Alexa could come to a whole host of Bluetooth devices, thanks to Qualcomm

Qualcomm has confirmed that it’s taking steps to enable the Alexa wake word on Bluetooth devices, thanks to software support in some of the latest Qualcomm Bluetooth Audio chips. 

For those wanting the technical details, it’s the CSR8670 and CSR8675 chipsets that are Alexa enabled, with software from Sensory Inc and Rubidium Ltd, meaning that developers will be able to integrate Amazon’s Alexa skills into Bluetooth devices, licensing the software through the Qualcomm eXtension program. 

Qualcomm specifies that in this case, Alexa would be supported natively on the Bluetooth device, with the intention that the communication with Alexa is then transferred via an app on a connected smartphone.

• 12 best Alexa devices you can buy today

Putting this into real world use, this would allow you to speak to Alexa via your Bluetooth headset, perhaps to get information from Alexa, or for other tasks, like adding reminders.

Exactly how far the Alexa offering will go remains to be seen: Alexa is currently marching into a whole host of devices, expanding well beyond the original implementation in the Amazon Echo devices. It’s now finding its way into other speakers, phones and connected devices, with a rapidly expanding ecosystem. 

Qualcomm also details that it will be supported “barge-in” operation. This means that the Alexa wake word would be operational while music is playing – just like the Amazon Echo, that means you’ll be able to talk to Alexa over the top of whatever else is going on. 

From a consumer point of view, this latest development from Qualcomm is just a piece of a bigger puzzle, but it should mean that developers find it easier to bring Alexa to more devices in the near future.

• What can Alexa do and what services are compatible?

The Morning After: Friday, February 24 2017

Good morning. We spent two days with the Nintendo Switch and we have feelings. Amazon is citing the First Amendment in defense of its robot Alexa, and we look forward to transforming into cups and bananas in Bethesda’s forthcoming Prey.

Nintendo still has to prove itself.
48 hours with the Nintendo Switch

Even without a Virtual Console, is the Switch more like the Wii, Nintendo’s ambitious and wildly successful console which unearthed a whole new audience of casual gamers, or the Wii U, the half-baked followup that even the company’s hardcore fans never truly adopted? That was the main question we had as we started testing the new console this week. Here are our thoughts.

This will be a very different show from years past.
All the smartphones we expect to see at MWC 2017

It’s that time of year again. Barcelona, with its stunning architecture and succulent jamón, will soon be packed with new smartphones, tablets, wearables, networking gear, app developers and, well, tech journalists like us. But things are going to be a little different this year. You can expect phones from LG, Sony, but we’re unlikely to see them from HTC and Samsung — not that they’ll have nothing to show…

OnFlubGoogle glitch freezes OnHub, WiFi routers

The networking devices Google rolled out are supposed to make your WiFi situation easier to manage, but that wasn’t true yesterday. The company says an issue with its Accounts Engine caused problems for many owners of the routers, who needed a hard reset to get going again. That’s a minor inconvenience for some, and more of an issue for others who may have used the devices at remote locations, or with custom settings that the software doesn’t allow users to backup.

Former Google employees may have stolen thousands of secret documents.
Alphabet sues Uber over Waymo’s self-driving car tech

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous car business, has sued Uber for allegedly stealing crucial technical information about its self-driving technology. Waymo’s lawsuit targets Otto, a promising self-driving truck startup that Uber acquired in mid-2016. As we noted in August, Otto was founded and staffed by former Google employees, including Anthony Levandowski.

Making your gaming laptop portable again.Razer’s USB-C Power Bank will keep your laptop running

Gaming laptops are great — unless you’re on the go. All of that power usually means a compromise on battery life, which means there’s probably a solid market for Razer’s new battery pack. The 12,800mAh Power Bank isn’t especially large, but it is ready to keep your USB-C laptop (whether it’s a Blade Stealth, XPS 13 or Macbook) powered for a few extra hours. In the case of the Blade Stealth, using it should keep you going for up to 15 hours.

You can be anything! (Well, some things.)

