Amazon Echo Dot refreshed with new tricks and colours

Amazon has announced a new version of its popular Amazon Echo Dot device that works within the Amazon Alexa eco-system.

The Echo Dot, which had previously been on sale in the US, has now come to the UK, getting a full revamp and refresh at the same time.

The device can be connected to any Bluetooth speaker within range, or for older speakers via a line-in cable.

Understanding that you might have a handful of Echo Dots and Echo devices in the home, Amazon has worked to make sure that only one of the devices responds depending on where you are in the house and how far you are from the closest device.

The new Amazon Echo Dot device will come in gloss black and gloss white. In the US it will cost $49 in the US and £49 in the UK. You’ll be able to buy the Dot in a 6 or 12 pack so you can blanket coverage your home with the devices.

The new Device will only be able to be bought if you have the more powerful Amazon Echo device.

The news comes on the back of the announcement from Amazon that it will be launching the Amazon Echo in the UK for £179.

Mario, Miyamoto and Me

Apple’s keynote presentation, where it revealed the latest iPhones, Apple Watch and AirPods, has just finished. I’m on my way to talk to the man whose entrance received probably the biggest roar of excitement in the whole event: Super Mario creator, Shigeru Miyamoto.

He’s sitting in a hotel room where plush figures of Nintendo-favourite characters, from Mario to Bowser, sit on the sofa with him.

With the help of his translator, Miyamoto-san talks me through the news: From December, Mario will be on iOS devices in a game called Super Mario Run. “Do you want to play it?” he asks, as I grab the iPhone out of his hand before he changes his mind.

So there I am, being shown how to play. “As soon as you tap once, the game’s going to start. Are you ready? Just press, you don’t have to swipe up to make him jump,” I’m told. “It’s designed so you can play it one-handed.” This takes some getting used to, but as soon as I stuff my spare hand into my pocket, it all makes sense.

It quickly transpires that this game isn’t like other endless running games. First of all, it’s not endless – when you reach the end of a level, you find yourself jumping up to hit the top of a flagpole, just like in other Mario games.

You also hold the iPhone in portrait mode, unlike most platform games, including the original Mario, meaning you don’t get as much notice of what’s coming next. This game is also richer than many other runner games. The scenery is populated with familiar details – from pipes to holes to piranha plants and dungeons – all recognisably backed by Mario-esque music.

The controls are simpler than ever before too: press to jump, press harder and he jumps higher.

Nintendo

The purpose, though, is that once you’ve played this, you might be tempted to try other Mario games on Nintendo’s fully-fledged consoles. Nintendo’s step over to smartphones is happening. The question is, why now?

“The hardware has to provide a stable experience and until recently we felt that we couldn’t get that, but the response that these systems can provide is good enough now,” Mr Miyamoto says.

“With Mario games, over the years we have been making the side-scrolling games like the Super Mario Bros games and Super Mario Maker and we also have the 3D games, like Super Mario Galaxy, where you’re running around in a 3D space.

“Our intent has always been that the side-scrolling new Super Mario Bros games would be simpler and ones that more casual players could be able to enjoy. What we’ve found is that even though those games are designed to be simpler and easier to understand, the controls can still be difficult for some players and they have a hard time controlling Mario or making him run and jump at the same time.

“We wanted to ask how we can make the experience even simpler for somebody who had never played a Mario game. That’s been the focus with Super Mario Run: a game that’s even easier to get into and play.”

This is not a port of a game from another console – which has often been the downfall of titles which have thrived when real buttons were available to use but where pressing your thumb on unyielding glass is less satisfying.

So is this the next stage in accessible, casual games?

“For many years our mission in approaching hardware has been our goal of expanding the number of people playing games. Now, people are having these interactive experiences through their smart devices and so that’s accomplished this great mission of helping to turn more people into gamers. We’re using this opportunity to bring our characters to this audience and let them experience the fun of our games and hopefully bring them back to our platforms.”

