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Posted by Michelle Ehrhardt

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As OpenAI scrambles to find new ways to monetize ChatGPT, it announced today that it's introducing a new, cheaper subscription tier for its AI chatbot—but that it's also adding ads to both that new tier and for free users.

ChatGPT Go was first launched in India in August, and later became available to 170 countries around the world, but today marks the first time it's been available everywhere, including the United States. It marks a middle ground between the Free and Plus plans, coming in at $8/month vs. the Plus plan's $20/month, and is arguably the first "affordable" ChatGPT subscription.

Credit: OpenAI

What you get is basically an expanded version of the Free tier, as it does not give you access to any new models or features, but does put a higher limit on messages, uploads, images, and memory. It also gives you unlimited access to ChatGPT's new 5.2 model, as opposed to the limited usage that comes with the Free tier.

Essentially, it's aimed at everyday users who just need a little bit more from the AI, but don't necessarily want more power user-oriented features like advanced reasoning models or Sora video generation.

However, with that price cut over the Plus plan comes a double-edged sword. Announced alongside ChatGPT Go were ads, which OpenAI said it's planning to start testing in the U.S. for the Free and Go tiers "in the coming weeks." We've seen hints that ads would be coming to ChatGPT for a while, but now we know roughly what they'll look like.

OpenAI says that ChatGPT ads will be clearly labeled, will show up below answers, and will focus on products that are relevant to whatever conversation you're having. The company promises that ads won't influence your answers and that your ChatGPT conversations will be kept private from advertisers, but that your ads will be personalized over time. However, you'll be able to turn off ad personalization and clear the data used for it at any time.

Oddly enough, for this initial testing phase, OpenAI also says ads will only apply to users who are logged in, meaning that if you're planning to use the Free tier anyway, you might be able to skirt them for now by just staying logged out. You'll lose out on features like memory, but it might be worth it depending on your priorities. ChatGPT Go users will have no choice but to see ads, though.

Credit: OpenAI

Alongside the announcement, OpenAI posted a few examples of what ads would look like in the app, but nothing is final yet. Of note, ads will not run on accounts where the user either admits to being under 18, or the company predicts they are. Similarly, sensitive topics like health or politics should remain ad-free.

Both of today's announcements point to ways AI is trying to become profitable in 2026, which has continually proven to be challenging for the companies operating these chatbots, despite heavy investment. Unsurprisingly, they rely on the same methods pre-AI companies have relied on for decades: Ads and subscriptions. But for now, OpenAI is making at least two promises it's hoping will help the news go down more easily.

First, the company says it will "always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that's ad-free." That's probably cold comfort to anyone who values their wallet. But second, and perhaps most surprising if true, is that OpenAI still says it's not going to optimize for "time spent in ChatGPT" over "user trust and experience." That'll be a boon for usability, but less time spent in-app will mean serving fewer ads. I'm curious to see how long OpenAI will stick to that commitment, especially as monetary incentives push the company in the other direction.

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Posted by Jordan Calhoun

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The user-generated video industry is worth over $4 billion, reflecting how tastes have evolved away from reading articles and watching television punditry and toward scrolling vertical video feeds and watching live streams. As a reader, a writer, and the editor of an article-driven tech site, the rise of user-generated video and streaming can be a tough reality to accept. But as a longtime fan of live streaming, a part of me is thrilled to see the media landscape begin to take it more seriously. For example: On Jan. 16, Bluesky announced the rollout of a feature that more seamlessly connects its users to live streams—a feature that may catch on more broadly.

The latest Bluesky update, v1.114, allows streamers to display their "Live Now" status directly on the social network, a feature previously launched to beta testers back in May 2025. Now widely available, the feature makes it easier to connect to social audiences across platforms: Users can click a Bluesky profile's "Live Now" status and be directed straight to that profile's associated Twitch stream. (The feature currently works only with Twitch, but is expected to expand to other live streaming platforms soon.)

