Check out how the Google app’s latest voice was created

Recently, you may have noticed that the Google app received an updated, slightly clearer text-to-speech (TTS) voice. The more natural-sounding voice is a welcome change, but have you ever wondered how Google brings the words coming from your phone to life?

In the latest episode of Nat and Lo, a YouTube series where the two Google employees give you behind-the-scenes looks at what goes on at Google HQ, the hosts explore how the latest TTS voice update came to be. In the video above, you can check out part of the arduous process of recording thousands of lines, along with a little history of TTS.

April’s free PlayStation Plus games include Zombi, Dead Star and more

Sony has unveiled the batch of free games that PlayStation Plus members can look forward to in the month of April. On the PlayStation 4 front, gamers will be able to take on their friends in the space shooter Dead Star. If the undead are more your style, you can take on Zombi, a PlayStation 4 port of the Wii U launch title ZombiU.

Meanwhile, Playstation 3 owners will get a crack at Savage Moon and survival title I Am Alive, while PS Vita gamers can check out Shutshimi and the puzzle action of A Virus Named Tom.

All of the above titles will be available as free downloads for PS Plus members throughout the month of April.

Why is there PlayStation stuff here?

PlayStation on Android Central?!? We use our Android phones to interact with the PlayStation 4 — especially if you have a Sony Xperia phone. We’re also talking a lot more about VR, and PlayStation VR is just as big a part of that conversation. It stretches things outside of Android a little, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun. Enjoy!

• Gaming with Second Screen apps
• Hands-on with PlayStation VR
• Specs comparison: Playstation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Gear VR

Dyson Pure Cool Link purifier will give you an unpolluted, connected, home

Dyson doesn’t just want to make sure your floors are nice and clean, it is hoping to make sure the air you breathe inside your home is clean too. 

Apparently the air inside your home can be up to five times more polluted than outside. Not great right? Well, Dyson has announced a solution designed to help, in the form of the Pure Cool Link purifier.

When you think of a purifier, you probably think of a big white box in the corner of a room. Well Dyson has made its purifier more desirable thanks to a familiar clean design.

The Pure Cool Link doesn’t just automatically remove 99.95 per cent of indoor allergens and pollutants as small as 0.1 microns, but it connects to your smartphone too via the new Dyson Link app.

Pocket-lint

First of all, 0.1 microns in an everyday scenario is said to be pollutants like cigarette smoke. The Pure Cool Link purifier fan uses Air Multiplier technology and a DC motor to draw in the polluted air, pass it through the 360-degree Glass HEPA filter, before releasing purified air through the amplifier loop and into your home.

Sensors at the back of the device detect changes in conditions to automatically adjust the airflow in order to maintain the target air quality. The Dyson Link app allows users to keep track of air quality history, remotely monitor air quality inside and outside their home, and set a new target if the home reaches a poor air quality level. There is also an auto mode that will allow the Pure Cool Link to react automatically to the monitored air quality however, so you could just set it up and let it do all the leg work for you.

Pocket-lint

The app is available for iOS and Android devices and users will be able to link any future Dyson connected devices to it. Alongside the basics of turning the purifier on and off, users will also be able to set schedules, turn notifications on or off, as well as turn oscillation on or off. There is also a night mode feature that will limit the fan speed and dim the display on the bottom of the purifier. 

So how much will it set you back to have an unpolluted home? Well, there are two models of the Dyson Pure Cool Link purifier fan, both of which come in blue or white colour options.

The tower model model will cost £450 and the desk model will have a price tag of £350, both available now at Dyson.co.uk.

Microsoft’s Build 2016 conference by the numbers

Despite somehow managing to stretch 20 minutes worth of actual news into a two and a half-hour slog, Microsoft announced a host of new products and services at its 2016 Build developers conference on Wednesday. The company announced an “Anniversary Update” for Windows 10, new universal social media apps, educational trips to Mars using the Hololens and a new software dev kit for the XBox One. And that’s just the start!

Engadget has a new Windows 10 app!

Forgive us for tooting our own horn, but Microsoft isn’t the only company with big Windows news today — we have some, too. Engadget has released a new app for Windows 10, giving you quick access to technology news from your Start screen. On top of presenting stories in a touch-friendly format, the app also has a Live Tile that offers a glimpse of the latest happenings. Give it a shot if you’re eager to follow all the developments from Build (and beyond) without having to wade through your web browser.