Apple

What are the bonuses of a smartphone over a conventional console, I ask. “Even when we were working on the first DS system, we were thinking about opportunities to incorporate GPS or how to use a persistent network connection. We didn’t do it then, but now with a mobile device we’re looking into functionalities like the persistent network connection.

“That will play an important part in the Kingdom element of the game where you have your own Mushroom Kingdom and you’re bringing the Toad characters into the Kingdom and expanding and customising it, using that network connection. We’ll continue to look at the uniqueness of each hardware platform and create mobile games that leverage this to do things that can only be done there.”

Although the game will be available on Android devices one day, for now it’s Apple only. “The iPhone and iOS are great to work on because it’s stable. In terms of working with Apple, we found we shared a lot of philosophies and we found from early on it was easy to work with them. It’s Apple’s hardware of course, not ours, but that just means it’s a framework in which you try to be as creative as possible – it’s not a limitation, I look at it as a lot of fun.”

That brought us to our last question, how important will smartphone gaming become? “We’ll continue to look at the opportunities smartphones bring and when we see one we’ll continue to design for that hardware in a way that takes advantage of the functionality there. But we’ll keep designing for our own platforms as well.”

Tado teams up with Amazon for voice-controlled heating in the UK

Smart heating company Tado has announced it is teaming up with Amazon Echo to offer voice-controlled heating to its users in the UK, Germany and Austria. 

The collaboration comes after Amazon finally announced that Amazon Echo, and a refreshed Amazon Echo Dot would be coming to Europe and the UK in Autumn. Amazon Echo is a speaker that doubles up as a voice assistant and responds to the wake word “Alexa”. The Echo Dot is a smaller version of the Echo that loses the speaker element and acts as a little, always-on Alexa hub.

Tado is already an Amazon Echo partner in the US, allowing users to set, increase or decrease their home temperature with Tado by asking Alexa to do it for them.

The partnership is now extending to the UK, Germany and Austria, meaning Tado users in those countries, with Amazon Echo, will be able to say “Alexa, set (living room) temperature to 22 degrees” or “Alexa, increase (bedroom) temperature by three degrees”, for example. It will allow for quicker and easier control, as well as hands-free.

Tado is a smart heating system that automatically adjusts the temperature within your home based on your location. It uses your smartphone’s location to automatically turn the heating down when the last person leaves home and it will also turn the heating up when it recognises someone is on their way home. Tado will also takes into account the weather and your building characteristics.

• Tado third-gen system adds multi-room control, plus HomeKit and Echo compatibility
• Amazon Echo vs Amazon Tap vs Echo Dot: What’s the difference?
• Amazon Echo review
• Amazon Echo comes to Europe, UK customers can finally use Alexa

For the Alexa voice-control to work room-by-room, Tado users will need to have the Smart Radiator Thermostats that were launched at the beginning of the September 2016. They were announced alongside the third-generation of Smart Thermostat, which is also compatible with Apple’S HomeKit and IFTTT.

Amazon’s Echo will be available in the UK from Autumn for £149. The third-generation of Tado products are available in two Starter Kits, both of which can be rented for less than £6 per month.

The Tado Smart Thermostat v3 Starter Kit includes the Smart Thermostat and internet bridge and costs £199 to buy outright, while the Smart Radiator Thermostat Starter Kit that includes two Smart Radiator Thermostat and the bridge costs £179. Additional Smart Radiator Thermostats, priced at £59, and Smart Thermostats can be added to a Starter Kit 

You can hail a self-driving Uber in Pittsburgh starting today

Uber’s self-driving cars have been spotted around Pittsburgh for a few months now, but starting today you can actually take a ride in one. The company announced that as of today, Uber’s most “loyal” Pittsburgh customers might receive a ride in a self-driving Ford Fusion when they request an Uber X. As predicted, being a test subject in the company’s cars will net you a free ride.

