Google Home multi-user support lets you connect up to 6 accounts simultaneously

Now everyone gets a properly personal Google Assistant in the home.

From the beginning Google Home wasn’t going to make much sense if it was tied to a single account, and now several months after launch we have proper multi-user support for the connected smart speaker. Google Home will now connect to six Google accounts simultaneously, and tailor responses based on the voice profile of the person who asked the question.

This makes Google Home dramatically more useful for those who have the speaker placed in a shared space in the house, letting each person in the family get responses on their appointments, commute and tasks individually. As Google’s promo video shows, questions can be asked from different people in succession with no confusion, as the Home responds with the person’s name before relaying their own tailored information.

To set things up, all you have to do is open up your Google home app and look for a card that says “multi-user available” (which will appear once everything’s updated). There’s a quick process to teaching the Google Home what you sound like and linking that profile to your account, and then setting up your preferences for specific apps and integrations.

Google notes that this multi-user support is available only in the U.S. for now, with the UK getting the feature in “the coming months.”

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Sprint offering Galaxy S8 2-for-1 deal until April 27, so long as you open a new line

New Sprint customers and upgraders can get a solid deal when picking up two Galaxy S8s this week.

The Galaxy S8 launch hype is real, and Sprint is capitalizing on the buzz with a two-for-one deal that gives you two of the hottest Samsung phones for the price of one. The caveat, of course, is that this deal comes by way of Sprint’s “Galaxy Forever” lease program, meaning you’re actually signing up for two leases, but only have to pay for one.

The price for the deal is $31.25 per month per phone, and you’ll be refunded for the second phone each month so long as your account is active. Sprint’s Galaxy Forever program lets you upgrade to the new Samsung Galaxy model once every 12 months, continuing to pay your monthly fee while returning your Galaxy S8 for whatever comes next. It’s not too far removed from the other upgrade schemes carriers like T-Mobile have pushed for a while now.

Unfortunately, there’s one piece of information that makes the deal less interesting. Further fine print shows that the deal is only available for people starting two new lines with Sprint or one new line and one upgraded line, so this deal isn’t available for current Sprint customers unless they’re growing their plan. Chances are Sprint will have other incentives for people who are already customers, but they won’t be as big as these aimed to lock in new lines.

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Prepare for the world’s first nanocar race this month

Nanotechnology is fascinating, but for most people who aren’t full-time chemists, it’s a ridiculously dense field of study. An international team of scientists are trying to make nanotechnology more accessible to the public with the world’s first nanocar race, scheduled to start on April 28th in the French city of Toulouse. Six teams hailing from three continents will gather at the Centre for Materials Elaboration and Structural Studies and attempt to jolt their custom nanocars across a polished gold track 100 nanometers in length (roughly one-thousandth the width of a human hair).

The nanocars come in a variety of shapes and functionalities, and they’re not technically “cars,” since they don’t have motors (and most don’t even have wheels), as noted by Nature. The teams will make their nanocars move by shooting electrons at them from the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). They won’t be allowed to actually push the tiny vehicles, but many designs will take advantage of this specific racetrack environment.

For example, the entry from the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, has butterfly-like wings that are meant to flap when the STM gives it a jolt. Some nanocars will react to the electrons in ways that should raise their energy states, propelling them even further down the track.

Of course, the entire race will be broadcast, almost-live, on YouTube and the event’s official website. The researchers have developed a creative method of filming the race: After each prod of the STM, the teams will take three minutes to scan the track with the microscope; these scans will be collected every hour and posted online as short animations.

The race isn’t all fun and games, of course. The scientists plan to use it as an opportunity to collaborate and further study the way isolated nanomachines behave on solid surfaces — research that could impact the future of medical treatment and other integrated technologies.

Via: Nature

Source: Nanocar Race

OWC Debuts New Thunderbolt 3 Products: SSDs, PCIe Expansion Chassis, Six-Bay RAID, and External GPU

OWC has announced that it will be debuting a range of new Thunderbolt 3 products at the 2017 NAB Show this weekend in Las Vegas.

Envoy Pro EX with Thunderbolt 3
First up is the Envoy Pro EX with Thunderbolt 3, a pocket-sized, bus-powered SSD with desktop-class performance and speeds up to 40 Gb/s. Storage capacities will start at 240GB. As it remains a prototype, no release date was specified. OWC’s existing Envoy Pro EX with USB 3.0 starts at $199.99.

Mercury Helios 3
OWC’s new Mercury Helios 3 is a PCIe expansion chassis with a dedicated cooling fan and two Thunderbolt 3 ports with speeds up to 40 Gb/s. It can accommodate a half-length, full-height, double-width PCIe card. OWC said it will be available in the second quarter of 2017. Pricing was not disclosed.

Other products include the Helios FX external GPU powered by Thunderbolt 3, ThunderBay 6 six-bay RAID with Thunderbolt 3, and Mercury Viper portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD suitable for daisy chaining. OWC said the ThunderBay 6 is coming in late 2017, but no word on pricing or availability for the other products.

