Google Home works with eBay’s ShopBot to price your stuff

RJ Pittman, eBay’s chief product officer, has demoed an interesting Google Home feature at the tech titan’s Cloud Next conference. He asked the speaker if he could speak to eBay, which activated the e-commerce company’s shopping bot that’s aptly named ShopBot. “Hi, I’m eBay,” the speaker replied, “I’m the world’s price guide. You can ask me what something is worth.” eBay originally launched ShopBot for Facebook Messenger last year. But unlike the Messenger version, Home’s seems to focus on helping you price goods you might want to sell instead of finding more stuff to buy.

During the demo, Pittman asked the bot to help him price a Canon camera. After asking him about its condition and model, the bot gave him an estimate. The exec says it could bring more sellers to eBay, since people can easily find out if some of the junk they have lying around are valuable enough to be sold. “When technology can start doing the heavy lifting and providing you with a concierge-like personalized service,” he added, “then that’s when we’ve really made great strides.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t say when the feature will roll out to users, though Google revealed that eBay has migrated to its cloud platform from Microsoft Azure. We’ll just have to keep an eye out for its official launch.

Source: CNET, GeekWire

Siri’s Multiple Language Support Still Its Biggest Strength Over Other Virtual Assistants

Reuters published an article on Thursday that reveals some of the painstaking work that goes into making Siri capable of speaking additional languages, which remains one of its biggest strengths over rival virtual assistants.

The behind-the-scenes look appears amid claims that Apple has squandered its lead in the voice-assistant space, with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all advancing the features of their respective assistants recently.

But for a smartphone market in which most sales are outside the U.S., Siri’s big advantage over the other assistants is underlined in the number of languages it can speak. Microsoft is said to have an editorial team of 29 people who work to customize Cortana for local markets, while Google and Amazon say they plan to add more languages soon. But it’s a game of catch-up: Apple already has 21 languages, localized for 36 countries. That compares favorably to Microsoft’s Cortana (eight), Google Assistant (four), and Amazon’s Alexa (two).

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, a language model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

Once the required amount of data has been gathered and a voice actor has recorded the Siri responses in a new language, Siri is released with answers to what Apple believes will be the most common questions. Siri then learns more about what users ask, with additional tweaks made via updates every two weeks.

The drawback to Apple’s script-writing approach is that it does not scale, according to Charles Jolley, creator of an intelligent assistant named Oslo. “You can’t hire enough writers to come up with the system you’d need in every language. You have to synthesize the answers,” he told Reuters. “That’s years off.”

But it’s something the founders of Viv – Siri’s original creators – are actively working on. “Viv was built to specifically address the scaling issue for intelligent assistants,” said Dag Kittlaus, the CEO and co-founder of Viv, which was acquired by Samsung last year. “The only way to leapfrog today’s limited functionality versions is to open the system up and let the world teach them.”

Consumers should soon get a taste of how far they’ve come. Viv technology will power Bixby, Samsung’s new virtual assistant, set to feature in the Galaxy S8, which launches at the end of this month.

Tag: Siri
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Twitter for iPhone now lets you easily grab back some storage space

Why it matters to you

If you’re an avid Twitter user whose iPhone storage is fast disappearing, the app now lets you quickly clear cached data.

If you’re an iPhone user who’s always on Twitter then all that data you download may be taking up more space than you realize.

With the social media site encouraging users to post more images and video, a growing chunk of your handset’s storage space will be eaten up by cached data. This isn’t particularly helpful if you’re using a 16GB iPhone, or if you simply don’t have much space left whatever iPhone you’re using.

Thankfully, help is at hand via the latest Twitter update, which lets you easily clear the app’s cached data and reclaim some possibly precious storage space. Once you’ve nabbed the update, all you need to do is:

1 – Head to your profile page via the Me button at the bottom right of the display

2 – Tap on the gear icon just to the right of your profile pic.

3 – Tap Settings.

4 – Tap Data usage under General.

5 – Tap Media storage.

6 – At the top of the display you’ll see how much storage Twitter is currently using on your device for content such as photos, GIFs, and Vines. Tap Clear media storage to do exactly that.

7 – Tap the back arrow and then tap Web storage.

8 – Click on the two red buttons to reclaim more space.

As a side note, version 6.7.31, which brought the new space-saving feature to iPhone owners, reportedly crashed the Twitter app for some users. Fortunately, the company was onto it in a flash and quickly rolled out 6.7.32 to fix the glitch.

