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Nothing to do with Google Hangouts, Turntable Labs’ Hangout includes a virtual dancefloor and chat function.

Turntable.fm returns as Hangouts, a collaborative music appCreate your own virtual space for music sharingYou and your friends can take turns to DJ

From flared jeans to fascism, it’s a well-known fact that if you hang around long enough everything old comes back again. And if you remember turntable.fm, the collaborative streaming music platform of the early 2010s, you’ll get a flash of déjà vu when you look at the newly launched Hangout. It looks and works very much like turntable.fm, and that’s no bad thing. (And just to clarify, this is nothing to with Google Hangouts, which closed its virtual doors in November 2022).

The idea behind Hangout is simple: you create your own personal space, which is called a Hangout, and you and your friends can then take turns being the DJ. There are over 100 million officially licensed tracks to choose from, and you can take part from multiple platforms: your web browser, your iOS device or your Android device.

What’s different from turntable.fm?

Hangouts comes from Turntable Labs, a spin-off from the original Turntable.fm. That service suffered from one big problem when it launched: it had no official deals in place with any record labels, so operated within a gray area that limited what it could do. Instead of getting licenses from the record companies, it claimed to be a non-interactive radio station, which meant you couldn’t play your own choice of music if you were the only person in the room and only US residents could use it. It did sign licences in 2012 with four major music labels, but the site shut down the following year.

Hangout clearly doesn’t want to repeat that history, hence the licenses being in place from the get-go. But with former Turntable.fm VP of technology Joseph Perla at the helm, it clearly hopes to recapture the magic of the original without any of the other issues. However, it also has a rival – and that too has a turntable.fm connection, as it is run by former turntable CEO, Billy Chasen. That one’s called deepcut.fm, and it’s a rebranded (and very retro-looking) version of turntable.fm.

As interesting as the history is, what really matters is whether anybody’s going to use it – and music collaboration has changed somewhat since Turntable’s heyday. Apple’s SharePlay, Spotify Live and other similar services already offer collaborative listening, and while they don’t have Hangouts’ cutesy interface, they do already have established customer bases.

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The YouTube VR app is getting a co-watch feature on the Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

Watch parties are now available in YouTube VRYou’ll all need to own paid content to watch it togetherYou can’t watch 360 video together yet

VR gaming, like gaming in general, is always more fun with friends. Hopping into Just Dance VR is fine, but taking it on in a multiplayer session – either online or for couch co-op – is a much more enjoyable experience. The same is true for Walkabout Mini Golf and Beat Saber – and now you can also enjoy shared experiences when watching movies or other content in the YouTube VR app.

Whether it’s watching a 4K movie or your favorite YouTube Short, it’s now possible to host a YouTube watch party with up to seven other guests at the push of a button – no matter where you all happen to be (though it will need to be somewhere with an internet connection).

You’ll want to boot up the free YouTube app on your Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3S (after installing it if you haven’t already), then look above the screen to see the co-watch icon (it looks like a person-shaped outline flanked by two silhouettes), and click it to start your watch party.

From there you can invite people from your followers list – provided you follow each other – by sending them a notification. Once they accept they’ll join your virtual group, and then you can decide what you all want to watch.

There are a few restrictions to note, however. As mentioned you’ll have to be following each other, and it’s important to note that you want to watch paid-for YouTube content everyone in the party will have to pay for it separately – so you can’t get away with splitting a single rental fee.

Additionally, full-360-degree immersive video is not yet supported, which is a shame as these 3D experiences are among my favorite ways to use the YouTube VR app. Hopefully it’ll be added in the near future, but for now I’m excited to start some watch parties with YouTube’s huge catalog of 2D content.

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Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said there are no “red lines” when it comes to releasing more games on PS5.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer says he is pleased with Microsoft’s multiplatform pushSpencer says there are no “red lines” when it comes to releasing more Xbox games on other platformsSpencer thinks “the ball is moving in the right direction”

Microsoft‘s gaming head Phil Spencer has said that there are no “red lines” regarding the release of more Xbox games on PlayStation.