Behold, the insane shape-shifting potential of ‘Prey’

I’m a little teapot, short and stout.

It’s Google’s newest old messaging appGoogle Messenger turns into Android Messages

Google wants texting to work more like iMessage or Whatsapp. As part of a push to expand Rich Communications Services (RCS) support, the company is renaming its main Android SMS app. Now dubbed Android Messages, it is… almost exactly the same as it was before. Hopefully, the new name will get this app on more Android devices, and push carriers to adopt RCS standard features that will tighten up group texts, photo sharing and read receipts.

But wait, there’s more…

• Getting all the ‘Hearthstone’ cards will be more expensive than ever
• In the NBA’s eSports league, diversity means a new kind of athlete
• Amazon cites First Amendment while refusing to hand over Alexa/Echo data to cops investigating a murder

Samsung to change donation policies amid bribery scandal

In the last six months, Samsung has been no stranger to scandal. Since September, it’s hurriedly dealt with the fallout from its Galaxy Note 7 recall, and in recent weeks has been thrust into an investigation over bribery claims involving some of its top executives. After staying mostly silent on the South Korean monetary probe, the electronics giant today issued a statement outlining steps to stop it from finding itself in similar position in the future.

From today, Samsung requires all donations over 1 billion won ($883,680) to be approved by the board of directors and for payments to be shared publicly via South Korea’s financial regulator. Previously, only payments over 680 billion won ($600.9 million) needed the thumbs up from the board.

The company says those steps will “enhance the transparency of the management of such donations and funds and to strengthen the compliance” — making it more accountable by allowing transfers to be scrutinized by outside parties.

Samsung’s actions come after vice chairman Lee Jae-yong (better known as Jay Y. Lee) was arrested for allegedly donating 43 billion won ($38 million) in bribes in 2015 to companies backed by Choi Soon-sil, friend and adviser to President Park Geun-hye, in order to ingratiate himself and promote his rise inside the company.

It’s not the first time a high-ranking official has been embroiled in a financial scandal. In 2008, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, who then served as the company’s chief executive, was accused of using a 200 billion won (roughly $200 million) budget to bribe prosecutors and politicians into ignoring the company’s financial wrongdoing.

Despite facing a seven-year jail sentence and a 350 billion won ($310 million) fine, Lee, who is Korea’s richest man, received a suspended three-year sentence and was told to pay just 110 billion won ($97.4 million) in damages.

Lee Jae-yong is now being held in a detention center while he waits for proceedings to come to an end. It’s believed it could take as long as 18 months for a trial and verdict to be reached.

Via: Reuters

Source: Samsung

Steve Jobs Would Have Been 62 Today While MacRumors Turns 17

Steve Jobs, born on February 24, 1955, would have celebrated his 62nd birthday today. The late Apple co-founder, who passed away on October 5, 2011 following a lengthy battle with cancer, is remembered not only as a visionary and marketing genius, but also as a friend, father, and husband.

Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, introduced three of Apple’s most iconic products in its history: the Macintosh in 1984, and after a twelve-year absence from the company, the iPod in 2001 and iPhone in 2007. His iconic career had its fair share of highs and lows.

In 1985, following a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs resigned from Apple. He went on to found NeXT later that year, and while its hardware business was largely unsuccessful, Apple acquired the company in 1997 to use its NeXTSTEP operating system as the foundation of Mac OS X.

Jobs would become Apple CEO again later that year and guide it from the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1990s to become the world’s most valuable company just two months prior to his death. His legacy lives on at Apple, which recently said the theater on its new Apple Park campus will be named after him.

Apple CEO Tim Cook:

“Steve’s vision for Apple stretched far beyond his time with us. He intended Apple Park to be the home of innovation for generations to come,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The workspaces and parklands are designed to inspire our team as well as benefit the environment. We’ve achieved the most energy-efficient building of its kind in the world and the campus will run entirely on renewable energy.”

Coincidentally, today also marks the 17th anniversary of MacRumors.com, founded by Arnold Kim on February 24, 2000 during his fourth year of medical school. Kim stopped practicing medicine in 2008 to focus on this website full time, and the community now reaches millions of Apple fans around the world.

