Google Assistant stops working for some Android Wear users

A bad Google app update has caused the Assistant to stop working for some users.

Among the wearables competition, Android Wear has a few things going for it. There are a plethora of unique options from super rugged watches to dressier options. Another advantage is the seamless integration with Android smartphones and the ability to access Google Assistant on your wrist. At least, in theory.

Android Police is reporting that following a recent Google app update, Google Assistant on Android Wear devices can’t do anything except return basic web searches. Given how integral Google Assistant is with many of the actions on Android Wear, this severely limits the potential for affected devices. No sending messages, controlling your home, setting timers, or anything else beyond basic web searches.

According to Google’s Product Forums, the company is currently collecting feedback and bugs from affected users. If your watch has been having this issue, it may be worth letting Google know so they can work on the fix.

Is your watch crippled by the latest update? Let us know down below!

Learn more about Android Wear

Best Couch to 5K apps

Get off the couch and running with the help of a 5K training app!

Did you have bold plans to start running more at the start of the summer, but things just didn’t pan out? It can be tough to just go out for a free run when you’re maybe still working on your form and endurance.

That’s where a running app can come in handy. The most popular smartphone apps for runners are the Couch to 5K training programs. They are typically built around an 8- or 9-week program that eases you into running using the interval training method. You start out with an even mix of walking and jogging, with the program gradually increasing the running intervals as you progress through the program. The goal is by week eight you’re able to complete a full 5K run with no walking breaks needed.

If you search for “Couch to 5K” in the Google Play Store and you’re going to find dozens of app options to choose from, so which one is right for you? There are a couple free options that are a bit more basic, as well as some premium options that play nice with other fitness apps and include GPS to track your run routes and distances. You’re also going to need a good set of in-ear headphones to get the most out of these apps because they all use audio cues to tell you when to switch from running to walking — plus it’s always better to run with music.

We’ve broken things down into the free apps and paid apps. Let’s run through each app’s features.

Free apps

5K Runner: 0 to 5K

5K Runner was developed by Fitness22 and is all about inspiring you to keep running — there’s daily inspirational quotes and badges to earn as you continue down your path from couch to 5K. It also looks downright pretty with your next run’s intervals clearly visualized from the app’s home screen.

There’s a built-in music player for any MP3s on your phone, and you’re able to temporarily lock the screen from within the app so you can easily see how much time you have left on each interval at a glance without touching your phone — perfect if you’re running with your phone in an armband case.

The app tracks your progress and run history so you can see how you’ve improved over the weeks. Fitness22 has some other related apps including a 5K to 10K app, a Gym Workout Trainer app, and bunch of other fitness apps that you may want to check out if you enjoy your experience with 5K Runner.

This app is free for the first week and includes all the premium features found in the other paid apps, but then you’ll need to pay $2.99 to unlock the remaining seven weeks. A good option if you’d rather try before you buy.

Download: 5K Runner: 0 to 5K (Free trial)

5K Run — Couch to 5K Walk/Jog Interval Training

If you’re just looking for a free running app to help you jumpstart a new running habit, 5K Run is right for you. You’re able to use it on a treadmill or outdoors and it plays well with any music app you might use — although you’ll need to switch between the 5K app and the music app to control the music.

The schedule has nine weeks of runs programmed in with the ninth week dedicated to hitting 5K on a 40-minute run. From there, you can move on to the 10K trainer app if you want to keep pushing yourself in training.

The app UI is very basic here with few bells and whistles. You get the chimes and voice prompts to start walking or jogging as you go, and there’s built-in GPS to track your distance. You’re also able to manually enter your distance if you’re running on a treadmill.

It’s all free and simple to use for beginners. If you want to try out a Couch to 5K program for free without any commitment required, this is your best bet.

Download: 5K Run (Free)

Paid apps

Couch to 5K (Active Network)

The first paid app we’ll look at is the Couch to 5K app from Active Network. Its main features include an easy-to-use interface, customizable personal trainers, GPS support to track your distance and pace, and great integration for community support and finding 5K races near you.