The company’s multiplatform push kicked off earlier this year, which saw the likes of Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, Pentiment, and Sea of Thieves make their way to PS5 and Nintendo Switch. Now, Spencer has revealed that he isn’t against seeing more Xbox games released on other platforms, but has held back on confirming which titles.

Speaking in a recent interview with Bloomberg, Spencer said: “I think the ball is moving in the right direction. I think this idea of open platforms, where users have more choice, creators have more choice, you see the momentum, right?”

The Xbox boss continued, saying that he is pleased with the beginning of the multiplatform plan, and, according to Bloomberg, confirmed Microsoft wants to “do more of that” and that it won’t rule out any titles in its major franchises.

“I do not see sort of red lines in our portfolio that say ‘thou must not,'” Spencer said, but added that it’s too early to decide on the next version of Halo.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was originally thought to be an Xbox-exclusive title until it received a confirmed PS5 release date this summer.

Bethesda’s next major action game will launch on December 9 for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC as a timed exclusive instead, before it arrives on PS5 in Spring 2025.

After the announcement, Spencer explained the surprise PS5 release, calling it a business move for the company.

“Obviously, last spring we launched four games, two of them on the Switch, four of them on PlayStation, and we said we were gonna learn,” Spencer said. “We said we’d watch. I think at [the] Showcase, I might have said, from our learning, we’re gonna do more.

“What I see, when I look, our franchises are getting stronger. Our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been. So I look at it and I say, okay, our player numbers are going up for the console platform. Our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been.”

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Britain’s economy and company profits have been stifled due to poor tech uptake among UK businesses.

Poor tech uptake has cost the UK economy an estimated £111 billionReport claims 676,000 jobs could have been created despite the perceived AI threat‘Digital leaders’ are more likely to see strong turnover growth

A new report from Virgin Media O2 Business and Cebr has highlighted how much is being left on the table by companies that have failed to adopt new technologies, and it could be affecting the entire country as well as their own profits.

The study claims if all British businesses had increased their digital technology usage in 2021, when pandemic-induced digitization was on trend, the UK’s economy would have seen a £111 billion uptick in turnover by 2023 – a sum worth around 3% of the nation’s estimated GDP.

Still today, the study found three in four have not increased their digital technology usage since 2021, highlighting a major gap that could be plugged.

British businesses need more tech

More locally, businesses branded by the report as ‘digital leaders’ – companies actively investing in digital solutions – have seen a 12% growth in turnover, compared with only 5% for their not-so-digitally-inclined counterparts.

Firms with a strong digital culture are nearly twice as likely to have workforces that are prepared for the future than those with weaker digital cultures (81% versus 43%).

“There’s a £111bn boost to the UK economy to be unlocked for those organisations who build strong digital cultures, where technology underpins the way people connect and collaborate with colleagues and customers to drive business outcomes,” noted Jo Bertram, Managing Director at Virgin Media O2 Business.

Apart from the direct economic benefits, Virgin Media O2 Business believes that a further 676,000 jobs could have been created by 2023 – a considerable number given the ongoing worry that artificial intelligence could replace human workers.

This in itself is a theory that has been challenged, with experts seeing AI more as a colleague than a replacement – an idea I explored myself at a recent tech conference.

Nina Skero, CEO at Cebr, added: “We encourage UK leaders to use this report as a guide to navigate the challenges and opportunities of a digital workplace. By prioritising cultivating a strong digital culture, organisations can unlock their full potential and drive sustained growth for the UK economy and wider society.”

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The Samsung Galaxy S25 series, including the S25 Slim, is said to be almost ready to launch.

A report suggests the Samsung Galaxy S25 will be unveiled on January 23Samsung is apparently aiming to launch the S25 Slim at the same timeA leaker has reiterated that all S25 models will use a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset

The wait for the Samsung Galaxy S25 series could almost be over, as according to a report the S25, Galaxy S25 Plus, and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will all be announced on January 23.

That’s according to South Korean site FNNews (via @Jukanlosreve), citing “industry sources.” It’s a date that makes sense, since based on past form we always expected to see the Galaxy S25 range appear in either January or February.