"Live Now" arrives just as Bluesky saw an increase in users this week, following a major X outage and scrutiny of the platform's ongoing deepfake porn problem. Regardless of what it could mean for Bluesky's overall growth, I'm optimistic about any pro-discovery feature that can be adopted more broadly. I can imagine a future where more sites refer its users to live streaming platforms. Consider a Gmail avatar letting me know when a YouTuber is online, a Spotify artist page pointing me to a musician's stream, or an article byline pointing me to a live video on Substack. I hope that the bridge between my social feed and live streams continues to get shorter.

How to enable the "Live Now" badge on Bluesky

To turn on the "Live Now" badge on your Bluesky avatar, click the three-dot menu on the top-right of your profile page on desktop or mobile. From the list of options, choose the "Go Live" option and paste a link to your Twitch profile page. The duration of your temporary "Live" badge is customizable, ranging from 5 minutes to 4 hours. Choose your preferred duration, and click "Go Live."

Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker

Credit: Jordan Calhoun / Lifehacker

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Posted by Beth Skwarecki

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Tracking symptoms of your menstrual cycle can be surprisingly effective at identifying when you’re likely to get pregnant. One of the best metrics to track is body temperature, which wearables can pick up on. The Natural Cycles app already works with your Apple Watch or Oura Ring, but now the company is launching its own smart band. 

As I noted in my CES fitness trends roundup, smart bands are having a moment. Whoop used to be the only major screenless tracking band out there, but we now have Amazfit, Polar, and may soon see Luna and Speediance fitness bands. Garmin has a sleep tracking band. And now, this band from Natural Cycles uses the same form factor for the simpler job of tracking temperature. 

What the Natural Cycles band does

Natural Cycles is a subscription-based app ($149.99/year) that uses temperature to estimate where you are in your monthly cycle. The concept is similar to other period-tracking apps, but the temperature data makes it a fertility awareness method, in contrast to the old fashioned “rhythm method” that was so error-prone. 

Temperature tracking isn’t unique to this app; I remember using the same idea many years ago when I was trying to get pregnant. I had to wake up at the same time every day and take my temperature first thing in the morning with a thermometer that had an extra decimal place of accuracy compared to standard drugstore thermometers. From there, I’d chart my temperature on graph paper, and when my temperature ticked up by about half a degree (and stayed there), I could pinpoint the day I had most likely ovulated.

Wearables track temperature data automatically, as you’ve noticed if you wear an Oura ring or another wearable with a temperature sensor. Natural Cycles already has partnerships with both Oura and Apple Watch. Whoop, for its part, can track temperature with its own band and provide ovulation estimates.

Natural Cycles previously offered a Bluetooth-enabled thermometer ($39.99) for people who don’t have an Oura ring or Apple Watch. Now, it’s introducing its own wearable band, in purple, with a sticker price of $129.99.

Most users will get it for less, though. Natural Cycles is including the band free with its  $149.99 annual subscription, and current members can add the band to their existing subscription at a 25% discount, making it $97.49. The company describes these as limited time offers. Anyone adding the band to a monthly membership would pay the full $129.99. 

Natural Cycles is a subscription, like Whoop, so after your first year of using the device ends, you’d still have to pay to renew your subscription. The device seems to be intended only for capturing nighttime temperature, so you wouldn’t need to wear it during the day. The downside is that it doesn’t capture fitness or other data, so it can’t replace a fitness tracker. 

If you want the most affordable device that does it all, consider an Apple Watch Series 8 ($178 refurbished) or newer, or an Apple Watch SE 3 ($239.99)—both of these have a temperature sensor and can work with Natural Cycles, but they are both more expensive than the Natural Cycles subscription itself. 

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Posted by Stephen Johnson

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Remember when hands-free shopping was going to be the next big thing? In 2017, the Echo Dot was the single best-selling item on Amazon during its Prime Day sale, outselling both the Nintendo Switch and Instant Pot. Amazon's goal was partly to heavily discount the device in order to install its voice assistant, Alexa, in as many homes as possible—likely in hopes to capitalize on the voice commerce revolution that industry analysts predicted would be worth over $40 billion by 2022. But something went awry.