More: 10 free online storage services to claim your space in the cloud

Want even more space back? Then how about deleting a few of those storage-hungry apps you never use. To uncover the worst offenders, dive into your iPhone’s Settings, tap General, then Storage & iCloud Usage, and Manage Storage. If you have a lot of apps on your device, wait for about 15 seconds for the list to fully populate. The apps show in order of how much storage they use, with the biggest at the top. If you see any you don’t use, then go ahead and uninstall them.

DT’s Simon Hill offers a bunch of handy tips — including the one above — to maximize the space on your iPhone. You can check them out here.

Baidu’s Deep Voice can quickly synthesize realistic human speech

Baidu has been quietly working on other projects besides self-driving cars at its AI center in Silicon Valley, and now it has revealed one of them to MIT’s Technology Review. Apparently, the Chinese tech titan has created a text-to-speech system called Deep Voice that’s faster and more efficient than Google’s WaveNet. The company says Deep Voice can be trained to speak in just a few hours with little to no human interaction. And since Baidu can control how it speaks to convey different emotions, it can (quickly) synthesize speech that sounds pretty natural and realistic.

Google’s WaveNet can also synthesize realistic human speech, but it’s quite computationally demanding and hard to use for real-world applications at this point. Baidu says it solved WaveNet’s problem by using deep-learning techniques to convert text to phenomes, the smallest unit of speech. It then turns those phonemes into sounds using its speech synthesis network. The system converts the word “hello,” for instance, into “(silence HH), (HH, EH), (EH, L), (L, OW), (OW, silence)” before the speech network pronounces it.

Both steps rely on deep learning and don’t need human input. However, the system doesn’t control which phonemes or syllables are stressed and how long they’re pronounced. That’s where Baidu steps in — it switches them around to change the emotions it wants to convey.

While the company says Deep Voice has solved WaveNet’s problem, it still requires a ton of computing power. A computer has to generate words to say in 20 microseconds to mimic human-like interaction. Baidu’s researchers explain:

“To perform inference at real-time, we must take great care to never recompute any results, store the entire model in the processor cache (as opposed to main memory), and optimally utilize the available computational units.”

Still, the researchers believe real-time speech synthesis is possible. They’ve already created quickly generated samples and collected feedback through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. They asked a large number of people through the service to rate the quality of their samples, and the results indicate that they’re of excellent quality.

Source: MIT Technology Review

FBI Director Comey: ‘no such thing as absolute privacy’

If you’re wondering how the director of the FBI can justify advising that you tape over your webcam while also asking for backdoor access to iPhones, check out his keynote speech at the 2017 Boston Conference on Cyber Security. As James Comey sees it, Americans should not expect “absolute privacy” because a court can (under some circumstances) compel people to give testimony from their memory of private conversations and it should be able to order up digital evidence the same way.

During his speech, which you can watch below, Comey did not comment on Donald Trump’s wiretapping claims or the recent WikiLeaks CIA post.

He went on to say that the FBI was unable to access data on 1,200 of the 2,800 devices it tried to access between October and December. Somehow, Comey also claimed “We all value privacy. We all value security. We should never have to sacrifice one for the other.” As we all reckon with the truth that our phone is now the biggest privacy threat, law enforcement is similarly trying to figure things out. Right now, that seems to mean talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to security and encryption.

Source: CNN, Reuters, The Independent

Airbus just pulled the wraps off its ‘flying car’ concept, and it looks amazing

Why it matters to you

Airbus’s work shows it’s serious about its urban mobility plan, one that it says could get off the ground within seven years.

If you rolled your eyes and uttered a cynical “yeah, right” last year when you read about Airbus’s plan for a futuristic flying car, then guess what showed up at the Geneva Motor Show this week.

The aerospace giant unveiled a wickedly cool design for its ambitious “Pop.Up” transportation system, an autonomous concept comprising three separate modules.

Developed in partnership with design and engineering firm Italdesign, the modules include a pod for two passengers, a set of wheels to which the pod connects, and — here’s the really awesome part — a giant autonomous quadcopter that carries the pod between different sets of wheels.

Lifted into the air by a giant drone

It works like this: Say you’re at home and you need to head across town for an appointment. First, you summon a vehicle via the system’s app. Within minutes, the self-driving vehicle arrives  at your door. You climb inside and it takes you toward the city. But instead of heading into busy traffic, the pod parks up before being lifted into the air by a giant drone that carries you over the city to another set of wheels located on quieter roads. After setting you safely down, the pod drives you off to your final destination while the drone whizzes off to assist another user. What do you mean, “yeah, right”?

As you can tell, you wouldn’t own any of the modules. Instead, this is more like a futuristic ride-hailing service where multiple vehicles are shared across a city by numerous users. Hang on a minute, isn’t Uber also looking at the same kind of idea?