The site adds that the launch event is likely to happen in San Francisco, and that – surprisingly – the Samsung Galaxy S25 Slim might be unveiled at the same time.

An unexpectedly early arrival for the S25 Slim

We’ve heard rumblings that Samsung was working on a ‘Slim’ model, but most leaks so far have suggested this thinner phone would arrive two or three months after the rest of the line.

Apparently though, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Slim is in the final stages of development, and Samsung is hoping to have it finished in time for a January 23 launch, so that it can have as much of a head start as possible on the slim iPhone 17 Air that’s rumored to be landing later in 2025.

It sounds then like there’s a chance the Galaxy S25 Slim won’t be ready in time, though perhaps in that case Samsung will still announce it on January 23, with the phone then going on sale later than the rest of the Galaxy S25 models.

We’d take all of this with a pinch of salt anyway. This is the first real Samsung Galaxy S25 release date leak we’ve seen, so until other sources start agreeing or disagreeing it’s hard to say how likely this all is.

In other Samsung Galaxy S25 news, leaker @UniverseIce has reiterated their claim that every model in the line will be equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, everywhere in the world.

That’s an unusual approach for Samsung, which typically uses its own Exynos chipsets in some regions, but this seems to be the consensus among leakers now, so we’d say it’s likely that the Snapdragon 8 Elite will indeed be used everywhere.

That should be good news, as typically Samsung’s Exynos chipsets can’t quite match the Snapdragon alternatives for performance.

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Is fragmented software holding back your team’s efficiency and flow?

The pressure on businesses to digitize has changed how they operate, fueling a growing trend of adopting new technologies to stay competitive and improve efficiencies. However, this drive towards modernization is leading to an overuse of point solutions that are designed to address one specific problem within an organization. The result? Sprawling and disconnected technology stacks across businesses that are draining efficiency and disrupting the flow of work.

In recent years, many teams had two major priorities – enable business in a heavily remote world and drive growth at all costs. And because they had the access to capital needed to buy technology, many adopted a range of incremental technologies to address specific challenges across their departments. Whether it was a new employee time off request tool for HR or a new tax compliance management tool for finance, organizations were constantly bringing in new software and doing so with little regard to existing processes.

Fast forward to today and businesses find themselves in a different position than in recent years. The focus for many is on driving efficiency and enabling people to do their most productive work. But instead of their existing technology working for them, in many cases, it’s draining efficiency even further.

Software overconsumption and underutilization drain efficiency

Many organizations have the best of intentions when acquiring software – they are adopting it to help do tasks better, faster, and smarter. But challenges arise when organizations have deployed more software than they need, have redundant technologies, haven’t integrated the systems, or aren’t utilizing the software to its full extent.

The beauty of software-as-a-service (SaaS) is that it’s easier for organizations to adopt, implement, and use technologies to solve specific challenges. But it’s also because of those exact same reasons that businesses find themselves in the position they’re in today. Teams have been able to purchase their own software solutions to solve their specific challenges and individual processes. This increases the agility of teams to solve problems with technology, but it also creates disruptions to broader processes and workflows across an organization.

Those implications show up in many forms. Business leaders and teams now have siloed data, unnecessary technology spend, and disrupted processes that prevent people from being efficient and work flowing as it should. IT teams are also burdened by an overwhelming amount of software implementations and added security concerns that come with software adoption without proper governance.

To solve these challenges, many organizations have started looking for ways to consolidate their technologies.

Software consolidation takes center stage

A recent report shows that 72% of CIOs are concerned about the impact of app sprawl, while another found that midsize companies waste an average of £18 million annually on unused software licenses. And according to Canva’s 2024 CIO report, 64% of organizations say they don’t have enough staff to train employees on new technologies. The data is clear – organizations need to consolidate their technology stacks. And that’s exactly what they’re doing to achieve widespread efficiency across departments.

But a successful software consolidation strategy requires more than cutting technology – it must take process into account.