OWC’s previously announced Thunderbolt 3 Dock and DEC for the 2016 MacBook Pro will also be on display at the show.

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Apple Announces LivePhotosKit API for Embedding Live Photos in Websites

Apple today announced the launch of a new LivePhotosKit JavaScript-based API that’s designed to make it easy to embed Live Photos taken with Apple’s latest iPhones into websites.

This new JavaScript-based API makes it easy to embed Live Photos on your websites. In addition to enabling Live Photos on iOS and macOS, you can now let users display their Live Photos on the web.

Introduced alongside the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus in 2015, Live Photos are designed to add life and vitality to the standard still photo by adding a bit of motion. A Live Photo captures an extra 1.5 seconds of movement before and after a shot, animating an image with movement and sound.

Live Photos can be captured using the iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, SE, 7, and 7 Plus, and can be viewed on all devices running iOS 9, OS X El Capitan, and watchOS 2 or later.

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Though Live Photos have been around since 2015, few social networks support them, and there have been limited ways for non-Apple users to view them. The addition of a LivePhotosKit API may help make Live Photos more popular.
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‘Virtual Rick-ality’ is a VR treat for ‘Rick and Morty’ fans

Rick and Morty is one of the funniest shows on television — and it’s also one of the weirdest. Co-created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (Community), the series is like a demented spin on the Doc Brown/Marty McFly relationship from Back to the Future. Rick Sanchez is a dimension-hopping alcoholic genius who’s the grandfather to Morty, a nebbish kid who’s always in over his head. Comedy! While I was initially worried that the show’s first VR experience, Virtual Rick-ality, might not live up to the series’ wildly inventive attitude, it didn’t waste much time proving me wrong.

The game puts you in the role of a lowly Morty clone who’s initially created just to do Rick’s dirty laundry. That menial task serves as a cheeky way to learn how to interact with the environment, a loving recreation of Rick’s garage lab. You’ll notice plenty of callbacks to jokes from the show, but you won’t get much of a chance to explore them at first. For the task at hand, all you need to do is throw the dirty laundry into the washer, add some detergent, and you’re done. If you start fumbling and take too long, Rick and the actual Morty won’t waste any time berating you.

Eventually you’re tasked with retrieving an intergalactic delivery using a clone of Mr. Meseeks — a character that’s originally introduced in the show, but serves a very different purpose here. It exists purely to mimic all of your movement in VR, and it comes out of a device resembling a Poke Ball from Pokemon. Since you can throw that device anywhere, the clone ends up being a smart way to interact with objects outside of your virtual play space. And, after playing plenty of VR games, its ability to mimic your movements feels very original.

Throughout Virtual Rick-ality, you’ll notice plenty of mechanical similarities to the popular VR title Job Simulator. Both games were developed by Owlchemy labs, after all. Instead of flipping burgers, you’re given jobs befitting the weird world of Rick and Morty. The mere act of recharging a battery becomes an exhausting battle to turn dials, flip switches and pull levers. It’s a bit infuriating at first (especially if your VR setup has tracking hiccups), but eventually I got into the flow of the puzzle.

I played the game using an Oculus Rift with Touch Controllers, and it was a mostly pleasant experience. I could only play it in a small area, but Vive users can also play it with room-scale tracking, which gives you a bit more freedom to walk around the virtual environments. Since you’re spending much of the time teleporting around and grabbing objects, Virtual Rick-ality isn’t very intense. Instead, it’s more focused on the little details, like recreating the interface for Rick’s computer, or developing a complex puzzle to fix Rick’s spaceship.

Adult Swim/Owlchemy Labs

Audio cassettes scattered throughout the world also hide short sketches between Rick and Morty, which are particularly entertaining if you’re a fan of Roiland’s voice work (he portrays both characters). And speaking of voice actors, you’ll also hear from the actors playing Morty’s sister Summer (Spencer Smith) and father (Chris Parnell). Together with a strong script, I often felt like I was actually living through an episode of the series, drunken profanity and all.

The one downside of Virtual Rick-ality? It’s clearly a game made for fans, which might make some players feel left out. Why is Rick such an abusive alcoholic? What’s the deal with al the intergalactic junk in the garage? The game doesn’t spend any time filling in the blanks. Newcomers should check out a few episodes of the show to make sure its humor gels with you. For everyone else, Virtual Rick-ality is the perfect way to hold you over until Rick and Morty’s third season kicks off this summer.

Uber might have to pay £2 million to operate in London

Transport for London (TfL) is proposing licence fee changes that would foot Uber with a £2 million bill. The regulator opened a consultation today that would change the current two tier-system, “small” and “standard,” to a more expensive five-level structure. Right now, private hire operators with two vehicles or less pay £1,488 for a five-year licence, while those with three or more pay £2,826. Under the new system, companies with more than 1,000 vehicles would fall into the highest category and have to choose from one of two payment structures: £33,304 per year, plus £14 per registered vehicle, or £166,518, plus £68 per vehicle for a five-year licence.

