According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you're going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will exhaustively search travel options, read up on all the fun things to do, check all the local hotspots, and offer you a fully fledged itinerary. So far, I've found this to work only in the most generic ways: If you want to do the six most obvious things in any city on planet Earth, AI has you covered, but that's about as far as it goes.

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google's new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious …

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Some news: The Vergecast is now a daily podcast! Starting today, we'll be posting every weekday, with even more gadgets and rankings and conversations and feelings and podcasts-within-podcasts. We're excited for all the ways this new schedule lets us tell new kinds of stories, experiment with new tech and new formats, and involve you even more in the show.

(The other immediate change to know about: We'll be publishing the show in the afternoons going forward, so we can include the day's biggest news in our 90 Seconds on The Verge segment. The goal is to always be live before 4PM ET. Often well before.)

As we've been preparing for our new …

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