Thoughts on Tech News of Note - 05-22-2026

• Google I/O 2026
• First US Quantum Foundry
• Alexa's Me-Too Move (and Spotify, too!)

Google I/O 2026 As usual, Google talked about a lot of stuff for a very long time. It is impractical to try to cover all of it with any depth and consideration. Instead, I will highlight a few things that I think are worth trying and/or watching and provide a few takeaways for our future daily lives.

It may not always seem like it, but Google lives and dies on search. Search is how they make most of their money, and historically they have been very cautious and careful with the changes they make to it. This year, it felt as if Google cast off some of that cautious care to unload a host of changes, some incremental, but all of them leading to what could be some significant shifts for the world's most popular search engine.

The new multi-modal search box is one of the few things announced that is available now. The new search box allows you to insert text, photos, videos, and other files to get search results that are much more tailored for you. In a way, you can think of this as changing the search box to be more like a prompt box for your favorite chatbot. From Google's perspective, you shouldn't have to go to ChatGPT, Claude, or even Gemini to get answers. You can get what you need right from search. This might end up being a gamechanger for Google if they can divert people away from competitor's tools, at least for simple queries.

Keeping in line with search, the new AI search agents will allow you to stay updated on topics that may change over time and eliminating the need for you to do repetitive searches to keep up. Theoretically, the agent can prompt you whenever something new has developed or just inform you where things currently stand. I don't do a lot of repeated searches, but I will have to come up with something to test this out. Perhaps it could be useful for financial information, like stock prices or local gas prices.

Finally, on the search front, Google has created something they are calling the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, that is an open-source standard enabling agents and e-commerce platforms to work together to make it easier to buy things online. For participating retailers, you will be able to checkout right within search, assuming you're set up for Google payments, but PayPal is to be added 'soon'. A number of retailers are signed on, including Shopify (which powers a ton of online stores), Walmart, Wayfair, Best Buy, Lowe's, Etsy, and many others, with more surely to come in the future. As a person with an Etsy storefront (check out my handmade crocheted items; find the store link at jpwcrochets.com), I'm interested to see how this may benefit or harm small sellers and how Etsy presents this to its members. Google also has a Business Agent tool that retailers can use to help answer customer questions. This feature is launching with early adopter partners such as Michael's, Poshmark, and Reebok. If the places where you shop online are tied into this new ecosystem, it could become much easier to watch your money be swiftly siphoned away from your bank account.

What I think is worth watching is how well the shopping experience will be integrated with these stores. I do a lot of shopping online, but I tend to spend most of my time on store websites that I know well, doing some virtual window shopping before making a purchase decision. I don't often buy items online through search unless I want to buy a type of thing and I don't know where I can get it. Most of the time, I'll just go directly to a store's website to make a purchase. Will I be able to enjoy a similar experience in search or will the experience hinge on me searching for the right things first? Will this drive traffic away from store websites much in the same way that modern search and AI tools have driven traffic away from other websites, especially news websites?

If it was possible to create a unifying theme for everything Google announced, it would be that Google wants to make it easier to spend more of your time in their products. You don't need to leave the Google search box to get all the answers you need. You don't need to install OpenClaw on a Mac Mini to have an always-on personal agent at your disposal; Google has Spark that runs in the cloud so your agent can work on your behalf even if you close your laptop. You don't need to run all around the web trying to find the things you want to buy; Google Shopping can find what you want and help you put all those things in one shopping cart where you can pay with your Google payment info already loaded up and ready for you - it will even remind you when you have rewards points you can redeem. You don't need to use Canva to create fancy images and presentations, nor do you need to employ Figma to help you design beautiful websites and user interfaces, you can use Google Pics and Stitch instead. And even if you're a very technical cybersecurity researcher or just a normal person who wants help managing your daily life, there's a tool for you - Code Mender to distract you from the FOMO of not having access to Anthropic's Mythos and new Android audio glasses from Samsung along with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to help make sense of your personal digital data.

Google once said they wanted to help organize the world's information. That may still be true, but now they want to be your one source for all the information you need. It's a distinction with a difference.

First US Quantum Foundry IBM is partnering with the United States Department of Commerce to build "Anderon", the country's first quantum wafer foundry. Anderon will be headquartered in Albany, New York, and will cost $2B to build. That $2B is split 50/50 between IBM's cash and federal incentives from the government via the CHIPS Act. The foundry will build commercial grade quantum processors for third-party designers and enterprise customers. IBM will provide the necessary patent portfolio, blueprints, and an existing workforce to help make the foundry viable more quickly. The initial product is a 300-millimeter silicon wafer format for superconducting qubits. Superconducting qubits are core architecture for commercial quantum systems and IBM has successfully used and tested them. Ultimately, they hope to expand to other formats in the future, but most of that will probably depend on the success of the initial product.

What is the point of this, you may ask? Quantum computing is a foreign concept for most of us. The point here is less about quantum computing specifically and more about producing necessary technology in the United States. This foundry is being built to service customers and not IBM's internal projects. It's another step toward having local suppliers and more robust advanced manufacturing capabilities on American shores. The quantum computing ecosystem has its own specific supply chain bottlenecks, and this move is expected to help alleviate some of that pain. IBM expects to have the foundry operational by the end of 2029. If they're successful, it could lead to the creation of other manufacturing opportunities for the United States.

