Microsoft app helps blind people ‘see’ the world with AI

Microsoft has launched an iPhone app designed to help blind and partially-sighted people better navigate the world. The app, Seeing AI, uses ‘computer vision’ to narrate the user’s surroundings, read text, describe scenes and even identify friends’ facial cues.

The project has been in the works since September 2016; in March this year, Microsoft demonstrated a prototype of the app for the first time. It uses neural networks, similar to the technology found in self-driving cars, to identify its environment and speak its observations out loud.

Point your phone camera at a friend and it’ll tell you who they are. Aim it toward a short piece of text such as a name badge or room number and it’ll speak it instantly — a marked step up from the optical character recognition (OCR) technology of yore. Plus, it guides the user into capturing the object in question correctly, telling them to move the camera left or right to get the target in shot.

The app also recognizes currency, identifies products via their barcodes and, through an experimental feature, can describe entire scenes, such as a man walking a dog or food cooking on a stove. Basic tasks can be carried out directly within the app, without the need for an internet connection. It’s currently available to download for free in the US on iOS, but there’s no indication when it’ll come to other platforms or countries.

In a blog post by Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft’s AI and research group, the company explains that Seeing AI is “just the beginning” for this kind of AI application. Machine learning, perception and natural language processing have evolved over time into separate fields of research, it says, but “we believe AI will be even more helpful when we can create tools that combine those functions.”

Source: Microsoft

You can broadcast live from within Facebook’s social VR app

Earlier this year, Facebook launched Spaces, a social VR experience that lets you and your friends interact with each other in virtual reality. Now, the company is ready to introduce a new aspect of Spaces by merging it with another Facebook product: Facebook Live. That’s right; starting today, anyone with an Oculus Rift can livestream directly from Facebook Spaces, letting anyone and everyone have a peek inside your VR universe.

To do this, you’ll access a new virtual tool in Spaces that looks like a tablet. Pick it up, hit the “go live” button, and it’ll livestream your VR world to your Facebook feed where you friends and family can view it. You can then show off various Spaces experiences like traveling through vacation photos, watching a video together or interacting with fellow VR buddies. The tablet, according to Spaces’ head of product management Mike Booth, essentially acts as a “magic mirror” of sorts that gives you a view of what everyone will see when they look at the livestream. Think of it as a virtual camera viewfinder.

As you’re livestreaming, your audience can add reactions like the Like thumbs up or a heart symbol just like regular Facebook Live, except that in Spaces, those reactions come flying out of the aforementioned “magic mirror” in the VR world. Also, as your audience leaves comments, you’ll see them appear as stacks next to the magic mirror. If you want to address one comment in particular, you can “grab” the comment from the stack and make it into a virtual sign. This, Booth says, lets people in the VR world talk back to the audience and respond in a personal way.

The inspiration behind the addition of Live was Messenger Video Calling, a feature in Spaces that lets you call people in the real world and have them see you and your virtual avatar in your virtual world. That, however, was a one-to-one experience. “With Go Live, we can have the same experience with many people at the same time,” says Booth.

“Our big goal behind this is that, VR is for everyone,” continues Booth. “A lot of people don’t know what VR is; they think it’s something that gamers do.” But if they can see and interact with this livestream of a social VR experience, they might think otherwise.

“It’s the ultimate communications device,” says Booth. “People are the killer app for VR.”

The livestream feature will roll out to Spaces starting today and throughout the rest of the week. Facebook Spaces is only available on the Rift at the moment, though there are plans to release it on more platforms in the future. Which is great, unless you’re not sold on the whole thing in the first place.

Mystery game ‘What Remains of Edith Finch’ finally heads to Xbox One

Frustrated that the mysterious story of What Remains of Edith Finch has been available on PCs and the PS4 for months, but not your Xbox One? Don’t be. Giant Sparrow and Annapurna Interactive have confirmed that Edith Finch is coming to Xbox One on July 19th for $20. The experience remains the same, but that’s no bad thing if you’re a fan of exploration stories like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or the upcoming Tacoma — it’s all about revealing an intricate narrative.

To recap: you assume the role of Edith Finch as she combs through the family home to learn why she’s the only remaining member of the Finch clan. While each of the short stories that Edith finds is guaranteed to end in death, it’s not a grim tale. It’s meant to provoke happiness, intrigue, and even a little appreciation for beauty. A bit hokey, we know — but if you’re tired of the usual fantasy and sci-fi narratives, this might be worth a look.

Source: YouTube, Annapurna

Google Play adds HDR playback for select movies and TV shows

Next time you fire up the Google Play Movies & TV app, pay attention to every title — it could sport a tag you’ve been waiting for. The service has finally introduced HDR or High Dynamic Range playback, and it’s now available for select movies and TV shows. HDR makes what you’re watching more life-like by displaying a wider range of colors, so that you can see more details in the darkest and brightest parts of an image despite displaying greater contrast. You’ll need an HDR-compatible monitor or TV to fully enjoy the upgrade, though… and the feature is only live in the US and Canada.