One of the coolest features is the ability to select a personal trainer that suits your needs. You can choose a friendly female trainer that will offer you words of encouragement during your run, or other characters like Sergeant Block who will bark orders at you like you’re in the military. You’re able to switch between the different trainers so your runs never feel stagnant.

There’s a music player built into the app, but it only works with MP3s downloaded onto your phone so if you use Spotify or the like you’ll need to switch between the two apps. You’re able to log all your workouts and view your progress which includes your total run time and distance, which can be encouraging to follow.

There’s a 5K to 10K app, too, if you complete the 8-week program and wish to continue with Active Network app’s towards your next goal.

Download: Couch to 5K (Active Network) ($2.99)

C25K Pro

C25K Pro is another great paid option that features really good app integration with other fitness apps like Google Fit and MyFitnessPal. It’s easy to use and fully customizable, which is nice. Developed by Zen Labs Fitness, this app also claims to be the official Couch to 5K app and comes with a bunch of great features built in.

While there is a free version with ads, the Pro version is where it’s at with premium features including calorie and distance tracking. For music, C25K lets you listen to your own playlist from music on your phone, but the app also recommends a couple companion apps for music and audiobooks. RockMyRun is a free app with curated workout mixes from popular DJs, and actually ups the beats per minute (BPM) as your workout progresses to give you a boost as you go. There’s also Audio Books by Audiobooks.com, which lets you engage your brain on your run with your choice of over 100,000 titles to choose through. You get one audiobook for free and then will need to sign up for a monthly subscription for more.

As you would expect, Zen Labs Fitness also has a 10K training app and other fitness apps you might consider checking out if you enjoy your experience with C25K Pro.

Download: C25K Pro ($2.99)

Which Couch to 5K apps have you tried?

Have you found success with a Couch to 5K app in the past? Got any tips for beginners just starting out? Let us know in the comments below!

Turn your home into a smart home with the $150 SmartThings Home Monitoring Kit

Our friends at Thrifter are back again, this time with a deal on creating the smartest home possible!

Right now you can get the SmartThings Home Monitoring Kit for $150, which comes with a hub. Or you can get the SmartThings Smart Home Hub by itself for just $50. The hub normally sells between $80-100 and rarely drops past that. This sale for $50 is its lowest price since last year’s Black Friday deals.

The Home Monitoring Kit normally sells around $200. Although it fluctuates pretty frequently, this $150 price point is its 2nd lowest price this year. The kit includes the hub, two multipurpose sensors, one motion sensor, and one outlet plug. All of these bought individually, even with the hub on sale for $50, add up to $206.

Hubs like this act as the “brain” of any smart home. As you start adding more smart features, like a thermostat or smart plugs, you want to be able to control all of them at once. The hub lets you connect everything to it and then control them from one single place. The home monitoring kit can use that hub to connect all of your appliances, monitor your home and notify you when anything unexpected happens. The SmartThings Hub works with Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth, and other wireless protocols like ZigBee.

The Samsung SmartThings Hub is one of the best reviewed smart hubs out there. Tom’s Guide called it the Best Smart Home Hub in 2017. PC Mag named it their Editor’s Choice, gave it 4.5 stars out of 5, and called it “one of the most versatile home automation hubs around.”

Add a smart bulb or two to the kit to control your lights or a motion sensor if you need to cover more rooms.

If you want to invest in a smart home hub but don’t need all the accessories, you could always start with an Amazon Echo Dot. It can work as a hub for a lot cheaper, especially with Alexa-enabled smart devices.

See at Amazon

More from Thrifter

• How to keep your passport safe while travelling
• Here’s how a Priority Pass Select Membership can help you save BIG at the airport

For more great deals be sure to check out our friends at Thrifter now!

3D printing will revolutionize how the Marine Corps fights

“The people closest to the problem are also the people closest to the solution,” Capt. Chris Wood, co-lead for Additive Manufacturing with the US Marine Corps, told Engadget. In 2016, the USMC put that adage to the test as it launched the Logistics Innovation Challenge, a program “to solicit ideas from Marines, sailors and civilians from across the Marine Corps” that would address challenges that they face in their daily duties. And this is only the start to the US Military’s additive-manufacturing aspirations. Pretty soon, everything from ammunition to autonomous vehicles could come from the Corps’ cadre of 3D printers.

