🎙️ AI cloned their voice for $18K

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Welcome to your Thursday, {{first_name | friend}}. Before Angry Birds became the tiny rage machine in everyone’s pocket, Rovio Entertainment was basically playing “try again” on hard mode. Six years. Fifty-one games. Zero smash hits. Then someone sketched a round, wingless bird with the emotional range of a parking ticket, and mobile gaming changed forever. 

🦤 How many copies of Angry Birds have been downloaded across all platforms since its 2009 launch: A) 500 million, B) 1 billion, C) 3 billion, D) 5 billion? Keep reading, the answer is waiting for you at the end like a pig in a poorly built house.

🙏🏻 Real quick. Gmail has a bouncer. So does Yahoo. They watch whether you open and click my emails. Lots of clicks? I’m on the VIP list. No clicks? I’m getting tossed into spam like yesterday’s leftovers. So tap any link today. This one works. It tells the algorithm we’re friends. Which we are. Now let’s go. — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

This story is wild. Critics savaged Red Notice when it landed on Netflix in 2021. Rotten Tomatoes: 37%. Reviews were brutal. “Crushingly generic.” “Cinematic beige.” A $200 million movie critics couldn’t wait to bury.

Netflix called it the most-watched film in their history (though it’s since been overtaken by the animated film KPop Demon Hunters), 328 million viewing hours in 28 days. Two sequels greenlit.

Both things are true. And that’s the whole game.

Netflix doesn’t only track what you watch. They track HOW you watch.

Screenwriters at Netflix reportedly get notes telling them to have characters announce what they’re doing out loud, so phone scrollers can follow without looking up. Sound mixes are flat. Lighting stays bright and low-contrast. Nothing jolts you out of your half-asleep fog.

The industry calls these “algorithm movies.” You know them on sight. Tall Girl. Murder Mystery. The Kissing Booth. Titles that tell you exactly what’s inside. Stars a notch or two below Tom Cruise. Plots with no sharp edges. Netflix doesn’t care if you love them. They care if you finish them.

Showrunners at Netflix get data showing the precise moment viewers stop watching. If 15% of people quit at the 34-minute mark, the writers know. They fix it. 

The Top 10 list on your home page? Social pressure by design. When a show is #3 in your country today, you feel like you’re missing out. FOMO is a feature, not a bug.

The average American streams 3.2 hours every single day. That’s 22 hours a week. More time than most people spend exercising in a month. Well, except for me. I’m obsessed with getting my steps or Pilates in every single day. Annoying.

Critics have dunked on Adam Sandler for 30 years. Doesn’t matter. Netflix signed him to a reported $250 million deal because subscribers had watched 2 billion hours of his movies since 2015. Two. Billion. Hours.

Sandler isn’t a movie star to Netflix. He’s a churn prevention tool. When your subscription is up and you wonder if it’s worth $20 a month, a Sandler movie comes on. You laugh. You stay. Netflix wins.

In 2017, Netflix quietly dumped star ratings for behavioral data. What you do beats what you say you like. Your behavior is always the truth.

You can take one thing back. Go to your profile icon, select Manage Profiles, toggle off Autoplay next episode. Ten seconds. Your call.

🗣️ TEXT/POST THIS STAT: Netflix’s most-watched live-action movie got a 37% from critics. It was engineered to play while you scroll your phone. The average American watches 22 hours of streaming a week. And over 80% of it was put there by an algorithm. @KimKomando

📩 Send this to someone who said “it was fine” about a movie they can’t quite remember finishing.

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(Starts at 13:03) Who says a group project never works out? Picture this: A driver swerves on a busy highway. Three totally random drivers make a human roadblock to protect him. All caught on camera. The video? Going viral. Millions of views.

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🥷 AI money maze: Get this, an operation with 15,500 fake domains has been running rampant on social media. This scam metropolis promises “Smart AI Trading Technology” with guaranteed returns, backed by deepfake videos of celebs and public figures endorsing bogus platforms. Real-time cloaking technology shows harmless pages to security researchers while serving the scam directly to you. Don’t fall for it. 

Hackers house calls: Picture some random IT guy in the lobby holding a USB stick like it’s a poisoned breadstick. That is the FBI’s warning on Silent Ransom Group, a crew targeting U.S. legal and financial firms. They impersonate IT support through calls, phishing emails and fake help desk domains, then steal data remotely or in person. Yep, in the flesh. Afterward, they pressure employees and clients to start ransom talks. Unleash the hounds. 