Source: Microsoft Store

Chatting with Skype bots feels like talking to a search engine

Earlier today, Microsoft announced that it would be integrating chat bots into Skype, thus allowing you to have quick conversations with a variety of businesses and services. At the Build 2016 keynote, we saw examples of how you could book a hotel through a WestinBot or order a pizza though a Domino’s Bot. Those specific bots are unfortunately not available to the public just yet, but if you update Skype today, you’ll be able to play around with at least a few chat bots to get an idea of how it all works.

The way you add a bot is the same way you’d add a contact; indeed, the Add Contact screen in Skype now has two categories: “People” and “Bots.” As of right now, the only Bots available to add on Skype are Bing Music, Bing News, Bing Images, Getty Images and Build Bot (which is mostly centered around the Build conference). They’re mostly in Preview mode at the moment (in other words, they’re still sort of in beta), but they do appear to be functional.

As you might expect, the chat bots respond to very specific keywords. You’re not really having a conversation with these bots so much as you’re typing in search queries. For example, with the Bing Music bot, typing in “Hello” would bring up Adele’s song (a link to her YouTube video, it looks like) rather than polite small talk. A “Hi” in Bing News brought up articles with the word “Hi” in it. When I asked the Build Bot “What’s for lunch?” it responded with different lunch hours instead of what was on the menu. Asking the Build Bot to tell me a joke just prompted it to say: “Sorry Nicole, I’m a BOT with a specific purpose… Build. I don’t have the answers to everything. You might ask around or try this thing called the internet.” Cheeky.

In short, having a conversation with these chat bots feels a little like talking to a search engine, not a person. Which makes sense, because these chat bots are all single-purpose, but it does show that they have their limits. If you’re looking for a more complicated answer, it’s probably easier to just make a call or look up your answer on Google (or Bing, naturally).

Of course, it’s still early days yet for Microsoft’s AI strategy and we get the feeling that future bots will be a lot more intelligent. Plus once Cortana is integrated, it’ll begin to feel a lot more natural. At least we hope so anyway.

You can try this out for yourself if you download the latest Skype update for Windows, Android and iOS. Mac users will have to wait for now.

Get all the news from today’s Microsoft Build keynote right here, and follow along with our liveblog!

Dyson’s latest air purifier measures your air quality

Exactly one year ago, we managed to get our hands on the then new Dyson Pure Cool air purifier and quickly fell in love with it. While folks outside Asia are still waiting for the Pure Hot + Cool, Dyson is offering everyone something more special for the time being: the Pure Cool Link. As you can probably tell from the name, we finally have a Dyson fan that comes with an app (for both iOS and Android). Better yet, it even tracks your room’s air quality, and this data is used for automatically adjusting the airflow in order to suppress pollution level; though the app also offers manual control over the fan speed, along with rotation toggle, timer and a night-time auto mode for quiet monitoring plus dimmer LED display.

To make the Dyson Link app more worthwhile, the company teamed up with air quality data analytics company, BreezoMeter, in order to let you compare your home’s air quality, temperature and humidity with live outdoor data. It’ll also warn you about high pollen count as well, in case your nose isn’t so keen on that kind of stuff.

Leaving the air quality monitoring, the app and the slightly modified remote controller aside, the Pure Cool Link is otherwise virtually identical to its predecessor. It features the same cylindrical glass HEPA filter with a layer of activated carbon granules, which claims to filter out “99.97 percent of pollutants and allergens as small as 0.3 microns from the air;” or change that to 99.95 percent for as tiny as 0.1 micron. This means particles like pollen, bacteria, mold, Asbestos, odors, tobacco smoke and even carbon dust are easily trapped.

Following Japan’s retail launch yesterday, the Pure Cool Link’s tower variant is immediately available on Dyson’s US website today for $499.99, which is actually what the earlier Pure Cool originally cost. If you want to check out the device in person, it’ll be in select major stores from April 11th onwards. UK (£450) and Western Europe will also be selling the Pure Cool Link as of March 31st, followed by Canada, China and South East Asia in April.

Elon Musk says this is ‘part 1’ of the Tesla Model 3 reveal

If you’re ready for Tesla’s $35,000 electric vehicle and have $1,000 ready to put down, then your day has dawned — at least in Australia. Elon Musk tweeted a pic of the Model 3 pre-order line down under where it’s already March 31st, while the rest of us get ready for the company’s LA event tomorrow night at 10PM ET. Of course we’ll be on hand for what he says is just “part 1 of the Model 3 unveil,” with a part 2 scheduled for closer to its production in late 2017. In yet another tweet, Musk promised a follower we will “see the car very clearly, but some important elements will be added and some will evolve.”