Uber made the announcement at its Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, a location founded about 18 months ago specifically to focus on autonomous vehicles. The combination of a local government friendly to some reasonable radical experimentation coupled with the nearby Carnegie Mellon University providing a pipeline of excellent engineerings made Pittsburgh a natural choice for the program, but it’s still a little surprising it has cars on the road already. Google has been testing its vehicles in California for some time, but the fact that customers will actually get rides in Uber’s vehicles is a major milestone.

Of course, there are plenty of limitations in Uber’s Pittsburgh pilot. Only an unspecified “small number” of vehicles are being deployed to customers, and only on certain roads and routes that the company has already mapped out and tested extensively. Uber told me that those routes are some of the most popular roads being taken by its normal drivers, so it’s not like these are unpopulated back roads, but you can’t take an autonomous Uber anywhere you want.

There’s also a safety driver behind the wheel waiting to take over the car at a moment’s notice. This handy human can correct the car if it ever gets confused about what to do next, and they can also drive you off of the currently available autonomous routes to get you exactly to your destination. But if you’re going far outside the range of where these cars can operate, you’ll just get a normal Uber X instead; there doesn’t appear to be any way to specifically request a self-driving car, so you’ll just need to keep your fingers crossed. Hailing the car itself is pretty straightforward: the Uber app will show you if you’re getting a self-driving car (should you want to cancel the ride or celebrate, depending on how you feel about autonomous vehicles).

The cars that Uber is deploying are Ford Fusions with a huge array of sensors on top, with more hidden around the vehicle. The main unit up top is a 360-degree LIDAR unit that shoots out some 1 million laser beams per second to make a three-dimensional scan of the world around the car. Of course, those scans aren’t in color, so there’s another camera right below it that recognizes colors so the car can stop at a red light. There’s also a large front-facing camera array that looks for vehicles, pedestrians, lights, signs and so on.

Those are just a few of the sensors blanketing the car, and there’s also onboard compute and storage units for processing data in real time. The whole thing looks pretty elaborate right now, but Uber also showed me a Volvo with a much smaller and more discreet roof unit. An Uber representative called the Ford’s unit the “desktop” version and the Volvo’s a “laptop,” while promising we’d see the “smartphone” sized version before long.

Uber isn’t the only company operating a self-driving pilot — Delphi is testing a self-driving taxi in Singapore, and there’s a self-driving bus in the Netherlands, but it hasn’t yet taken passengers. As for what it’s like to actually request and ride in one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles? Well, we got a chance to do that, too — read all about it here.

I drove around Pittsburgh in a self-driving Uber

“Did you do that, or did the car do that?” I first asked that of my self-driving Uber’s “safety driver” when the car pulled out of the lane it was in to go around a pedestrian on the side of the road. I then asked it another half-dozen times throughout the 30 minutes I spent as a passenger in one of Uber’s autonomous cars that are hitting the streets of Pittsburgh today. Nearly every time, the answer came back: “the car did that.”

Indeed, my time as a passenger in the self-driving Uber as it drove around downtown Pittsburgh was blessedly uneventful — and in that relative safety and peace, I got an up-close look at what the challenges will be in making autonomous vehicles a widespread reality. I even got behind the wheel to “not drive” the car for myself.

For starters, it’s important to note that I never once felt like the car made any unsafe maneuvers. It obeyed the speed limit, left plenty of space between it and the car in front of it, took turns slowly and smoothly and generally behaved like an excellent citizen in vehicular society. It decides on speed first by determining a safe driving distance from the vehicle in front of it, and then by going as fast as the speed limit when it was able to. Uber’s engineers are also able to call out roads in which the car can exceed the speed limit to drive safely with the flow of traffic.

All told, it was a pretty boring ride — aside from the fact that a freaking computer was driving me around downtown Pittsburgh. That’s all the more impressive when you consider how much harder making a self-driving car operate around a city is compared to on the highway (like Tesla’s autopilot feature does).

A freaking computer drove me around downtown Pittsburgh.