Think about how work flows through an organization. It requires data to move between people and technology. So, if an organization is consolidating its technology stack, it’s important to understand what technology is necessary to keep, ensuring that business processes and workflows move as efficiently as possible.

End-to-end process automation enables organizations to identify where inefficiencies lie in their processes today, including the technology that isn’t working for them. It also allows organizations to apply automation to orchestrate workflows across departments for maximum efficiency. And because disconnected and siloed data is a key driver of software consolidation, process automation enables business leaders to easily build applications that bring optimized workflows and processes to life.

Taking a strategic approach with process in mind can help to uncover overlapping tools, underutilized licenses, and replace point solutions with easy-to-use applications that allow work to flow efficiently and effectively through an organization. By consolidating software with process in mind, organizations can easily adopt new technologies in the future, like AI tools, on top of already optimized workflows. This will make adoption and implementation easier, while also preventing disruption to processes.

If the primary mandate for organizations today is efficiency, then the path to operational excellence starts by empowering your team members by removing friction from work. Reducing the sprawl of software and optimizing processes to connect data between people and systems is a key factor in removing that friction.

Technology can solve your efficiency challenges, if adopted and used with process in mind. Without process, there’s a good chance that technology is a main reason your people and teams are struggling to be productive and efficient.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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Businesses must prioritize data quality and governance to unlock AI’s full potential and drive growth.

The most successful businesses in the future will be those that optimize their AI investment. As companies start their journey to AI readiness, they must develop robust data management strategies to handle increased data volume and complexity, and ensure trusted data is available for business use. Poor quality data is a burden for users trying to build reliable models to extrapolate insights for revenue-generating activities and better business outcomes.

It’s not unusual for business users to prioritize access to the data they need over its quality or usability. The simple truth is if an organization has bad quality data and uses it to feed AI tools, it will inevitably deliver poor quality and untrustworthy results.

Why data quality matters

Data quality is critical because it acts as the bridge between technical and business teams, enabling effective collaboration and maximizing the value derived from data. Depending on the data source and governance requirements, this presents a time-consuming challenge to data scientists who can spend up to 80 percent of their time just cleaning the data before they can even begin to work with it.

Amalgamating data sources is one huge task. The work of combining and transforming multiple data sets, such as raw data from regular business operations, legacy data in a variety of formats, or new data sets acquired following an acquisition or merger, should not be underestimated.

This is important work for business development purposes. Data is critical to better target marketing and sales, direct product innovation and market expansion, improve customer service, and even create an AI chatbot or agent to enhance brand experience. It’s also vital in ensuring compliance with the latest regulations and preparing for likely future requirements in key areas including data privacy and protection, so businesses need to know which data contains sensitive information to secure it and avoid leakage or breach.

But not all data is equal and organizations need to be able to identify the high value data that is business-critical from the low value, low risk data which does not require governance or protecting. The only way to do this is to ensure data is clean and high quality.

Cultivating a data-driven culture

Being data-driven is developing an organization-wide culture that understands and actively seeks to extract value from data to underpin all decision-making, ensuring better business outcomes. It’s less about having the data and more knowing how to optimize it.

This requires a high level of maturity and commitment to developing this capability over time. One of the primary challenges for organizations becoming more data-driven is connecting technical and business teams effectively. This is not a new issue, but many companies have not yet addressed it successfully and it is hindering their ability to become data-driven.

Data teams are often focused on building data governance foundations and setting up various tools and processes to help their organization. However, the business teams may find the data they are getting is too technical, not of the right quality, not in the right format, or simply not the right data they need. The data team may not understand the business context of the request and therefore what data is required, and this unintentional misalignment is a huge challenge for organizations to overcome.

As a result, companies end up with data teams doing their best to build robust data governance systems, but business teams remain unsatisfied and underutilize the data. This is where accelerating data transformation with AI-augmented data quality initiatives becomes mission-critical. Business users need solutions that allow them to work with data independently—changing formats, enriching it, and resolving issues automatically through smart algorithms. This provides the trustworthy data foundation required for implementing successful AI projects.