Model 3 order day starting in Australia pic.twitter.com/T6aUnG5BCv

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2016

@rossbin You will see the car very clearly, but some important elements will be added and some will evolve.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2016

Microsoft hopes Cortana will lead an army of chatbots to victory

If Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest cover story didn’t make obvious enough, the hour or so the company dedicated to them on stage at its BUILD developer conference should have cleared up any doubts: Microsoft sees Cortana as a big part of its future. It wants the AI assistant to do everything, but knows it can’t make that dream a reality by itself. Its new framework allows developers to build an independent chatbot that plays nice with users and Cortana. It’s not the only one pursuing the goal of the perfect assistant, though, and there’s no telling if its efforts to inspire an army of chatbots will be successful.

Although chatbots have been around for half a century, they didn’t have a practical use until the internet took hold. SmarterChild, which was popular on AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s Messenger, worked like an advanced directory inquiries, giving out business information, weather and even movie times. Google searches quickly took over this functionality for most users, though, and more modern interpretations have largely taken the form of a personal assistant.

Apple’s Siri, released in 2011 with the iPhone 4S, blended conversational interactions with basic functionality like opening apps, playing music, and managing calendar appointments. In 2012, Google Now took a more automated approach, surfacing information based on your search results, calendar, and email. Cortana, which debuted in 2013, built on this with greater integrations, deep links into apps and a secure, personalizable “Notebook” that stores user information. In the meantime, developers in China were doing something completely different.

WeChat’s business-bots

WeChat is a Chinese chat app with over 650 million active users. Years ago, Local businesses began taking advantage of its popularity, creating accounts not just to field customer service inquiries, but also to process purchases and reservations. This started with human representatives manually handling requests, but companies began to automate the process using chatbots.

Microsoft is very familiar with WeChat: It’s run numerous tests on the service, with varying success — it once deployed 100,000 bots on the platform, only to have them pulled down within days. The company’s now-famous — or perhaps infamous — Twitter bot Tay is actually a sibling to Xiaoice, a bot that’s lived peacefully on WeChat, as well as Weibo and Line, for years. It should come as no surprise, then, that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called out WeChat on stage today, noting how it’s made interacting with businesses easy in China. Qi Lu, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President in charge of Bing, Skype and Office, made the inspiration clearer: He told Bloomberg Businessweek that the power of chatbots “was somewhat accidentally invented by WeChat,” adding that Microsoft now “has a leadership role to play” in the field.

Modern interpretations

Despite dabbling with WeChat for the past few years, Microsoft is a little late to the functional chatbot party. Ostensibly, the Amazon Echo is an intelligent wireless speaker. In reality, it’s all about “Alexa,” Amazon’s voice-based functional chatbot. Alexa is always listening and can answer basic queries – the sort you’d give to present day Siri or Cortana – but it also lets you order stuff from Amazon, or pay off your Capital One credit card bill. The retail giant has been rapidly iterating on the platform, and the recent spate of new hardware shows its dedication to the cause.

Facebook, too, has been experimenting with the idea of chatbots. Its “M” assistant, currently in a limited test, can handle all sorts of inquiries. It uses both Facebook’s pool data on you and conversational AI to let you buy or book almost anything (BuzzFeed pushed this to the Nth degree to rent an army of parrots). M is in an extremely early phase right now, and relies heavily on human workers, but this isn’t the long-term plan. The employees are apparently training the AI on how to deal with requests, which it’s hoped will let Facebook deploy a less human-dependent bot in the future.

Google’s also supposed to be working on an AI-powered chat assistant, according to a December report from The Wall Street Journal. It’ll apparently mirror M in many ways, but until we hear more about it – perhaps at Google I/O in June – it’s difficult to say how it’ll differentiate itself. The one thing we can say for sure is Amazon, Facebook and Google are all powerhouses that would love to be the conduit by which you live your life online. Sure, Amazon might be more focused on selling you things, from its store, and Google might want more data for advertisers, but when it comes to personal assistants, the goal is similar.

Microsoft’s approach

Microsoft is coming at this from a slightly different angle, though. Facebook may know a lot about you, but it doesn’t have your private data, it doesn’t have access to your files and it can’t track what you do outside of your web browser. Cortana is already a cornerstone of Windows, and at BUILD today Microsoft showed the personal assistant keeping track of various presenters’ lives, from daily interactions with colleagues to recalling what toy store someone had visitor a year ago. It’s also available on iOS and Android, albeit in a less-powerful form.

