Amazon Offers Echo’s Far-Field Voice Recognition Tech to Third Parties

Amazon has fired another salvo in the virtual assistant wars by opening up access to the far-field voice recognition technology found in its Echo smart speakers so that third-party manufacturers can make their own versions (via BBC).

The move comes as Amazon attempts to spread the use of its Alexa virtual assistant across a wide range of connected products and take ownership of a larger portion of the growing smart devices market. Google announced its branded Home smart speaker in November, while Apple is also rumored to be planning a similar Siri-enabled device this year.

The initially invite-only access to the technology via the Alexa Voice Service program will give manufacturers the right to replicate the Echo’s seven-microphone array that allows the speakers to hear a voice command from across the room.

The access also means third-party developers can use the proprietary algorithms used for wake-word recognition, which focus the array on the owner’s voice and filter out echoes and other noises. Developers will be provided with a reference kit as a starting point for their own designs, and the freedom to source components from a range of parts manufacturers.

“Our vision is for Alexa to be everywhere, and that means making it available to other companies and services to integrate into a wide range of devices,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

“We expect Alexa to be in many devices over time, including products that compete with Echo, which is why we’re investing in making a wide range of hands-free and far-field reference solutions available to OEMs [original equipment manufacturers].”

Amazon’s rollout of Alexa has gained steam ever since CES 2017 in January, when the virtual assistant cropped up in a range of products including third-party smart speakers, cars, TVs, lamps, and even refrigerators.

In February Amazon announced it was extending third-party support for its Alexa Voice Service (AVS) internationally, and last month it added its Siri competitor to the company’s iOS app, allowing users to search Amazon, track orders, play music, and start audio books from Audible.

Tags: Amazon Echo, Alexa
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Google Aero is a hyperlocal food delivery and home services app for India

Google is now targeting the hyperlocal segment with Aero.

Google has launched several India-specific initiatives recently, including a data-friendly version of YouTube and free public Wi-Fi at train stations. The company is now setting its sights on the burgeoning hyperlocal segment with a new app called Aero.

Rather than competing with already-existing services, Google is positioning Aero as a place to find all available options from a multitude of service providers. For instance, if you’re looking for food delivery, Aero collates all options from the likes of Faasos, Freshmenu, Box8, and others, giving you a list of all the providers that deliver food to your location without having to open several apps.

The company is doing the same for home services by partnering with UrbanClap and Zimmber. Aero has several categories to choose from, including home maintenance, beauty-related needs, house cleaning and pest control, installation and repairs of appliances, and more. You’ll be able to book services or order food directly from the app, and pay using your card, netbanking, or select cash on delivery.

For now, the app is limited to Bengaluru and Mumbai, and if you reside in either of those cities, you can take a look at what Aero has to offer.

Skype’s ‘all-new’ Windows 10 app makes the trip to Xbox One

Although Microsoft isn’t promoting its Xbox One camera add-on nearly as much these days (and using one on new systems requires an adapter just to plug it in), it has acknowledged the Kinect with a new version of Skype for the console. This “all new” edition is based on the Universal Windows version available on other platforms but redesigned to work in the living room. While Snap picture-in-picture chatting is no longer available, it has a new look, controller shortcuts and now features manual zoom control to go along with its automatic zoom capability. Despite a number of attempts, living room video calling has yet to take off, but if you’re properly equipped then the new version should be available on your Xbox One now.

Source: Skype Blog

Apple May Spend Several Billion Dollars to Obtain ‘Substantial Stake’ in Toshiba’s Memory Chip Business

Apple may spend several billion dollars to obtain a “substantial stake” in Toshiba’s memory chip business, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK. Reuters cited NHK as saying Apple’s stake would be greater than 20 percent.

Given concerns from Japanese government officials about Toshiba selling “critical technologies” to overseas buyers, Apple would reportedly have Toshiba keep some shares so that the company retains partial Japanese ownership.

Apple is also considering teaming up with its manufacturing partner Foxconn, which is trying to acquire about 30 percent of the stake, the report said.

Foxconn allegedly offered Toshiba up to 3 trillion Japanese yen ($30 billion) as a standalone bid, but a subsequent report said Toshiba would likely reject the bid due to Foxconn’s ties with China, where it operates multiple factories.

Apple’s other manufacturing partner TSMC has reportedly already withdrawn its bid, while other potential suitors are said to include technology giants Amazon and Google and rival memory chipmakers SK Hynix and Western Digital. Apple itself was named as a potential bidder by a separate source earlier this month.

