20 gigabits per second over 20 kilometers between small terminals. It's different than Starlink's satellite-based system and in theory cheaper and faster to install on a pole, a tree, or a building without regulatory issues.

Tara currently partners with telecom companies like Barti Airtel and T-Mobile to extend fiber networks, currently operating in 12 countries, including a five-kilometer link over the Congo River. Reuters sources report that Russia is using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether to bypass Western sanctions in oil trade deals with China and India. Countries like Iran and Venezuela also use cryptocurrencies for international trade.

Last week, authorities raided over 20 locations and sealed two European Parliament offices as part of a bribery probe into Huawei's lobbying activities. Prosecutors say that Huawei has engaged in corruption, forgery and money laundering since all the way back to 2021, offering things like gifts and travel perks to influence political decisions. Around 15 former and current members of the European Parliament are also under investigation.

And finally, this one's for you, Tom Merritt. Spectrum will now offer a streaming-only subscription to Sportsnet LA for the first time this season, so Dodger fans can watch games without a cable package. SNLA+, as it's known, costs $30 per month or $200 per year and includes live and archived games, pregame and postgame shows, and other related content through MLB.com and the MLB app, but only if you're in the local market. ♪

For more analysis of the tech news of the day, subscribe to DailyTechNewsShow.com. That's where you can find show notes and links to all these headlines there as well. Happy St. Patrick's Day to all who celebrate. I'm Sarah Lane, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

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