Microsoft’s plan to transform Cortana from a helpful personal assistant into a fully fledged chatbot is simple: Make companies build their own bots that play nice with its own. To that end, it released the Microsoft Bot Framework, a tool to create AIs that can be deployed across a wide variety of services. On stage it highlighted a simple Dominos demo that could process pizza orders on its own. Although the demonstrations were largely shown in the Skype app, the bots are platform independent. The company confirmed compatibility with third-party services like Slack and Telegram, and even SMS. It’s clear from this broad compatibility that Microsoft wants its bots to be everywhere.

The Dominos bot had the safety net of a human operator when things went awry. Even when the fleshbag takes over, though, the bot is still suggesting dialog, and making sure orders are processed using the correct syntax. That’s vital when you consider Microsoft’s endgame here: It wants Cortana to be able to talk to Dominos on your behalf. By creating a free, open-source framework for companies to build upon, it’s essentially ensuring that Cortana will be able to talk to a vast network of business without issue. Companies, for their part, get a functional chatbot that works with or without Microsoft’s assistant.

The move echoes Microsoft’s strategy at large. Under Nadella, it’s accepted that it can’t be everything to everyone, but it wants to make sure it’s relevant in as many markets as possible. And if everyone uses Microsoft’s framework, the cross-platform Cortana will be an enviable position versus Amazon’s Alexa and Facebook’s M.

Competing platforms

It’s worth noting, though, that Facebook has made moves to open up its Messenger platform. It’s apparently gone so far as to secretly release a chatbot SDK of its own to select developers. The SDK reportedly lets developers build apps for Messenger that facilitate purchasing goods, making reservations – basically everything Microsoft’s does. Whether it’ll release this SDK publicly isn’t clear, but the chances of it playing nice with services outside of Facebook’s purview seem slim. Google, too, if the rumors are to be believed, is building its own platform, and encouraging developers to build bots for it, building on its efforts to integrate third-party services into Google Now.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is being remarkably open in its efforts to attract developers. Its framework is available on Github, rather than a company developer portal. It has clear guidelines, and can be coded in either C# (one of Microsoft’s languages) or the open-source node.js environment. Stefan Rimola, a front-end web developer at Engadget, says the documentation and language choices make it “easy to pick up” for a “broad spectrum” of devs.

But herein lies the problem. As sound as Microsoft’s strategy seems, it can’t go it alone. The company has had big problems attracting developers since the modern Windows era began. It’s made steps towards rectifying that, like buying Xamarin to encourage the use of Windows as a cross-platform development tool, or surprising the world by integrating the Linux command line into Windows. Its cross-platform, open approach with the chatbot echoes this attitude.

There’s no way of telling if companies will embrace Microsoft. Chances are Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple are all shooting for the same thing. We could end up with multiple competing bot platforms (just as with chat apps themselves), each with access only to certain third-party services. If Microsoft can get developers on board and establish a lead, maybe it can persuade Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple to play nice with its framework. But that’s a big if.

Soccer legend Pele suing Samsung over doppelganger

Korean tech giant Samsung isn’t a stranger to lawsuits, with its most famous legal battle being that never-ending one against Apple. But now, Samsung is about to face another legal challenge, after soccer legend Pelé has filed a $30 million lawsuit over a lookalike featured in a New York Times newspaper ad. Pelé, whose actual birth name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Brazilian football players often shorten their full name), alleges that Samsung broke off negotiations with him for an advertising campaign and instead hired someone who “very closely” resembles his image, according to a complaint filed in a federal court in Chicago.

As Reuters reports, the lawsuit documents, filed by the firm which owns his trademark and publicity rights worldwide, called Pelé IP Ownership LLC, also point to Samsung’s use of a photo portraying a “modified bicycle or scissors-kick, perfected and famously used by Pelé” in its advertisement. (Here’s a picture, in case you’ve never seen Pelé’s trademark move before.)

The ad in question. [Image credit: Webber Represents]

We reached out to Samsung and a spokesperson said the company had no comment on the lawsuit.

Much like Pelé, other celebrities are keen to keep control of their image for marketing purposes. Lindsay Lohan (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls), for instance, is currently involved in a legal situation with Rockstar Games: She sued the developer over the likeness of a character in Grand Theft Auto V. Even though these two cases are different, this shows that these personalities aren’t afraid to go to court when need be.

Source: Reuters