May 2, 2024 | View in browser 

🧠 ChatGPT rival Claude lands on iPhone
🎶 Popular artists back on TikTok
📔 Audible to use Prime Video data
📺 Crunchyroll gets price hike

🦇 Batman: Arkham Shadow coming to VR

Soon, iPhone users will have access to another ChatGPT alternative. Claude was built by the company Anthropic, which is led by a group of former OpenAI staff.

The Claude large language model will be able to perform not only chatbot functions, but also image analysis. It will also be able to access (with permission) a user's camera and photo album to do tasks like summarizing notes from a photo of a whiteboard.

The iOS app for Claude is now on the App store and is free for Claude users, including those with free accounts or subscriptions. Anthropic also announced a new Team plan that offers access to Claude for up to five users for $30 per month.

After a raft of popular artists saw their music pulled from TikTok in February of this year due to a licensing issue with Universal Music Group, a deal has now been reached to allow the musicians' work to return to the platform.

Both UMG and its artists raised concerns over the use of AI on the platform, which was addressed in the deal. “TikTok is also committed to working with UMG to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform ...,” UMG wrote in a press release about the situation.

Audible is facing competition in the audiobook market from alternatives like Spotify, so parent company Amazon is now working on improving its recommendations to help it stay ahead.

Audible will begin testing the use of data from Amazon's Prime Video service to feed recommendations for audiobooks, including a discovery page feature called "Based on what you watched recently on Prime Video."

There's no option currently available to allow users to opt in or out of the test, which Amazon says will be rolling out to around half of people who use both Audible and Prime Video.

Anime streaming service Crunchyroll is raising its subscription prices for the first time since it was taken over by Funimation four years ago. The prices will be raised in the U.S., Argentina, Colombia, France, Portugal, and "select additional countries."

The Mega Fan tier will increase by $2 per month to $12 per month, while the Ultimate Fan tier will increase by $1 per month to $16 per month. There is also an existing ad-supported option that will remain unchanged. In addition, the free trial option will be cut down to seven days from the previous 14 days.

Beloved video game franchise Batman: Arkham from developers Rocksteady will see its next installment, Batman: Arkham Shadow, launching later this year. And the game will be a Meta Quest 3 exclusive, according to Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley.

Many gamers have bemoaned the move to VR, but the VR experience could be a compelling switch to the Arkham series. It is being developed by Camouflaj, which was responsible for the groundbreaking Iron Man VR from 2020.

"Rather than writing a game like this off so quickly, it’s worth celebrating the fact that VR is getting more serious experiences like this," Digital Trends Gaming Editor Giovanni Colantonio writes.

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