Toshiba announced plans to sell its NAND flash memory business in January in order to raise funds to cover write-down costs associated with its U.S. nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse Electric, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March. The company expects to face $9 billion in related charges.

Apple dual sources 32GB, 128GB, and 256GB flash storage from Toshiba and SK Hynix for the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

Toshiba, facing an uncertain future, is supposedly expected to select the winning bidder of its memory chip business by June.

Tag: Toshiba
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Google has taught an AI to doodle

Hot on the heels of the company’s art and music generation program, Project Magenta, a pair of Google researchers have taught a neural network to sketch simple drawings all on its own.

The researchers relied on data from Quick, Draw!, an app that asks users to draw a simple item and then guesses at what it could be. They used 75 classes of item (say owls, mosquitos, gardens or axes), each of which contained 70,000 individual examples, to teach their recurrent neural network (RNN) to draw them itself in vector format.

“We train our model on a dataset of hand-drawn sketches, each represented as a sequence of motor actions controlling a pen: which direction to move, when to lift the pen up, and when to stop drawing,” David Ha, one of the researchers, wrote in a recent blog post. The team also added noise to the data so that the model can’t directly copy the image, “but instead must learn to capture the essence of the sketch as a noisy latent vector.”

That is, the AI isn’t simply throwing together bits and pieces of images from its memorized dataset, it actually learned how to draw these objects. To prove this, the researchers presented a model that had been taught to draw pigs with a number of purposefully incorrect inputs. “When presented with an eight-legged pig, the model generates a similar pig with only four legs,” Ha wrote. “If we feed a truck into the pig-drawing model, we get a pig that looks a bit like the truck.”

What’s more, the AI can merge a pair of disassociated images to create a series of uniquely intersecting hybrids. It’s the same basic idea as the pig-truck above but able to produce a large number of similar but unique designs. This feature could be of great use to advertisers, graphic designers and textile manufacturers once fully developed. Ha also figures that it could be used as a learning aid for people teaching themselves to draw.

Via: Venture Beat

Source: Google

Original version of Windows 10 will stop getting security updates in May

Why it matters to you

If you’re somehow still running the very first version of Windows 10, version 1507, then you’ll want to get a later version installed before May 9, 2017.

It might seem like just yesterday that Microsoft first released Windows 10, but in fact, it’s now been more than two years since the company’s latest and greatest operating system started rolling out to over 400 million machines. Along the way, we’ve enjoyed three major updates bringing significant improvements and culminating in Creators Update that started installing on machines just this week.

This isn’t just a trip down memory lane, however, as the fact of Windows 10’s increasing longevity has repercussions for that handful of users who still haven’t upgraded to any of those major updates. Even though Windows 10 is a relatively new operating system that will enjoy full technical support for some time to come, the very first version of Windows 10 will soon be running out of time, as Windows IT Pro reports.

The information comes from a Microsoft support page, which indicates that on May 9, 2017, support will become more limited for Windows 10 version 1507, which was the very first version launched on July 29, 2015. Microsoft puts it in fairly simple terms:

“After May 9, 2017, Windows 10 devices running version 1507 will no longer receive security and quality updates. Microsoft recommends updating devices to the latest version of Windows 10 by visiting the Software Download site and selecting Update now to manually update your device. For additional info, check out the Windows lifecycle fact sheet.”

As Microsoft points out, Windows 10 was designed to work as a service, with its major feature updates building on each other to deliver new features and enhanced security. According to the company’s policy, machines need to be updated to the latest feature update within 60 days to remain eligible for monthly security and other quality updates. That 60-day window was extended for Windows 10 version 1507, but that’s ending next month.

Most people have upgraded to Windows 10 Anniversary Edition, or version 1607, and if you’ve installed the Creators Update then you’re running Windows 10 version 1703. To find out which version of Windows 10 you’re running, go to the Cortana search box and type “winver,” then run the app that pops up.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

If you’re still running Windows 10 version 1507 for Windows Home, Pro, Enterprise, or Education, then you’ll want to get updated as soon as possible. Check out our guide on how to get the Creators Update installed, and remember that if you don’t update prior to May 9, 2017, then you’ll stop getting those incredibly important monthly security updates that keep your system safer from attack.

The time for Uber leadership to step down is long overdue

It seems like hardly a week goes by without Uber fending off bad press. If it isn’t sexual harassment stories or driver disputes, it’s self-driving car accidents and reports of sleazy business practices. The situation has gotten so bad that employees are leaving in droves; President Jeff Jones left last month, AI Labs director Gary Marcus did as well, and so has VP of Product Ed Baker. Rachel Whetstone, Uber’s head of policy and communications for two years, announced this week she was stepping down too. But until CEO and founder Travis Kalanick leaves and Uber changes its “Always be hustlin’” mantra, it’s highly unlikely that anything will change.