The good news is that you can still enjoy the feature even if you have a non-smart TV by using Chromecast Ultra, Google’s more expensive streaming puck for 4K displays. If you can fulfill all those conditions, you’re golden — just find HDR tags in the app like in the screenshot below.

In addition to Mad Max: Fury Road, Google also confirmed HDR compatibility for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. We’ll bet you’ll find a few more options if you look, since the big G has teamed up with its studio partners for the feature’s launch, including Sony and Warner Bros.

Source: iTunes

Take HomeKit devices for a spin at a handful of Apple Stores

As a mark of just how serious Apple is about its smart home initiatives, the company has built HomeKit into 46 of its brick and mortar stores. That means if you stop into the Union Square location in San Francisco or the World Trade Center and Williamsburg stores in New York you’ll be able to give the IoT suite a test run, TechCrunch writes. Some 28 other stores throughout the country will have the demos up and running. If you don’t have one of the fancy stores, you’ll have to settle for non-interactive literature and the like. Ugh.

As far as the actual testing goes, it sounds pretty simple. Customers will be able to futz with Hunter ceiling fans, Hue lightbulbs and even connected window shades via iPhone, iPad or Watch, apparently.

Apple is playing catch-up here, so transforming HomeKit from a feature people never use on their phones into something they can see and touch is pretty important. After all, Tim Cook and Co. need to gain mindshare against offerings from Google and Amazon if they want the HomePod to succeed.

Source: TechCrunch

Verizon partner exposes 14 million customer records

If you’ve had to call Verizon customer service recently, you might want to keep a close eye on your data. ZDNet has learned that an employee at a carrier partner, Nice Systems, exposed 14 million residential customer records from the past 6 months on an unguarded Amazon S3 server. As long as you could guess the web address (which reportedly wasn’t that hard), you had free rein to download whichever log files you wanted. Each record included a name, cellphone number and account PIN, and only some of it was masked. Thieves would not only have personal info they could abuse elsewhere (such as social accounts that use a phone number for authentication) — they could impersonate you if they called Verizon later.

A spokesperson for the telecom says that it’s investigating the exposure, and acknowledges that there’s “some personal information.” Verizon had to give the data to Nice to verify customer info, and it was allowed to set it up on the Amazon server, but it clearly didn’t intend for that info to be made public. There’s “no indication” that the info has been compromised, it claims. That’s not going to be very reassuring, though, as it’s not clear who (if anyone) downloaded the data while it was public.

Nice will only say that the data was “part of a demo system.”

This isn’t the first time a big company’s data has been exposed online. However, the Verizon incident underscores an important point: data security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. If a partner company doesn’t guarantee airtight privacy, it’s just as dangerous as if the main company had revealed the data itself.

Source: ZDNet

The internet rallies around the fight for net neutrality

Today is the net neutrality Day of Action, and many thousands of organizations, companies and websites are standing up against the FCC’s plan to gut net neutrality rules and let ISPs regulate themselves. The first deadline for comments on the FCC proposal is up in five days, and plenty of sites are making it easy today to voice your opinion.

Some websites have added banners to their pages, including Netflix, Twitch, Spotify and PornHub. Mozilla, Vimeo and Airbnb have added more-substantial additions to the top of their pages while websites like Twitter and Google have opted for blog posts.

Some of the more creative messages can be found at Greenpeace’s and Reddit’s websites. Greenpeace has a pop-up telling you the site has been blocked by your ISP and then goes on to explain that while it might not be true yet, it could be if the FCC’s plan is approved. Reddit’s page has a pixelated logo with an alert saying, “Monthly bandwidth exceeded, click to upgrade” and a pop-up with a slowly typed message that eventually says, “The internet’s less fun when your favorite sites load slowly, isn’t it? Whether you’re here for news, AMAs, or some good old-fashioned cats in business attire, the internet’s at its best when you — not internet service providers — decide what you see online. Today, u/kn0thing and I are calling on you to be the heroes we need. Please go to battleforthenet.com and tell the FCC that you support the open internet.”

The ACLU also has a pop-up, and Kickstarter’s is full page. Amazon’s statement in favor of net neutrality is lower down on its page and only visible if you’re signed in.

Those are just a few of the many sites that have chosen to participate today. Others include OkCupid, Tumblr, Dropbox, GoDaddy, DuckDuckGo, Expedia and Rosetta Stone. AT&T, which sued the FCC to fight against net neutrality rules just a couple of years ago, decided to support the Day of Action and net neutrality this time around, though there’s nothing on its front page today. Verizon has decided that it’s above the “slogans and rhetoric” of things like the Day of Action and says we need more-concrete action.

Companies have also released statements today. Lee Tien, an attorney with Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “It’s our Internet and we will defend it. We won’t allow cable companies and ISPs, which already garner immense profits from customers, to become Internet gatekeepers.”

Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change said, “Chairman Pai’s plan to gut the FCC’s net neutrality rules will devastate Black communities. For the first time in history we can communicate with a global audience — for entertainment, education, or political organizing — without prohibitive costs, or mediation by government or industry. We join today’s Day of Action to fight back against this attack on our 21st century civil rights. The FCC has the power and responsibility to defend our digital oxygen, our right to communicate online, and to protect the public from predatory business practices from giant ISPs determined to invent new ways to charge us even more for even less.”

Co-founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian said, “Net neutrality ensures that the free market — not big cable — picks the winners and losers. This is a bipartisan issue, and we at Reddit will continue to fight for it. We’ve been here before, and this time we’re facing even worse odds. But as we all know, you should never tell redditors the odds.”

And Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, said, “If we lose net neutrality, we lose the open internet as we know it. What sort of a web do you want? Do you want a web where cable companies control the winners and losers online? Where they decide which opinions are read, which creative ideas succeed, which innovations manage to take off? That’s not the web I want.”

As of this writing, the FCC proposal has received over 6 million comments. Feel free to add yours here.

[Images: PornHub, Amazon]

Google’s new AI acquisition aims to fix developing world problems

As part of its continued push into the AI sector, Google has just revealed that it has purchased a new deep learning startup. The Indian-based Halli Labs are the latest addition to Google’s Next Billion Users team, joining the world-leading tech company less than two months after the startup’s first public appearance. The young company has described its mission statement at Google as “to help get more technology and information into more people’s hands around the world.” Halli announced the news itself in a brief post on Medium, and Caesar Sengupta, a VP at Google, confirmed the purchase shortly afterwards on Twitter.

Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Looking forward to building some cool stuff together. https://t.co/wiBP1aQxE9

— Caesar Sengupta (@caesars) July 12, 2017

While Halli Labs is still in its infancy, the company’s founder — Pankaj Gupta — is a data scientist who has worked at Twitter as well as defunct Indian Airbnb competitor Stayzilla. Google buying AI firms is hardly shocking news, but the tech giant’s focus on expanding into developing markets is what separates this from other recent acquisitions. With Google previously introducing region-specific offline versions of apps and even installing Wi-Fi into Indian train stations, the tech behemoth has already shown its interest in making life easier for the country’s growing population of internet users.

With Halli Labs’ announcement post stating that its emphasis is on solving “old problems”, this intriguing acquisition appears to show Google once again using AI to double down on servicing the world’s internet users.

Source: Medium

Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 35 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced more than a year ago in March of 2016. Apple designed the Safari Technology Preview to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari.

Safari Technology Preview release 35 includes fixes and improvements for Media, Web Inspector, JavaScript, Accessibility, WebAssembly, WebCrypto, Web APIs, and CSS. Today’s update also includes two performance-related bug fixes for MotionMark Suites and Speedometer.

With Safari 11 now available to developers through the macOS High Sierra beta, Apple is providing two versions of Safari Technology Preview, one for macOS Sierra users and one for those using macOS High Sierra.

The Safari Technology Preview update is available through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store to anyone who has downloaded the browser. Full release notes for the update are available on the Safari Technology Preview website.

Apple’s aim with Safari Technology Preview is to gather feedback from developers and users on its browser development process. Safari Technology Preview can run side-by-side with the existing Safari browser and while designed for developers, it does not require a developer account to download.

Tag: Safari Technology Preview
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Apple Releases Second iOS 11 Public Beta to Beta Testing Group

Apple today released the second public beta of iOS 11 to its public beta testing group, allowing non-developers to download and test the new operating system ahead of its fall launch. The second public beta of iOS 11 comes a little over two weeks after Apple released the first public beta and it corresponds to the third developer beta that was released earlier this week.

Beta testers who have signed up for Apple’s beta testing program will receive the iOS 11 beta update over-the-air after installing the proper certificate on an iOS device.

Those who want to join the beta testing program can sign up on Apple’s beta testing website, which gives users access to iOS, macOS, and tvOS betas. Step-by-step instructions for downloading installing the public beta can be found in our how to. Betas should only be installed on a secondary device as the software is not stable and can include many bugs.

iOS 11 introduces subtle design changes to the operating system, including a new Lock screen experience and a customizable, redesigned Control Center. Siri is smarter, has a more natural voice, and can do more, Messages features person-to-person Apple Pay, Notes has searchable handwriting and document scanning, and Music lets you share playlists with your friends.

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A new Files app improves file management on iOS devices, and on the iPad, there’s a new Dock, an App Switcher, and support for Drag and Drop, all of which improves multitasking on the device. An entirely revamped App Store is coming in iOS 11, photos and videos take up less space, iMessages can be stored in iCloud, and developers are getting new tools like ARKit for creating impressive new augmented reality apps and games.

In the developer beta released this week, Apple introduced a handful of changes, including new TV Providers, new locations for the Files app, changes to the iPad App Switcher, and more. Details can be found in our beta 3 tidbits post and the video below.

For full details on all of the new features included in iOS 11, make sure to check out our iOS 11 roundup. Apple plans to release iOS 11 to the public in the fall following several months of testing and refinement.

Related Roundup: iOS 11
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