Successful AI starts with data governance

Despite the current hype surrounding AI, Gartner has, however, estimated a loss of confidence in generative AI projects due to poor data quality, as one main reason, with at least 30 per cent predicted to be abandoned by 2025 at the proof of concept stage.

Ensuring data quality stems from establishing an organization-wide data governance strategy. This will ensure the business is focused on the desired outcomes of using AI and generative AI, rather than rolling out AI regardless of the state of the data that will be used to train it. AI is, however, also a tool that will help get the data into a state of AI readiness by reducing the manual oversight and labor traditionally needed to transform and cleanse data by automating processes and rules. It can also help with profiling and classifying data and detecting anomalies, contributing to the overall health of data sets.

GenAI is able to capture data in non-standard formats including tables, images and even audio, to ensure data quality rules are applied universally. AI also enables non-technical users to self-serve and find the data insights they need by using natural language to process queries, supporting the creation of business value for an organization in any and all of its departments. This process of data democratization is central to the success of any AI initiatives, as restricting their application and benefit to technical teams will severely restrict their impact.

Ultimately, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to AI training data. Each poor quality record will add confusion to the LLM, increasing the risk of hallucinations, and when poor quality data is consistently used, the trustworthiness of the outputs will decline. Today, there is an inflection point created by the rapid advancement of AI toolsets, the exponential increase in data, and digital and AI regulation which means organisations have a window of opportunity to get their data strategy in place. With competitive advantage, market expansion, customer experience and business growth all at stake, the winners will be those who prioritize this transformation now.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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AI robot trained by watching videos successfully performs surgery.

Watching old episodes of ER won’t make you a doctor, but watching videos may be all the training a robotic surgeon’s AI brain needs to sew you up after a procedure. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University have published a new paper showing off a surgical robot as capable as a human in carrying out some procedures after simply watching humans do so.

The research team tested their idea with the popular da Vinci Surgical System, which is often used for non-invasive surgery. Programming robots usually requires manually inputting every movement that you want them to make. The researchers bypassed this using imitation learning, a technique that implanted human-level surgical skills in the robots by letting them observe how humans do it.

The researchers put together hundreds of videos recorded from wrist-mounted cameras demonstrating how human doctors do three particular tasks: needle manipulation, tissue lifting, and suturing. The researchers essentially used the kind of training ChatGPT and other AI models use, but instead of text, the model absorbed information about the way human hands and the tools they are holding move. This kinematic data essentially turns movement into math the model can apply to carry out the procedures upon request. After watching the videos, the AI model could use the da Vinci platform to mimic the same techniques. It’s not too dissimilar from how Google is experimenting with teaching AI-powered robots to navigate spaces and complete tasks by showing them videos.

Surgical AI

“It’s really magical to have this model and all we do is feed it camera input and it can predict the robotic movements needed for surgery. We believe this marks a significant step forward toward a new frontier in medical robotics,” senior author and JHU assistant professor Axel Krieger said in a release. “The model is so good learning things we haven’t taught it. Like if it drops the needle, it will automatically pick it up and continue. This isn’t something I taught it do.”

The idea of an AI-controlled robot holding blades and needles around your body might sound scary, but the precision of machines can make them better in some cases than human doctors. Robotic surgery is increasingly common in some instances. A robot performing complex procedures independently might actually be safer, with fewer medical errors. Human doctors could have more time and energy to focus on unexpected complications and the more difficult parts of a surgery that machines aren’t up to handling yet.

The researchers have plans to test using the same techniques to teach an AI how to do a complete surgery. They’re not alone in pursuing the idea of AI-assisted robotic healthcare. Earlier this year, AI dental technology developer Perceptive showcased the success of an AI-guided robot performing a dental procedure on a human without supervision.

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Today’s game has a super-high average score and is ending streaks left, right and center. Mine was nearly among them

Having a very, very long Wordle streak is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it grants me immense bragging rights over those mere mortals with their streaks in the hundreds. On the other, it turns every game into a must-win ordeal. After all, what would I be without my Wordle streak? A so-called ‘expert’ with no credentials, that’s what. I’d be laughed out of town.

