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This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Character.AI launches Stories for teens after banning them from chats
26 Nov 2025, 2:28 pm by Emma Roth
Character.AI, under threat from several lawsuits over its alleged negative impact on teen mental health, is banning underage users from open-ended chats on its site. Instead, teens will be allowed to use a new “Stories” format that, unlike regular chats, offers “structured” choose-your-own-adventure-style experiences with the AI characters on its platform.
The feature is available to everyone, but Character.AI is pitching it as a way to “enhance” the experience for users under 18. In October, Character.AI announced that it would shut down chats for teens on November 25th while it develops an age assurance feature that will automatically place underage users into “more conservative” AI chats.
Character.AI is currently facing a lawsuit that accuses the AI platform of contributing to a teenager’s death by suicide, along with other cases that claim teens’ conversations with the AI characters on its platform harmed their mental health.
Stories works by allowing users to choose from two or three AI characters, select a genre, and then either write their own premise or use AI to create one for them. Character.AI will then create a “guided narrative” where users can make frequent choices that change the course of the story. The experience also includes AI-generated images, with “richer multimodal elements coming soon.”
You’re buying a Frame TV? It’s okay to cheap out a little
26 Nov 2025, 2:00 pm by John.Higgins
Let’s get this out of the way: The Samsung Frame is not a good TV. None of the displays that I’d classify as art TVs are – at least not in the ways that we usually think about TVs. They only get a fraction as bright as comparably priced TVs, picture quality is middling, black level performance is bad (even for an LCD TV), and color accuracy out of the box leaves a lot to be desired. But that’s not why people buy art TVs.
Close friends of mine love The Frame on their living room wall and have asked me about Black Friday sales so they can buy another for the bedroom, even after I gave them a list of cheaper TVs that are better at being actual …
ChatGPT and Copilot are being booted out of WhatsApp
26 Nov 2025, 1:00 pm by Dominic Preston
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are both leaving WhatsApp thanks to upcoming changes to the messaging app’s terms of service that will prohibit using it to distribute AI chatbots not made by Meta.
OpenAI announced its planned departure a few weeks ago, with Microsoft following it this week. Both companies attributed the departures to Meta’s new terms of service for WhatsApp Business Solution, which come into effect on January 15th, 2026, and said the chatbots will remain accessible in WhatsApp until that date. ChatGPT users can link their accounts to WhatsApp to make sure their chat history carries over, though Copilot users won’t have that option.
WhatsApp announced the update to its terms in October, banning AI companies from using its business API as a distribution platform for chatbots. Other companies will still be permitted to use WhatsApp for customer service or support chatbots, with the terms only prohibiting cases where the AI itself is the product — a simple way of stopping Meta’s AI rivals using its own platform to reach customers.
“The purpose of the WhatsApp Business API is to help businesses provide customer support and send relevant updates,” an anonymous Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time. “Our focus is on supporting the tens of thousands of businesses who are building these experiences on WhatsApp.”
The change means that other third-party AI chatbots, including Perplexity, are likely to announce departures from WhatsApp soon, leaving Meta AI the only option available from next January.
First there was nothing, then there was Hoto and Fanttik
26 Nov 2025, 12:00 pm by Sean Hollister
Hoto exists because someone got bored.
CEO Lidan Liu, the company’s founder and a notable industrial designer, tells The Verge she was tired of advising from her consultancy Designaffairs China. I have to build something on my own, she thought. And back then, she was spending a lot of time in her workshop surrounded by the same old tools.
“The tool industry, it never changes, the products are boring, very masculine and very much designed for professional users,” Liu thought. “We can start something new.” So she founded iMonkey Technology, which later became Hoto, short for “Home Tools.”
She didn’t have to build it alone. She knew a cofou …
Poco partners with Bose to put a subwoofer in its latest phone
26 Nov 2025, 9:15 am by Dominic Preston
Xiaomi spin-off brand Poco has partnered with Bose to help its new F8 phones stand out in an increasingly crowded market. Both the F8 Pro and F8 Ultra feature stereo speakers designed collaboratively with the audio company, and the Ultra goes one step further by including a subwoofer too.
Both new F8 phones feature the same dual stereo speakers tuned by Bose, though you’ll have to buy the Ultra if you want the benefits of the subwoofer as well, which Poco says delivers “deeper, more impactful bass.” Additionally, there are two sound profiles tuned by Bose engineers: a Dynamic mode that delivers extra bass, and a Balanced option that emphasizes vocals and a more even soundstage.
“By combining Bose’s expertise in acoustic engineering with Poco’s innovation in design and technology, Poco F8 Series achieves a level of clarity and depth that redefines what’s possible in mobile sound,” said Nick Smith, president of audio technology and chief strategy officer at Bose.
The two phones are otherwise fairly typical affordable flagships. The F8 Ultra has a more powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, with a large 6.9-inch OLED display, triple 50-megapixel rear camera, and wireless charging. The F8 Pro uses last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, a smaller 6.59-inch screen, and downgrades to each of the three rear lenses. Both have IP68 ratings though, plus batteries bigger than 6,000mAh, which should deliver decent longevity.
The F8 Pro starts from $579, while the Ultra is available from $729, though a $50 early bird discount is available at launch. The two phones were announced alongside a pair of sub-$400 tablets, the Pad X1 and Pad M1, both of which lean on high resolution displays and Dolby Atmos speakers to serve as good value entertainment options.
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