The times when my safety driver had to take control were less about the car doing something unsafe and more about it being confused about what its many sensors and cameras were recording. For example, the car didn’t know how to deal with a truck that was double-parked very well. It read the truck as a vehicle stopped in the road, but it didn’t have the context to know that it wasn’t going to move any time soon, so we just sat behind it until the driver pulled around it.

The car also had a tough time dealing with a four-way intersection — while an autonomous car will obey the letter of the law, humans don’t. So, with safety as a top priority, the car sat at the stop sign, waiting for crossing cars to come to a complete stop before it would enter the intersection. But most people out there don’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign, so we just sat and waited while multiple cars crossed in front of us, glancing curiously at the strange bed of sensors on top of the vehicle.

Uber’s cars will likely learn these intricacies sooner than later, and I got to see examples of that learning on display in my drive. Apparently, when you’re stopped at a red light in Pittsburgh, it’s customary to let the first car across from you take a left turn if they need to before continuing straight through the intersection (it’s called the “Pittsburgh left,” appropriately). The autonomous cars thus are programmed to take a little pause before continuing through an intersection when a car across from it has its left blinker on. That’s not about driving “right” or “wrong” — it’s about knowing local rules of the road and respecting them. Every area these cars go into will have their own quirky rules like this they’ll need to learn.

The few hiccups we encountered didn’t really detract from the experience; the overall ride was a smooth as I’ve ever had with a human driver behind the wheel. The autonomous system is finely tuned to provide a smooth and safe ride, and it never accelerated or decelerated in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. If you’ve taken a cab around any major city, you’ve probably experienced some car sickness from a driver with a heavy foot on both the brake and gas, but there was none of that here.

I’m someone with a rather sensitive stomach, but I felt fine for the rather lengthy ride I went on. In fact, the ride almost felt too smooth, too in control. Like a computer was driving — which, of course, it was. That’s not a bad thing, but you can definitely tell the difference between a human behind the wheel and the autonomous system.

While sitting in the back of the Uber, I could look at an iPad mounted to show the riders some details on the car. You can see how far you’ve driven autonomously, the current speed and a graphic showing the movements of the steering wheel and when the brakes are applied. But most interesting was a view of what the car’s radar system is seeing at any given moment. You can see cars, buildings, pedestrians and anything else in range of the car. It’ll satisfy the curiosity of people interested in how the car works as well as provide some transparency and possible security to people skeptical about the system.

After cruising around Pittsburgh for a bit, I was offered my own chance to get behind the wheel. At first, I thought I was just getting a look at what the driver sees while they’re behind the wheel, but nope — I was getting a chance to sit up front while the car drove me around. The most interesting thing about that experience was the strange awareness I needed to keep while letting the car do its thing. I was tempted to look around and take in the sights of the city, because I felt totally comfortable letting the car do its thing.

Getting behind the wheel wasn’t any more nerve-wracking than riding in the back, because I was in complete control of the car.

Of course, the system is not even close to ready to have a driver totally check out, so I kept my hands touching the wheel and a foot ready to tap the gas or brake so I could take over. Fortunately, it’s dead simple to take control of the car: moving the steering wheel or applying any pressure to the brake or gas will deactivate the autonomous driving system. I took over the car a few times, mostly just to see how it worked, and it was dead-simple to both drive as normal and then hit a button near the shifter to put the car back into autonomous mode.

It’s not surprising that full manual control is so easy to activate, but it makes sense that Uber would want the press to see firsthand how easy it is to snap the car into your control. That said, I could definitely see a situation in which a “safety driver” couldn’t help but tune out a bit during a long shift behind the wheel. It’s also not the easiest thing to keep your foot hovering over a pedal and hands lightly gripping the wheel without accidentally engaging with them.