😶‍🌫️ Hello takes over: Don’t you love when someone moves your house keys? I certainly don’t. That’s basically what Microsoft is doing with its optional Windows 11 update KB5089573, making Windows Hello, face or fingerprint, your default sign-in on Windows PCs. Even if you switch back to a PIN, Windows overrides you unless you enter that PIN three times in a row. I like faster logins, but I don’t want to be shoved into mandatory biometrics. 

Waymo said Uber: This is wild. A Waymo robotaxi picked up a passenger, started the trip, then stalled mid-ride. The company’s solution? An email suggesting the passenger call an Uber. The robotaxi that’s supposed to replace human drivers outsourced the job to a human driver. With the rise of self-driving vehicles, it’s only a matter of time before there’s a country song about a guy’s truck leaving him, too.

🛟 Lifesaver setting: Your iPhone may be annoying, expensive and weirdly exposing about screen time, but it might save your life. A woman missed a sharp bend, rolled 330 feet down a mountain, and her car caught fire. She was trapped and badly hurt. Her iPhone Crash Detection called emergency crews, sent GPS, and rescuers arrived about 20 minutes later. iPhone 14 or newer? Make sure it’s on: Settings > Emergency SOS > Call After Serious Crash. It’s free, already on your phone and seriously useful. 

Voice clones hit 85% accuracy and 70% of us can’t tell what’s real. The one word that’ll save you $18,000.

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Click your favorite podcast player below to listen now or later:

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⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Folks, don’t give AI your secrets. Before you paste a doc into a chatbot, remove anything private. Names, emails, account numbers, salaries or medical details. Use placeholders like [Client], [Company], [Amount] or [Invoice No.] instead. The bot can still help without getting the keys to your filing cabinet.

iCloud and Google Drive are not backups. I know that’s not what you want to hear. They sync your files, but if you accidentally delete something or your hard drive fails, that deletion syncs everywhere. Gone. Carbonite backs up your entire computer automatically. It’s a complete, safe copy in the cloud. Get 50% off today.*

👨‍💻 Before you buy a second monitor: Try the tablet you already own. On Mac, go to System Settings > Displays > Add Display and choose your iPad. On Galaxy Tab, swipe down, tap Second screen, then on Windows press Win + K and select your tablet. Work screen by day, couch computer by night.

You’re wasting your lock screen: It’s useful beyond showing the time. On iPhone, touch and hold the lock screen and tap Customize. Change the clock, add widgets and swap those corner shortcuts for better tools, like a QR scanner or favorite app. On Android, same deal. Touch, hold and make it yours.

🔞 X feed getting gross? It’s not just you. X has gotten way more unhinged than other social media apps. The wild part: Some of it isn’t filtered out by default. On mobile, open Settings > Privacy and safety > Content you see. Under Sensitive media, turn off adult content and graphic violence. Eyeball bleach, activated.

🗣️ Chrome can read text for you: When a long article starts looking like alphabet soup, add the Read Aloud extension from the Chrome Web Store. Pin it from the Extensions icon in the top right, highlight any text and click Read Aloud. You can change the voice, pitch and speed in Settings. Let your ears clock in for once.

Your cat or dog might finally explain why squirrels make them go nuts. A new AI collar says it can translate pet sounds into human words. 

Meet PettiChat, a China-made collar gadget claiming 94.6% translation accuracy with replies in 1.2 seconds. It allegedly trained on millions of pet voiceprints and spits out phrases like “pay attention to me” or “leave me alone.” 

This furry mood ring costs about $153, plus a subscription. Just what you needed, another streaming service that asks for peanut butter. 

Watch it in action here. Spoiler: It’s bad.

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🔜 Tomorrow: Your credit card’s hiding money-saving perks you’ve never used. Price drops, broken gadgets, stolen purchases, rental car coverage, all possibly covered. I’ll show you the easiest way to check.

Tomorrow’s trivia goes full Roman mystery: a buried library, a volcanic disaster and students using AI to read the unreadable.

The answer: C) Approximately 3 billion downloads. It took Rovio 51 failed games over six years to get there. The Finnish studio had been grinding since 2003, titles like Mole War and Fun Duck Hunt went nowhere. They survived by doing contract coding for other studios to keep the lights on.

🎉 Then a designer sketched a round, wingless, legless, angry-looking bird during a random brainstorm. That sketch became game number 52.

Released Dec. 11, 2009, Angry Birds became the most downloaded mobile game franchise in history. At its 2012 peak, 263 million people played it every month. That’s more than the entire population of Brazil. Revenue jumped from $8.7 million to $152 million in two years flat. Two movies, an animated series, a theme park and over $1 billion in merchandise. All from sketch 52.

No single bird can defeat me. But Toucan. (I heard that groan all the way from here!)

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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🎉 Keep it going! You got this! — Kim

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, JTEMAN, PettiChat

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