Take the most recent Uber scandal, for example. Yesterday, The Information came out with a report that Uber spied on rival Lyft with a software-based program called “Hell” from 2014 through early 2016. It created fake Lyft accounts to keep tabs on its ride-hailing competitor and the software even figured out which of its drivers were “double-apping” a.k.a. those that drove for both Lyft and Uber. The Hell program would then send more customers to the double-appers in an effort to persuade them to use Uber exclusively, paying them a boatload of bonuses as a result. Instead of decrying this practice as inappropriate, Kalanick praised it, calling it an example of “hustle.”

It’s this philosophy of the ends justifying the means that is so obscene. Another example of this is Uber willing to deceive authorities by using a “Greyball” tool that would identify local officials and serve them “ghost cars,” thus preventing them from getting a ride. Then there was the case a few years ago where an Uber executive tracked reporter Johana Bhuiyan using a “God View” tool without her consent. And then there was that other time when Senior VP Emil Michael said that Uber should dig up dirt on journalists and Uber critics as a means of “opposition research.” The company would eventually apologize for all of these transgressions, but as neither executive was fired or let go, those apologies ring hollow.

It’s no surprise then, that this aggressive winner-take-all mentality carries over to other parts of the organization as well. The result, as the New York Times paints it, is an unrestrained culture where normal work etiquette is thrown out the door. As former employee Susan Fowler explained in a blog post a few months ago, it’s an environment where reports of sexual harassment aren’t taken seriously and where women engineers are repeatedly undervalued. There was also a report recently that revealed Kalanick and Michael visited an “escort-karaoke” bar in Seoul, Korea three years ago with several other male employees, allowing them to pick out their favorite escorts from a group of numbered women.

All of it stems from the top. Just two months ago, Bloomberg obtained a video clip of Kalanick getting angry at an Uber driver for complaining about low fares. Instead of being sympathetic to the driver’s financial needs, he got angry and yelled at him for not taking responsibility. Later, after he was found out, he issued an apology, saying that he needs to “fundamentally change as a leader and grow up” and get “leadership help.”

Yes, Kalanick might have shown contrition in the wake of Fowler’s blog post and yes, Uber has invited Arianna Huffington along with a team of investigators to look into the company’s culture. But none of this is enough. Huffington might say that Kalanick is “evolving,” but based on the multitude of Uber issues, it’s no surprise that investors and employees find this difficult to believe. For his part, Kalanick has said he’s not going anywhere, and is even looking to hire a second-in-command to help him with his leadership issues. That was over a month ago, however, and we haven’t heard if there’s any progress on this front. Uber doesn’t seem to be in much of a rush to change its ways.

Just as this story was being filed, there was yet another bit of negative Uber news; that it allegedly failed to look into rider complaints of drivers under the influence, and could be on the hook for a $1.1 million fine. This is not the first time that multiple negative stories about Uber has emerged in a single week. Whether it’s breaking local law, ignoring sexual harassment issues or refusing benefits to its drivers, it’s clear that Uber’s anything-goes attitude can only take it so far. The company’s credibility is almost nil. Kalanick and Uber’s entire leadership needs to resign in order for there to be a fundamental shift in culture. It’s time to stop hustling, and to start listening.

Saturn and Jupiter’s moon burps bode well for distant life

Scientists recently took a closer look at data over a decade old and concluded that two moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter might have environments that foster life. During an October 2015 flyby of the ringed planet’s moon Enceladus, the probe Cassini was hit by gaseous plume, which was likely a hydrothermal vent breaking through the iced surface. Scientists theorize that the spray is evidence of chemical energy for life to feed on. Thanks to sporadic evidence of plumes on Jupiter’s moon Europa, NASA has announced that two locations in the solar system might support living organisms.

Jupiter & Saturn’s moons identified as #OceanWorlds w/ “some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment” https://t.co/6JQQTUlRr1 pic.twitter.com/RJh5miNHeY

— NASA (@NASA) April 13, 2017

The Enceladus plume Cassini flew through had traces of hydrogen, according to a paper appearing in the journal Science written by the probe’s team. The scientists believe the gas is likely produced by a chemical reaction involving hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the moon’s ocean. Earth has some of these on its sea floors, where hydrogen combined with carbon dioxide produces methane in a process called “methanogenesis,” which is theorized to be a core component for microbial life on our planet.