Airbus says the technology would also incorporate an AI platform to determine the best travel routes according to user habits and current traffic data.

“The urban sky is under-utilized”

In a video announcing the zero-emission system, Mathias Thomson, general manager of Airbus Urban Air Mobility, says Pop.Up “allows passengers a seamless and faster way of getting from A to B using the city sky … it’s a partnership between the airspace and the automotive sector, two powerful sectors that come together to develop new technology, new concepts for the future of smart cities.”

Thomson continues: “Right now, the urban sky is under-utilized and that’s exactly the proposition — the grid-like layout of road doesn’t actually do it for us. We think that by combining air and ground we’ll get a much better use of the space that we have in our cities.”

More: Bold idea gets off the ground — first flying car available for pre-order

The vehicle in Geneva sure looks impressive and though Airbus isn’t quite ready to hit the “on” switch on any of the electric motors that power the technology, it says it aims to fully demonstrate the kit by the end of this year.

And Airbus CEO Tom Enders is backing this astonishing project all the way, telling an audience at a conference in 2016: “One hundred years ago, urban transport went underground, now we have the technological wherewithal to go above ground. We are in an experimentation phase, we take this development very seriously. With flying, you don’t need to pour billions into concrete bridges and roads.”

Airbus says that while for now the project is a concept, it wants to have a ready-for-service design in place within 7 to 10 years. Of course, if it does manage to reach its goal in such a short space of time, there’ll be the small matter of aviation regulators to deal with. But the fact that Airbus is pushing ahead with the idea shows it’s serious about developing solutions for pressing problems, hopefully changing our minds from “yeah right” to “holy crap they’ve gone and done it.”

Google can use machine learning to identify objects in videos

You’ve been able to use a reverse Google search to hunt down similar photos on the internet for years thanks to image recognition and processing tools, but only for static pictures. Today, at Google Cloud Next ’17, the search giant unveiled a new API that uses machine learning to search within videos for nouns and verbs occurring therein. Finally, you’d be able to hunt down that one movie about the guy who does the thing.

The Cloud Video Intelligence API is now in a private beta, meaning companies will get their hands on it long before you can use it to hunt down esoterica on YouTube. At this point, it is an enterprise solution, a deep-learning tool built on frameworks like TensorFlow that companies can use to parse through their stored videos and extract metadata. If you wanted to hunt through your vast media collection to hunt down “tiger,” for example, you’d get a result like this:

The API searches for “entities” like nouns found in videos and indicates when that object appears. It can even detect when scenes change. Companies have must store their media on Google Cloud Storage to run the annotating software, but getting onboard with their cloud suite would be a decent idea, given that Apple, Evernote and Spotify started using the search giant’s Cloud platform this year. Don’t expect the intricate search functions to find their way into YouTube just yet, but as with most of Google’s tinkering with parsing data, it will probably find its way into your life soon.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Google Cloud Platform Blog

Solar-powered UK schools face an 800 percent tax increase

Solar technology could face a huge hurdle in the United Kingdom. Schools and certain businesses with solar panels installed may see a 800 percent raise in taxes when a law goes into effect this April, according to The Independent. It’s a harsh blow to the industry when you consider some 12,000 employees from the sector were laid off last year, and installation slowed by 85 percent according to the publication. It’s something the Guardian says was caused by the end of subsidies for solar farms and and incentives for homeowners to add solar to their houses.

What’s more, only public schools with the photovoltaic panels in England and Wales will have to pay the tax increase, while private schools are exempt. Schools in Scotland are left out as well.

Another Guardian article says that a school with “a typical” 10kW solar gathering system would pay around £800 per year ($973.29). It also reports that 821 schools outfitted with solar panels will have to pay an additional £800,000 ($973,916). “After assuming similar installation rates across the 174 authorities in England and Wales, that climbs to a total of about £1.8 million ($2,189,907).”

“This is slightly less than helpful for the British solar industry,” the Solar Trade Association’s Leonie Greene told The Independent. “It’s absurd. Energy tax policy is going in the opposite direction to how we know energy needs to change and how it’s changing. What he is doing is advantaging old technology and disadvantaging new ones. It’s nonsensical.”

Sounds familiar, no?

As a form of protest, kids from north London’s Eleanor Palmer school in Camden collected some 200,000 signatures to “urgently rethink” the tax hikes as part of a Greenpeace campaign. They’ll be delivered to England’s Treasury Department on Thursday.

Surprising close to no one, the UK government defended the moves, saying that the taxes could lead to improvements for the schools in other ways without expanding on how.