As always, we express our gratitude to our readers, forum members, contributors, volunteers, sponsors, and all those who allow us to continue sharing the latest Apple news and rumors.

Tag: Steve Jobs
Discuss this article in our forums

Acer’s smart Air Monitor will let you know if you’re breathing easy

Why it matters to you

If you’re sensitive to your surroundings and like the idea of keeping tabs on the air quality, Acer’s new smart monitor is something to consider.

Acer has just released another monitor, but it’s not the kind you might be expecting.

The smart device we’re talking about here is the it-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin “Air Monitor.”

That’s right, this time around the company wants to help you keep track of air quality in your home, office, or any other indoor area that you spend time pottering about in.

Announced by the Taiwanese firm on Thursday, the stylish-looking machine allows real-time monitoring of a raft of key air quality indicators, namely TVOC (Total Volatile Organic Compounds found in some cleaning products, air fresheners, etc.), carbon dioxide, particulate matter, temperature, and humidity.

Acer’s Air Monitor lets you know if the air you’re breathing is turning nasty via its accompanying smartphone app, or through the device’s built-in LED lights, which change color to grab your attention.

Regarding the LEDs, Acer adds that “an integrated sensor automatically turns off the light when the ambient lighting is dimmed to a certain level to prevent distracting users while they sleep.”

In addition, IFTTT integration means you can set up home or office automation based on the device’s air quality indicators, so if the atmosphere turns bad an air purifier, for example, can be automatically activated.

More: Allergies acting up? These five air purifiers can offer relief

Acer points to research from the U.S. and Europe indicating that on average people spend around 90 percent of their time indoors — “at home, at work, and everywhere in between.” While you might think your indoor air quality is fine, perhaps it isn’t the case if you live on a busy street in a big city. Pollution experts also point to gas cookers, wood-burning stoves, office equipment, cleaning products, and scented candles as sources of indoor air pollution.

Acer’s Air Monitor will hit stores in selected countries from April, 2017. There’s no word yet on pricing or precisely which markets it’ll land in, but we’ll be sure to update this article with the information as soon as we get a sniff of it.

This flamethrower drone is coming in really handy for a Chinese power company

Why it matters to you

As drone technology develops, we can only marvel — or in some cases feel a little concerned — at the myriad of uses industry is finding for such machines.

In the exciting world of remotely controlled multi-rotor flying machines – known popularly as “drones” – an increasing number of businesses are waking up to the idea that the technology could prove useful in their own line of work.

Already, movie production outfits big and small are making full use of camera-equipped drones, while other industries such as entertainment, agriculture, and real estate are also looking to incorporate the unmanned aerial vehicles into their operations.

Of course, regulatory hurdles still play a major part in the extent to which the technology can be used by commercial bodies, a matter that continues to present Amazon with huge challenges as it seeks to launch a drone-based delivery service.

In China, however, these hurdles appear to be about as high as your knee, certainly if this electric power maintenance company in Xiangyang is anything to go by.

In a usage that would have the Federal Aviation Administration breaking into a cold sweat if the proposal ever landed on its desk, the Chinese firm has attached a flamethrower to an octocopter to clear trash caught on power lines.

Yes, let’s say that again. It has attached a flamethrower to an octocopter to clear trash caught on power lines. Perhaps other solutions were deemed too, well … dangerous?

More: Watch this flamethrower take on a liquid nitrogen freeze gun

In a video demonstration (above), we can see the copter flying close to some trash caught on the power line before the attached incendiary device lets rip, reducing the debris to a puff of black smoke.

The pilot in the video looks confident enough handling the flamethrower drone, though there’s one brief moment where, as the machine returns to the ground, a colleague appears to scuttle nervously out of the way. Clearly, holding the controller of this thing would be a good time to bring up the issue of a pay raise with your boss.

Whether you think the trash-clearing flamethrower is an ingenious idea or rather foolhardy likely depends on your attitude to risk, but for the time being at least, this particular company seems perfectly happy with its new fire-spewing toy.