Alexa's Me-Too Move (and Spotify, too!) No, not that #MeToo. This is a technology-oriented newsletter so get your mind right. This is one of those situations where someone does something that perhaps has some value or might even be groundbreaking on some level and then someone else, usually a competitor of some sort, comes running up behind them breathless, exclaiming they have the same thing so please look over here and not over there. In this case, we're talking about the new generative AI feature that creates podcast-style audio on topics you specify by prompting Alexa. Alexa pulls information from content provider partners such as Reuters, the Associated Press and perhaps most obviously, the Washington Post. There are supposedly over 200 providers that have signed up to be available for this service. If this sounds at all familiar, it may be because a similar feature exists within the Google world. It's most famous in NotebookLM where you can upload documents and other content and the tool can create a podcast for you along with slides, videos, and other content designed to help you learn and retain information better. The Google News app can also generate daily podcasts for you based on the biggest news stories of each day and it can send you push reminders when a new episode is ready. There is also a similar feature in mobile Chrome where if you ask Chrome to read the page to you, it will create a short podcast-style summary of it instead of just reading the words on the page to you. Sometimes this is more useful and sometimes it's just annoying, but it is almost always interesting to see what it will generate for you. The Google podcast approach is to have two AI-generated characters, one male and one female, banter back and forth like typical podcast hosts or very laid-back newscasters. I listen to the news briefings almost every day and do find that the topics are timely and are usually among the biggest stories of the day. I also have used the podcast feature in NotebookLM to help me learn more about specific topics and I even found it helpful for background research on subjects related to my job when I worked in corporate America. Nowadays I use it most often to summarize books or long-form writing I want to know about but don't necessarily want to read word-for-word. I have found these tools to be more helpful to me than scary, but I can understand the arguments against them, especially when it comes to the possibility of replacing valuable activities like reading and possibly replacing human beings that otherwise cover news stories with the professional detachment and experience we have typically valued in journalism.

I am an Amazon Prime subscriber, and I've had access to Alexa+ since almost the very beginning of its existence. I rarely use it even though I have an Echo Show 10 sitting right next to my desk where I sit all day. I generally ask Alexa something when I don't want to ask Google and set off the myriad Android devices I have around me at any given time. There is a Pixel Tablet on its speaker dock right next to the Echo Show and most of the time it will respond to a query, but sometimes my phone or some other device will swear I was talking to it and compete for my attention. Rather than deal with that, if it's an easy question, I'll just ask Alexa. But if I'm really serious about getting an answer, I'll pull out my phone and push the power button to ask Gemini directly. I don't use the Alexa app very often, so there is a bit of a hurdle Amazon has to overcome to get me to use Alexa more often, especially on the go, when it's so much easier to just go with Google.

Nevertheless, for science, I fired up the Alexa app on my phone and asked it to create a podcast for me about the topics covered in Google I/O this week. When the episode was ready, I got a notification from the app on my phone. I opened the app and it gave me the option to play it on my Echo Show, so I selected that and, in a few seconds, "Blake" and "Jordan" introduced themselves and let me know the contents of this podcast are AI-generated. The podcast Alexa created for me is 11 minutes and 37 seconds long and does indeed cover all the major topics covered in the keynote. The interaction between the hosts is similar to what the unnamed Google hosts have, but with much less personality. For the most part, Jordan acts as the person with all the questions and Blake then mansplains for her, just as you'd expect. The hosts went over all the big announcements from the 2-hour keynote, but they didn't dive in deep on any particular topic. The focus was on summarizing the new features or new products and informing you when they will be available. In this regard, it did a decent job. It even tried to tie everything together by saying Google is aiming to create an intelligent system. Now, to be fair to the AI hosts, Google itself did only so-so at creating a unifying theme that felt organic or even properly considered. For a basic summary of what was covered, the podcast was effective at communicating the most important information. I didn't note anything it said that seemed hallucinated or incorrect as I consulted my notes as the two hosts droned on mechanically, plodding through each new topic in a way not so different from a tired podcast host who's been to his or her umpteenth I/O and would just like a nice nap.

I will continue to use this feature from time to time to see how it develops. This might be something parents could use (once tested, of course) with their kids to see if it helps them learn more about topics that interest them. I hear stories on podcasts of the hosts' kids talking to Alexa and Google/Gemini, so having something a little longer that goes a little deeper on a subject could be useful and it's nice that you don't have to feed the algorithm to get what you're seeking.

BTW, after I picked the topics for this week's newsletter, I learned about Spotify's new feature that is very similar to what Amazon has implemented with Alexa+. With a Spotify premium account, you will be able create what they're calling a "Personal Podcast" based on a text prompt or by uploading PDFs or sharing web links. Spotify says you will be able to choose the voice, and you can even set a schedule so that a new podcast can be generated for you daily or some other schedule you determine. But there will be limits on how much you can create. There will be a credit system that will replenish each month you remain a premium subscriber, but additional credits will be available for purchase. I switched from Spotify to Qobuz some time back because I am a bit of an audio snob, so I do wish that Spotify would just enable anyone to buy credits to try this feature without having to subscribe, but I do understand this is a ploy to get people to pay for Spotify and spend more time in the app. I do like the idea of being able to have automatically regenerating podcasts and I appreciate that things will sync across the devices where you have Spotify installed. At some point I will probably re-up my subscription to give this a try when it becomes available in the United States in June.