To be clear, scientists haven’t discovered evidence of organisms on Enceladus, but they encouraged by the processes producing chemical energy, which could feed life. If they end up finding any, it likely wouldn’t resemble Earth’s since it would generate from a different chemical environment, the scientists said during today’s stream announcing the findings. Any life, even bacteria, would be a welcome find. But similar plumes have erupted less frequently on Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has a similar icy shell to Enceladus, presenting potentially correlating life-fostering conditions.

Scientists at the Goddard Space Center compared ultraviolet photos the Hubble space telescope took of Europa in 2014, when it first saw the gaseous spray emanating from the moon, and found it again in a 2016 picture. While it was two incidents captured out of twelve total photos taken of the plume’s location, which could be evidence of an unknown instrumental flaw, that’s enough evidence to keep looking. And the potential for hydrothermal similarities to Enceladus is supported by thermal imaging captured during a flyby of Europa by the Galileo probe over 15 years ago, which saw heat activity right below the plume location.

Cassini will plunge into Saturn on September 15th in a spectacular “Grand Finale, so there’s little opportunity for it to capture more photos of Enceladus. But the Europa Clipper Mission coming in the 2020s will pull off a flyby of Europa on the way to its main mission surveying Jupiter. Its thermal imaging will take a closer look at the same hotspots Galileo captured in photos over 15 years ago, along with a few extras like ultraviolet sensors to capture more specific data. Now that they know where to look and what they’re looking for, the upcoming mission will put an intense lens at one of the first areas in our solar system that might contain life.

Source: NASA

Nintendo’s fastest-selling console ever couldn’t top ‘Zelda’

Nintendo has been proclaiming that the Switch is its fastest-selling console ever since the system launched, but now it has numbers to back that up. Based on NPD reports, it says the Switch sold 906,000 units in the US in March. What’s surprising, however, is that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is not just its fastest-selling launch title of all time, its Switch version actually outsold the console, moving 925,000 copies (add 460,000 for the Wii U and you have 1.3 million total).

According to Nintendo, reaching an attach rate of over 100 percent could be attributed to people buying limited editions of the game to collect plus a second copy to play. Whatever it is, the game, and system, both sold well and it sounds like things are well on their way to meeting or beating Nintendo’s scaled-back projections. We should find out more about its worldwide sales performance when Nintendo issues its quarterly earnings report on April 27th.

Source: Nintendo (Businesswire)

PartyBOT is an AI that uses facial recognition and other tech to get your toes tapping

Why it matters to you

Ever go to a party where they play music you hate, and everyone dances except for you? That shouldn’t happen at a party with PartyBOT.

Ever wish Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri would let their hair down, stop being such know-it-all busybodies, and head out for a night on the town

While it’s likely better to have some regular human friends to fill this role, you may still be interested to hear about PartyBOT. Created by Accenture Interactive, PartyBOT loves to party. You know that because it totally says so in his name. It’s, like, his thing, man.

PartyBOT debuted at this year’s SXSW party: showing off his AI, facial recognition, and natural language processing technology to figure out the emotions of partygoers, and in the process working out which ones needed to be lured to the dance floor, and then feeding that information to the DJ. Who he totally knows on a first name basis, obvs.

“As demoed at this year’s SXSW, the PartyBOT can recognize when a user arrives at a party, and detect when they’re dancing to certain songs to ultimately provide unique party experiences for their guests,” Matt Murray, the lead creative technologist who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. “Through interactions with the agents’ mobile devices, the PartyBot can learn about users’ music preferences. That data is then analyzed and can be sent to the DJ in real time so the PartyBOT can make an informed decision on what type of music to play to get more users to dance. Once the agents detect movement from the users, they will then receive notifications, which include things like VIP room access and premium beverages to enhance their overall experience.”

As you can see from the video, PartyBOT can be incorporated into parties as a special attraction, with guests’ ability to use him to personalize their party experience helping make proceedings more fun.

However, the plan is that the same technology could be used for other things beyond partying as well.

“The facial recognition element of the AI and the increased capacity for emotion and empathy detection is a technology that goes beyond just the demonstrations at SXSW,” Murray continued. “For example, it could be used with an interactive agent at a hospital. If a patient claims to be in pain, the agent won’t simply assist, but will recognize the patient’s distress and pain and respond in an appropriately understanding and sympathetic manner. This adds a more personal element to the patient experience, and makes for a more comforting interaction.”