I joke, of course, but having gone 1,046 games without a loss I would rather not give up my streak all the same. I nearly had to today, though, because game #1,244 (Thursday, 14 November) nearly sent me back to ground zero.

I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only one, though – because today’s Wordle answer is undoubtedly a very difficult one. And it’s all the fault of the New York Times’ puzzle setters.

To explain why, I’ll need to reveal the solution, so don’t read past this point if you haven’t played yet, because SPOILERS FOR TODAY’S WORDLE, GAME #1,244, ON THURSDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 2024 will follow. You have been warned.

Wordle hall of shame

Let’s start with a question: what’s the hardest Wordle ever? Is it CAULK, one of the first games to upset thousands of avid Wordlers soon after the game’s meteoric rise to prominence? Or maybe BORAX, a word that many players outside of the United States had almost no knowledge of? Or JAZZY, with its repeated Zs and very-uncommon J at the start?

None of those, actually – the toughest ever is PARER, game #454 in September 2022. That’s based on the fact that it had an average score of 6.3, which to put it in context is half a guess more than its closest competitor, MUMMY (#491, 5.8).

Those average scores come from WordleBot, the in-game AI helper tool that analyzes your Wordle after you’ve played. As well as doing that, it records the average across everyone who plays, and in turn I note down those averages to keep a sort of league table. I have 956 of them listed now, giving me a pretty good idea of which Wordles people have found most difficult.

By that measure, today’s game is some way down the list of the hardest ever, with an average of 4.9. High, but not ridiculously so. However, that only tells half of the story.

Right, let’s get into the specifics now, which means revealing today’s answer. This is your last chance to go away and play if you haven’t done so yet.

**FINAL SPOILER ALERT**

Sorry, what?

(Image credit: ShutterStock)

Today’s answer is UVULA.

No, me neither.

I do sort of know what it means, actually. Or at least I knew before I played it that it was a real word, albeit a fairly obscure one with a very strange spelling. For the unaware, it’s the soft dangly bit between your tonsils at the back of your throat. I thought it was the ridge at the top of your mouth, maybe, but at least I was in the right area.

Others will not be so lucky. Twitter is already alight with people complaining that either they had no idea what it means or that it was just too obscure.

As well as its relative obscurity as a word, UVULA suffers from having an incredibly unusual format, with UVU at the start; that’s not found in any other answer. Plus, it contains two letter Us – and as I show in my analysis of every Wordle answer, that’s a very rare occurrence too, with only 10 games among the original 2,309 solutions having that format.

All of this added up to make it a very tough game. Its average of 4.9 puts it just outside of the top 20, but I think that’s misleading – people are probably solving it through brute force in the end, because there are no other words that have that format. With a word like PARER, in contrast, there are lots of alternatives and it’s therefore easy to keep guessing until you eventually fail. Here, you will ultimately reach a point where nothing else fits!

That’s what happened to me, anyway. I usually solve Wordle in about 10-20 minutes, sometimes 30-40 if it’s a difficult one and I’m playing carefully. Here, I must have stared at the board and played around with various letter combinations for two hours. That’s genuinely no exaggeration. My family thought I’d gone mad.

I nearly gave up – I was completely stumped. However, I have a daily column to write so kept going and eventually scored a five. My streak was genuinely in doubt, though – I could easily have wasted a couple of guesses on similarly obscure words that weren’t correct.

(Image credit: New York Times)

NYT blues

So why is this the NYT’s fault and not mine?

Well, it’s worth noting that this is – for the second day in a row – a non-canon Wordle answer. By that I mean that it was not among the 2,309 answers originally dreamed up by the game’s creator Josh Wardle and his partner, but has instead been added by the NYT.

Yesterday’s PRIMP (see below) was also one of these, and in total we’ve now had 10 of them: GUANO (game #646), SNAFU (#659), BALSA (#720), KAZOO (#730), LASER (#1038), PIOUS (#1054), BEAUT (#1186) and MOMMY (#1208).