Despite Amazon's complete domination of the home-voice-thing market, by 2022, Alexa was being called a "colossal failure," 10,000 people were laid off from Amazon, and the company reportedly lost billions in a year. While shopping by voice has grown slowly and steadily since its birth, it never lived up to the hype bubble of the late teens, and it's a fascinating story about how tech predictions go wrong.

It's not fun to shop with your voice

So what went wrong with voice shopping? I asked Jacquelyn Berney, the president of tech marketing firm VI Branding, why she thought people aren't shopping by voice as much as predicted, and her answer was simple: it's not fun. "My belief is that people like shopping ... and voice shopping takes away that dopamine hit," Berney said. "We want to remove friction in our lives. But shopping is not friction."

Shopping via Alexa and its pals makes one of the most dopamine-friendly aspects of shopping impossible: you can't see the thing before you buy it. That doesn't matter if you're re-ordering dog food, but it's death for some kinds of shopping. Here's how Jason Goldberg, then SVP of commerce and content at Razorfish, described the likelihood of people shopping for clothing using Alexa or similar devices in a 2018 interview: "Especially for first-time purchases with complicated attributes like size and color, people are never going to want to buy something via voice."

It's not easier to shop with your voice

While shopping can be fun, it's also often a pain, and shopping by voice doesn't alleviate the "hassle factor" of making purchases online—it adds to it. In marketing circles, reducing consumers' "cognitive load" is seen as a key to driving sales—if you make it faster and easier for people to shop, they'll probably shop more. Strictly in terms of physical effort, shopping by voice is easier than shopping from a webpage—you can do it while you're doing something else—but the mental effort, the cognitive load, is greater. "In practice, [voice shopping] can feel like more work because you’re waiting for the assistant to talk you through things you could skim instantly on a screen or in a store," Berney said.

It's not as secure to shop with your voice

Shopping with your voice is more than just a pain, it's a potential security threat. Keeping your password or PIN secure on a shopping platform is possible, but saying all those numbers is annoying, especially if other people can hear you. So many people didn't bother, and children started using Alexa to order dollhouses and cookies, mischievous parrots ordered grapes, and a late-night talk show host ordered pancake mix for the people watching their show. Ultimately, consumers don't trust the security aspects of voice shopping: 45% of respondents in a recent study done by PWC said “I don't trust or feel comfortable sending payment through my voice assistant.”

What happened to all those Echo Dots?

In retrospect it's hard to believe industry analysts would put enough faith in shopping with your voice to confidently predict sales would surpass $40 billion by 2022. It's harder to believe that Amazon would risk billions on a product that was inferior to the shopping platform that the company had already built. To be fair, despite a rocky start, Amazon's Alexa devices proved very popular—the company has sold millions of them and "Alexa" is a household name—but most consumers don't use them to shop. Amazon may have envisioned Alexa as a home shopping kiosk, but consumers want a jukebox: most people use smart speakers to play music. It was nice of Amazon to subsidize the cost of millions of customers' clock radios, though.

Where hands-free shopping is now

It might not have blown up as predicted, but voice-powered shopping has made modest inroads with consumers. According to consumer research from October, 2025, 43% of voice-enabled device owners use their devices to shop, but only if you include things like "researching products" and "tracking packages" as shopping. Only 22% of smart-speaker users actually make purchases with their smart devices, and those purchases tend to be household goods like paper towels, cleaning supplies, and batteries.

Where did industry analysts go wrong?

It's impossible to tell exactly what causes a general missing of the mark in an industry, but the voice shopping bubble was at least partially inflated by a misunderstanding. In a 2014 interview with Fast Company, Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese search engine Baidu, said, "In five years time at least 50% of all searches are going to be either through images or speech." This often repeated statistic seemed to point to an inevitable voice dominated market, but Ng was talking specifically about people in China using a specific search engine, not everyone online, everywhere.

Over time, a context-specific prediction began to be seen as conventional wisdom, and by 2017, you had confident predictions that $40 billion would be spent on voice shopping by 2022, and that voice input would naturally translate into buying behavior. That shaped corporate decisions like Amazon effort to corner the market with Alexa. But as the bubble deflated, the smart speaker found its true form: a radio that you can also use to re-order paper towels, a useful but limited tool instead of a paradigm-shifting disruption.

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