👋 Hello hello,
Google spent the last year watching AI search quietly siphon clicks away from the websites it used to send traffic to. This week it finally did something about it, sort of. Meanwhile OpenAI made its images invisible (in a good way) and ChatGPT got permission to read your text messages, which is either a huge convenience or the plot of a movie you don't want to be in.
Also, yesterday we told you that Claude developed a Mac driver for a printer that was only built for Windows. Today we’ll show you how.
🚨🚨 In a couple hours, the Practicaly AI team will be live and answering all your burning questions around AI and building AI workflows. Spots are still open! 🚨🚨
Let’s get into it.
🔥🔥🔥 Three Exclusive AI Updates
OpenAI shipped a Messages plugin that lets ChatGPT search your Apple Messages, catch you up on conversations, and draft or send replies, all from your Mac. It's live now in ChatGPT Work and in Codex on desktop, and you install it from Plugins > Public.
The prompts OpenAI is suggesting say a lot about the intent here. Things like checking your calendar and replying with a few free dinner times, surfacing follow-ups from yesterday's conversations, pulling birthdays out of your texts and adding them to your calendar, or flagging spam messages worth deleting. Basically, ChatGPT becomes the assistant that already knows what your friends said to you last night.
AI Overviews and AI Mode have been gutting click-throughs to publisher websites for over a year now. Google's response, announced this week, is a "Preferred Sources" button that publishers can embed directly on their own sites, letting readers mark that site as one they want to see more often across Search, Discover, and Google News.
This builds on Google's May rollout of Preferred Sources inside its AI experiences, where over 345,000 unique sources have already been selected by users. Google says people are twice as likely to click through to a source once they've marked it as preferred, so this is a real lever, not just a PR gesture.
Google also confirmed that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in plain language, and Android users will get customizable audio news briefings. If you run a website that depends on search traffic, the preferred sources button is worth embedding sooner rather than later.
GPT-Image-2 in the API now supports transparent backgrounds in preview, meaning you can generate an image with a genuine alpha channel instead of a white box you have to cut out by hand. That's a bigger deal than it sounds for anyone making marketing assets, product mockups, or presentation graphics.
Practically, this means one generated asset, like a product shot, a chart, or a sticker, can now be dropped onto any background: a seasonal campaign page, a branded slide deck, a merch mockup, without a separate background-removal step and without the halos or clipped edges that tools like remove.bg tend to leave behind.
If you build decks, run an online store, or design social templates, this is one of those quiet updates that saves real hours.
🔥🔥 Two Pro AI Resources
1. 🎓 Claude Academy
Anthropic just launched a free, open education platform teaching people how to actually use AI well, not just how to use Claude's features. It's organized around real problems you're trying to solve rather than product tutorials, and it leans on ideas like "today's AI is the worst AI you'll ever use" to build durable habits instead of tips that expire with the next model update.
It's free and open to anyone, no Claude subscription required.
2. 🤖 Clara AI SDR
Clara is an AI sales rep that lives on your website and talks to visitors through a real-time video avatar instead of a text chatbot. You train it on your pitch deck, scripts, and FAQs, and once it's live it can qualify a visitor, walk them through a demo by sharing its screen, handle objections, book a meeting, and push everything into your CRM, all inside one conversation. Clara says teams can go live within 24 hours.
It's most useful if your website already gets meaningful inbound traffic and your sales team is stuck repeating the same qualification questions on every first call. Worth noting Clara's "10X conversions" claim on its site is their own marketing number, not an independent benchmark, so treat it as a value proposition to test rather than a guarantee.
🔥 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With AI
A developer had an HP printer with zero native macOS support. Instead of giving up, he handed the problem to Claude Code and let it work through it over one long session: reverse-engineering HP's proprietary SPL3 print language, running HP's actual codec inside a Linux container to study how it behaved, and building a working native driver from what it learned. The full session is public if you want to see how it actually unfolded.
Pick the thing that's never going to get official support, an old printer, a discontinued app, a device with no modern driver.
Give Claude Code full context: error logs, existing (even broken) drivers, spec sheets, anything the manufacturer ever published.
Ask it to identify the actual protocol or file format at play before writing any code.
Let it test against the real hardware or a sandboxed copy of the manufacturer's own tools, and iterate on what fails.
Have it package the working result into something reusable, so you're not repeating the reverse-engineering next time.
🎤 Are we seeing you?
At 10 AM today, we’re hosting a free session for all our subscribers. Join us live, build in real time, and get your questions answered on the spot.
Can’t make it live? Don’t worry, we’ll send out the recording after the session to everyone who RSVP’ed.
Event details:
📅When: Friday at 10AM PT/1PM ET
📍Where: Virtual, Google Meet
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Until next time,
Team @PracticalyAI