Source: The Independent, The Guardian (1), (2)

Cord cutting 101: How to quit cable for online streaming video

Once called an “experiment” by prognosticating pundits in the past, live streaming TV has captured the attention of a wide audience, with Dish Network’s Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, and AT&T’s recently introduced DirecTV Now all in play. Channels and hit series that were once strictly bound by the confines of a cable subscription can now be accessed for a small monthly fee with no contract, no equipment rentals, and no crappy customer service to deal with. There’s never been a better time to kick cable to the curb.

Not everyone is cut out to be a “cord cutter,” though. Ditching cable or satellite service and the bill that goes with it sounds great in theory, but it’s not something you want to rush into without doing a little research and preparation first. As with most things, there’s a right way to go about cord cutting, and then there’s the way that sends you back to your cable company begging for forgiveness. We tend to prefer the right way … the awesome way.

Below is our quick compendium on how to make a smooth transition from a bloated cable package to a custom-curated entertainment utopia.

First things first: How’s your internet?

The thing about internet-delivered TV is that you need a broadband connection that’s copacetic with the streaming lifestyle. This may seem like a foregone conclusion, but we want to make it clear that if you’re going to bet your precious entertainment future on your network, you best have a solid hookup. Netflix and other similar streaming video services suggest downstream speeds of 5Mbps, but that’s simply not going to hack it for most folks, especially those with families that might want to stream more than one show or movie at a time.

When new cord cutters are confronted with buffering, they are understandably frustrated.

Consider that 5Mbps may get you one HD video stream, but you may experience loading and buffering delays if your network is getting choked up with any other traffic. Cable TV doesn’t interrupt your show to buffer, so when new cord-cutters are confronted with delays, they are understandably frustrated. Avoid the buffer and upgrade your broadband speed if you can, otherwise it’s time to reconsider ditching cable.

We also recommend testing your internet speed at peak streaming hours (between 6 – 10 p.m. weekdays) to determine if your neighborhood struggles under the strain of heavy traffic. For instance, if you routinely get around 10Mbps downloads during the day, but that figure takes a dive to about 3Mbps around dinner time, you’ll want to call your internet provider to see if anything can be done. Fortunately, this is an increasingly rare problem, but better to check ahead.

Of course, if you’re looking to get into the streaming big leagues to access the growing array of 4K Ultra HD streaming content available, you’ll want to kick up your broadband speed a few more notches. For streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon you’ll likely want to have at least 25Mbps on hand (which is what Netflix explicitly recommends). If you’re only going to be downloading 4K content from sites like FandangoNow or Ultraflix, 10Mbps will probably suffice. In any event, fast and reliable internet is an integral key to a positive streaming experience.

The U.S. Senate wants to limit the FCC’s ability to regulate ISP data policies

Why it matters to you

Your internet service provider gathers a lot of information. Part of the Senate wants to limit the FCC’s ability to determine how that data is used.

In October, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to impose new rules that require internet service providers (ISPs) to gain user consent before sharing certain data with third parties. The rules were set to go into effect at the beginning of March when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called on the commission to delay some of the rules.

Now, Congress is stepping in to address the rules’ status, with Senate Republicans introducing legislation that would do away with the rules altogether. The Senate’s measure would utilize its authority under the Congressional Review Act and would stop the FCC from implementing similar rules going forward, Ars Technica reports.

More: Broadband providers now need consent to share your data, thanks to the FCC

The resolution’s sponsor, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), said the purpose of the legislation is to “protect consumers from overreaching Internet regulation” and that it “empowers consumers to make informed choices on if and how their data can be shared.”

Furthermore, Flake said the FCC’s rules amount to “midnight regulation” that does not protect consumer privacy. Characterizing the measure’s overall impact, he said, “restrictions have the potential to negatively impact consumers and the future of Internet innovation.”

The FCC rules were to take place at different times. Data security protections intended to cause ISPs to protect their customer’s data were set to begin on March 2. Data breach notification requirements were to begin on June 2. And the requirement for ISPs to gain opt-in consent to share Web browsing history, app usage history, Social Security numbers, and other private information with third parties was to going into effect on December 4.

Senate Democrats oppose the resolution, with Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) saying, “If this [resolution] is passed, neither the FCC nor the FTC will have clear authority when it comes to how internet service providers protect consumers’ data privacy and security. Regardless of politics, allowing ISPs to operate in a rule-free zone without any government oversight is reckless.”

ISP such as Comcast and Verizon will likely support the proposition, given their position that the FCC rules apply restrictions on them that do not apply to other internet companies that also collect data, such as Google and Netflix. We will have to wait to see if the resolution becomes law to know exactly how our private data will be utilized by ISPs.