Uber has more than 30,000 drivers in the capital, so would almost certainly fall into this tier. If we take 30,000 as gospel, that would mean a fee of £453,304 per year, or £2.2 million for a five-year licence.

TfL says the new structure is a better reflection of the industry and the costs, including licensing and compliance, that it accrues while managing minicab operators. As the Evening Standard notes, TfL is in the midst of a hiring spree that will take its compliance team to 300 this summer. That figure is the largest in mayoral history and reflects the growth in ride-hailing, as well as the numbers needed to curb illegal activity.

“Given the emergence of large operators in recent years with, in a few cases, many thousands of drivers/vehicles working for them, it is clear that the current structure does not now, in any way, reflect the true cost of compliance activity for larger operators,” TfL said in its consultation. “To illustrate the scale of this discrepancy, the largest operator [note: this is probably Uber] currently pays the equivalent of just £565 per annum (over five years) for a licence which costs over £500,000 per annum to enforce.”

Uber declined to comment.

Source: Transport for London

HBO adapting Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic ‘Fahrenheit 451’

We’re already living in a dystopian reality, so it’s not surprising that our entertainment reflects that. Following Hulu’s release of The Handmaid’s Tale, showing a dark US theocratic future, HBO is adapting one of the original dystopian classics, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, according to Variety. The project is in development, but HBO is pushing it toward production with Michael B. Jordan (who also popped up in Matrix relaunch rumors) and Michael Shannon in starring roles.

The book portrays a future where books are outlawed and “Firemen” like Guy Montag (Jordan) and his boss Captain Beatty (Shannon) are charged with setting them ablaze — the title refers to the temperature at which paper supposedly catches fire. However, when Montag meets a free-thinking new neighbor, Clarisse, he starts to question the course of his life.

Bradbury published the novel back in 1953, during a time when book burning was actually a thing in the US. It became an instant classic as a meditation on censorship and freedom of expression, much as Orwell’s 1984 is synonymous with pervasive government surveillance. The only adaptation is French director François Truffaut’s 1966 adaption, a film that did become a cult hit but isn’t exactly widely known.

It’s a bit surprising that Fahrenheit 451, one of the best-known and liveliest tales of a potentially bleak future, has yet to be adapted since then. With HBO and Jordan behind it (as star and executive producer), there’s a solid chance we’ll finally see it come to life again and the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

Source: Variety

Google Home can now recognize more than one person

Google’s Home device is late to the domestic AI assistant game, but it can do one trick that Alexa can’t right now: Tell family members apart just by their voices. Up to six people can link their Google accounts to one Home device, then train Google’s Assistant to recognize their voices. Once that’s done, it’ll be able to distinguish you from your spouse or other family members and give you pertinent info, like your schedule or traffic on your usual route.

As it stands, the lack of multi-user support is a nuisance. While Home can still give everyone general information and trivia via the Knowledge Graph (and more erratic “featured snippets”), it can only create appointments and do other user-specific stuff for one designated Google account. Recently, however, it started displaying a message saying “multiple users are supported,” a clue that a change was in the offing.

To set it up, update the Google Home app on your smartphone (iOS or Android), then look for a card that says “multi-user is available” — if you don’t see it, click the top right icon to see your connected devices, as shown in the GIF above. Once you see Google Home, just click on “link your account,” and you’re ready to start training it.

After you say “Ok Google” and “Hey Google” twice each, the AI will store those phrases and use them to verify your voice characteristics in the future. “This comparison takes place only in your device, in a matter of milliseconds,” Google explains, to clear up any worries you may have about security or speed.

As shown in the video below, after a man asks about his day, Google Home lets him know that traffic is bad on his route. When his partner (who has a similar voice) asks the same question, it gives him separate, account-specific information about his schedule.

That’s something Alexa can’t do, though Amazon is reportedly working on its own multi-user feature, according to a leak from back in February. Until it gets that going, Google can finally claim some bragging rights — but it still has a lot of catching up to do.

Source: Google

Apple Music’s next exclusive is a Clive Davis documentary

Apple Music’s next documentary focuses on music industry legend Clive Davis. Last night at the annual Tribeca Film Festival, it was announced that Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives would be exclusive to Apple’s music-streaming service. That report comes via Deadline. While Davis’ name might be unfamiliar, his influence has been felt throughout the music industry for some 50 years. Davis is responsible for signing Bruce Springsteen; Carlos Santana (above); Earth, Wind & Fire and Alicia Keys in addition to cofounding Sean “Puffy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records among many, many other accomplishments. For more on his career, be sure to check out New York Times’ recent interview with Davis.

This comes after the music service snagging the rights to 808: The Movie and Taylor Swift’s 1989 concert movie. Thankfully this sounds like it’ll hew closer to those than Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke. Spotify recently revealed its latest exclusive, basically Carpool Karaoke but for hip-hop, and has a documentary about Metallica’ early years under its belt, too, so there’s some competition in the space. Hey, at least these exclusives are music adjacent and not your favorite artist’s latest records being siloed of to a service you don’t subscribe to, right?

Via: The Verge

Source: Deadline