Facebook is putting ads in the middle of videos

Get ready to see a lot of ads in Facebook videos.

In a bid to increase revenues for publishers posting video on its platform, Facebook is introducing ads in the middle of on-demand content, while expanding availability of “mid-roll” ads for live videos. Facebook will start testing the new format with a select set of U.S. publishers who will earn 55% of the ad revenue, with the social network pocketing 45%.

According to Recode, ads can be inserted once an on-demand video crosses 20 seconds in runtime, and each ad break must be two minutes apart. Facebook has also announced that pages or profiles that have 2,000 followers or more — and those that have reached 300 or more concurrent viewers for a live video — will be eligible to roll out ad breaks:

• Pages or profiles in the U.S. can qualify to test ad breaks if they have 2,000 or more followers and have reached 300 or more concurrent viewers in a recent live video.
• You can take ad breaks during any live video reaching 300 or more concurrent viewers by tapping on the $ icon in the Live composer window.
• You can take your first ad break after having been live for at least 4 minutes. You can take additional ad breaks after a minimum of 5 minutes between each break.
• Each ad break lasts up to 20 seconds.

Facebook’s decision to split ad revenue with publishers will incentivize publishers to post more video on its platform. The social network announced last year that over 100 million hours of videos are watched every single day, and that number has likely skyrocketed after Facebook made it easier for everyone to broadcast live video.

What Facebook’s mid-roll ad breaks for videos look like… pic.twitter.com/ViZtF1xlvf

— Matt Navarra ⭐️ (@MattNavarra) February 19, 2017

What this means is that if you like to consume a lot of video on Facebook, you’ll have to sit through ads.

LG X Power2 is a phone with boring specs and a huge battery

LG continues to focus on just one feature and ignore everything else in its X series.

LG has introduced the successor to the X Power, and like last year’s handset, the X Power2 has a huge battery and not much else going for it. The phone sports a 5.5-inch 720p display, 1.5GHz octa-core CPU, 2GB of RAM (1.5GB in select markets), 16GB storage, microSD slot, 13MP rear camera, 5MP front shooter, and a 4500mAh battery that LG claims will last “an entire weekend without recharging.”

LG also says that a full charge takes “only” two hours, which the company claims is “twice as fast as most phones.” The X Power2 also has LTE and Wi-Fi (we’ll have to wait another year for dual-band), Bluetooth 4.2, and microUSB. The silver lining is that it comes with Nougat out of the box.

The X Power2 will be available in Latin America in March followed by a launch in Europe, United States, Asia, and other regions shortly thereafter. No word on pricing yet, but it is expected to be in line with its predecessor’s $250 to $300 price tag.

LeEco is finally adding an app drawer to the Le Pro3 and Le S3

Upcoming EUI update will bring new features to LeEco’s phones in the U.S.

LeEco has announced that an upcoming update to its EUI user interface will bring an app drawer to the Le Pro3 and the Le S3. The update will add the app drawer icon to the middle of the dock, moving the Live entertainment app — which lets you access LeEco’s content offerings — to the right.

LeEco says that the addition of the app drawer was based on user feedback. The update will also bring camera improvements to both phones, with the Le Pro3 getting improved HDR capabilities while the Le S3 getting better image quality in low-light conditions. Both phones will also pick up additional parental controls, as well as tweaks to the LeEco Live interface and improved Bluetooth reliability. Le S3 owners will also see increased WiFi download speeds.

The software update will be rolling out to both the Le Pro3 and the Le S3 in the coming days. As of now, there’s nothing to suggest that the update will be hitting LeEco’s phones in India.

Android Central 325: The MWC preview event!

This week, it’s Jerry, Flo and Russell on the ones and twos, chatting everything MWC. What can we expect from LG, Samsung, Sony and others? And where can we get more of that sweet, sweet jamon?

Plus, it’s GDC, which is becoming one of the biggest mobile gaming shows of the year. And Google I/O is coming up sooner than you think, so we chat about that, too!

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral325.mp3