Notice anything about those words? Yes – they include some of the toughest in recent memory.

I can easily work out the average for Wordle as a whole, and right now it stands at 3.964 across those 956 games that I have a score for. However, if you look at the average for those 10 games added by the NYT you’ll see that it’s a mighty 4.35. It’s official: the NYT is making Wordle harder!

There is a reason for this, of course – in that Josh Wardle used up most of the obvious answers. LASER (average: 3.3) and PIOUS (3.8) are the only two below 4.0, and are also the most common words among them, MOMMY aside. That last word is an outlier, meanwhile, because it contains three Ms, an incredibly unusual format (and it had an average of 5.0 as a result).

Elsewhere, KAZOO was a 5.1, PRIMP yesterday was 4.5, BALSA 4.4 and SNAFU 4.3, so it certainly appears as though the NYT’s editors are choosing tougher words when given the chance.

There’s nothing wrong with this, really – and I like a challenge as much as anyone. UVULA is a perfectly fair word, albeit an undeniably difficult one to solve in Wordle. But I wasn’t feeling anywhere near as charitable when I was sat staring at a seemingly impossible game, and I doubt you will be if you just lost your streak today, either.

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Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here’s all you need to know to solve today’s game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Wordle hints and answers, Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Connections today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.

NYT Connections today (game #522) – today’s words

(Image credit: New York Times)

Today’s NYT Connections words are…

GRAINDRAINTOTALCUBESYRUPSHREDSIGNATURESAPJAMTAXPOWDERROCKEMPTYGROOVETIPEXHAUST

NYT Connections today (game #522) – hint #1 – group hints

What are some clues for today’s NYT Connections groups?

Yellow: Use upGreen: I’m really feeling this, manBlue: Service not includedPurple: The sweetest thing

Need more clues?

We’re firmly in spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today’s NYT Connections puzzles…

NYT Connections today (game #522) – hint #2 – group answers

What are the answers for today’s NYT Connections groups?

YELLOW: DEPLETEGREEN: PLAY MUSIC WITH PASSIONBLUE: WORDS ON A RESTAURANT RECEIPTPURPLE: FORMS OF SUGAR

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.

NYT Connections today (game #522) – the answers

(Image credit: New York Times)

The answers to today’s Connections, game #522, are…

YELLOW: DEPLETE DRAIN, EMPTY, EXHAUST, SAPGREEN: PLAY MUSIC WITH PASSION GROOVE, JAM, ROCK, SHREDBLUE: WORDS ON A RESTAURANT RECEIPT SIGNATURE, TAX, TIP, TOTALPURPLE: FORMS OF SUGAR CUBE, GRAIN, POWDER, SYRUP

My rating: EasyMy score: Perfect

This is probably one of the easiest Connections games we’ve had in a few weeks. The first couple of groups, yellow and green, were obvious collections of synonyms, while blue was not much harder; it doesn’t take a genius to spot that TAX, TIP and TOTAL go together, and in that context SIGNATURE is an easy addition. Would I have got purple, FORMS OF SUGAR, if not by default? We’ll never know for sure, but I suspect that if the other three hadn’t been so simple I might have put POWDER and GRAIN together at least, then built from there. I’m not complaining, of course – I’ve had a couple of failures lately, so I’ll take every victory I get, even if it wasn’t a particularly challenging game.

How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.

Yesterday’s NYT Connections answers (Wednesday, 13 November, game #521)

YELLOW: THINGS THAT ARE YELLOW CANARY, LEMON, MINION, MUSTARDGREEN: BUILDING ADD-ONS ADDITION, ANNEX, EXTENSION, WINGBLUE: CONCERNS FOR A DENTIST CALCULUS, CAVITY, PLAQUE, TARTARPURPLE: WORDS THAT SEEM LONGER WRITTEN THAN SPOKEN COLONEL, PHARAOH, WEDNESDAY, WORCESTERSHIRE

What is NYT Connections?

NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.

On the plus side, you don’t technically need to solve the final one, as you’ll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What’s more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.

It’s a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.

It’s playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.

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