The fundamentals appear to be in place for Uber, here in Pittsburgh at least. But there’s a long way to go before its cars can navigate all of the city, let alone other cities. A number of Uber engineers and spokespeople I talked to made it clear the focus was to build out Pittsburgh first, both in terms of increasing the area that autonomous cars could travel as well as fixing little oddities like its performance at four-way stop signs. Other cities will likely come in the future, depending on how the pilot goes, but right now all thoughts are focused on Pittsburgh.

One of the big challenges for Uber will be learning more about how the cars deal with inclement weather. That’s one of the reasons they’re testing in Pittsburgh — between the complexity of the old city’s layout (small streets, lots of one-way roads, lots of congestion) and the fact that it sees all kinds of weather, there will be a lot to learn from testing here. Uber engineers feel that if they can master Pittsburgh, they can make the system work pretty much anywhere. (I’m thinking both Boston and Manhattan will make for a serious challenge.)

Good luck mapping out Boston and Manhattan, Uber.

But it’s not clear exactly how Uber will deal with bad weather. The team said they’ve tested in rain and had good success thus far, but I wasn’t able to get a straight answer when I asked about how it’ll recognize and account for snow. It seems that it’ll be up to the safety driver to decide when to engage the autonomous features, and I have a feeling that in the winter these cars will be operated in traditional fashion to be on the safe side.

As much as the pilot is to gauge Uber’s technical prowess, it’ll also be a judge to how the public reacts to self-driving cars. In some ways, it’s like Google’s very public beta of Glass — except that no one was going to die if Glass went horribly wrong. Consumers will understandably be a bit nervous the first time they get into one of these vehicles. But with a human being behind the wheel and the cars operating at relatively low speeds around the city, the potential for true disaster seems pretty low.

The 1.3 million who Uber said die every year in car accidents is a big part of why they’re doing this in the first place. The company says that 94 percent of those accidents are caused by some variety of human error, and it believes that self-driving cars can see and process more than humans, making them safer. There’s a lot to be done before that’s a reality, and Uber’s definitely starting small. But right now, they have a lead on just about every other company working on self-driving cars.

Apple Facing iPhone Security Battle With Indian Government

India is seeking discussions with Apple about including state-funded biometric ID technology to authenticate its citizens, according to Bloomberg.

The government initiative is part of a national biometric identity program called Aadhaar (Hindi for ‘foundation’), which already covers fingerprint and iris-scanning authentication across a range of public and private services including banking.

Apple is expected to resist opening up its hardware and software to the registration, encryption, and security technology, but doing so could see the company excluded from India’s thriving smartphone market.

One consulting group in India is predicting “a battle of ecosystems” between the state and tech companies. Indeed, signs of division already appear to have emerged. Just a few weeks ago, government officials are said to have invited executives from Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and Google to a meeting to discuss embedding the technology into their devices, but Apple didn’t even show up.

According to Ajay Bhushan Pandey, who runs the Unique Identification Authority of India and convened the meeting, company representatives who did attend listened politely but were noncommittal. However, Pandey says he was unequivocal about the government’s position and told the executives to return to headquarters and “work this out so we can have Aadhaar-registered devices”.

Since September 2010, India has collected citizens’ biometric and demographic data and issued ID numbers to every man, woman, and child. More than one billion people have signed up to Aadhaar – over four fifths of the population.

The initiative is designed to catch criminals who defraud the welfare state, but civil liberties groups say the program violates public privacy. Despite opposition, the government is moving ahead with Aadhaar and recently rolled out a digital payments system built on the program, which is part of an effort to make financial services available to millions of people who don’t hold a bank account.

Apple is expected to fight the government’s demands following its recent public dispute with the FBI, which wanted to install a backdoor into the company’s mobile operating system in order to provide access to data in criminal investigations. Apple insisted any such intrusion would make users’ devices less secure and open to hacking. It appears to have won the battle in its own country, at least for now, but given that Apple’s stance on Aadhaar could affect its access to a hugely lucrative overseas market, India could be a whole other story.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: India
Discuss this article in our forums