Tablets can be a cheaper option than laptops, but they can still be quite expensive. Sales make a big difference, and right now, the 128GB Google Pixel Tablet is available for $275, down from $399. The 31 percent discount brings this tablet to its lowest price ever. This sale is only available if you get the tablet in porcelain and doesn’t come with the speaker dock (though that combo is 11 percent off).
Google released this Pixel Tablet in the summer of 2023 and gave us some things we really liked and some we didn’t. We gave it 84 points in our review, mainly due to its smart home features. Our reviewer, Cherlyn Low, already had a Nest Mini in her room, but she was impressed with how well the tablet worked. The sound is great – though that was thanks to the speaker dock – and its hub mode is very useful. It shows you all the devices in your home, including camera feeds and switches lamps.
If you want this device for entertainment and ease then it could be great. However, there were a few aspects that we didn’t like as much. Some of the movements aren’t very smooth and we didn’t get much use out of it without the stand. But, if you buy it without the dock the battery is pretty great, lasting 21 and a half hours with 50 percent brightness in our tests.
While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new ways to make enemies and NPCs smarter and more realistic, watching several NVIDIA ACE demos back to back really made me feel bad.
This wasn’t just slightly smarter enemy AI – ACE can create entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices and try to give NPCs a sense of personality. It’s also doing this locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. But while this all might sound good on paper, I hated almost every moment I saw the AI NPC in action.
TiGames’ ZooPunk is a great example of this: it relies on NVIDIA ACE to generate dialogue, a virtual voice, and lip syncing for an NPC named Buck. But as you can see in the video above, Buck sounds like a robot with a slightly rustic accent. If he’s supposed to have some kind of relationship with the main character, you can’t tell from his performance.
I think my deep dislike of NVIDIA’s ACE-powered AI boils down to this: there’s just nothing charming about it. No joy, no warmth, no humanity. Every ACE AI character sounds like a developer cutting corners in the worst way possible, as if you can see their contempt for the audience in the form of a boring NPC. As much as I would prefer to scroll through some on-screen text, at least I don’t have to interact with weird robot voices.