Of the hundreds of submissions, only a handful managed to make the final cut and enter prototype development. Among them, 26-year-old Corp. Rhet McNeal’s Scout, a fixed-wing UAS (unmanned aerial system) constructed almost entirely from 3D-printed components. Conventional Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) drones can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct and operate, making commanders more reticent to use these devices in the field out of fear of breaking them.

Scout, on the other hand, costs only around $600 to build. It also fits in a standard-issue pack, can be broken down in a little over two minutes, and assembled and in the air within five minutes, McNeal told Engadget. And because its body and wings are 3D-printed, if the drone does take damage, troops can print a replacement part in a couple hours using in-field 3D printers rather than waiting days, weeks or even months for replacements to worm their way through the Marine Corps’ supply lines.

“I don’t see this as replacing our current supply chains, but I do see it as a great opportunity to augment existing capabilities,” Lt. Col. Gregory Pace, battalion commander of the Marines 1st Maintenance Battalion, told the Marine Corps Times last year.

A prototype of the Scout UAS – Image: Autodesk

McNeal’s team spent four months developing and perfecting Scout’s design in collaboration with Autodesk at the company’s Pier 9 additive-manufacturing facility in San Francisco. “The challenge was: How do you deliver an inexpensive, portable UAV for the average Marine to fly in field?” Autodesk’s Paolo Salvagione, told Engadget. “How do you make it so that you can’t put it together wrong? Which particular parts lend themselves to modularity, so in case something gets broken you can replace it quickly?”

“‘Perfect’ is often the enemy of a design,” Salvagione continued. “And so when you’re working on something like this UAV, the 80 percent solution gets him to an iteration really quickly.” Had McNeal been using conventional prototyping techniques, the design process could have stretched on for many more weeks.

He would have had to construct, test, tweak and rebuild each iteration — often with the input and oversight of experts in various fields of aeronautics. But with Autodesk’s fusion-design program, “you embed that knowledge in a general way at the front end of a design as opposed to having to go through the whole design and send it off to someone else to analyze it and then tell you what’s right or wrong,” Salvagione said.

Scout has since been turned over to the Mitre Corp., a drone supplier for the USMC, for certification testing. Should Scout pass these trials, it could soon be put to work in Marine squads for short-range intelligence-gathering applications.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the USMC has experimented with 3D printing or even 3D-printed drones. In May, the Corps began field tests of Nibbler, a printed drone designed to serve a similar role as that of Scout.

“Our team is very enthusiastic about the Nibbler, but even more enthusiastic about what it represents for the future,” Wood told Defense Systems. Wood envisions tiers of additive-manufacturing capabilities stretching from in-field systems, like the Army’s RFAB, all the way back to the US, where heavier production, such as printing mission-critical components with metal and other advanced materials, would be done.

“Imagine being in a forward-deployed environment, and just like Amazon, you can ‘order’ the weapons and equipment you need for the next day’s mission from an entire catalog of possible solutions,” Wood continued. “These solutions can all be upgraded literally overnight in order to integrate new components or adapt to new requirements.” Theoretically, with the right CAD files, a squad would be able to quickly customize and optimize its equipment for the specific mission requirements with little more than a desktop 3D printer and construction components.

Sgt. Kenneth R. Storvick monitors the progress of a 3D-printing job at Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina – image: DoD

Marines would be able to extract a “near infinite set of different UAS that we could produce from those basic elements,” he concluded. What’s more, tangential research is being conducted into recycling garbage, like MRE wrappers or discarded water bottles, and using that as the base material for printing.

Once this technology has been matured and scaled, the USMC stands to save a bunch of money on repair and maintenance. As the Marine Corps Times points out, bulkhead cracks in America’s fleet of aging F-18 Hornet combat jets typically cost around $1 million and take six months of work to repair. Using 3D-printed aluminum replacement parts, however, drops the cost to just $25,000. Similarly, the Navy can now 3D-print hydraulic manifolds for the V-22 Osprey transport aircraft that weigh 70 percent less than their traditionally manufactured predecessors, and can be made 30 percent faster and 10 percent cheaper, to boot.

These benefits will soon reach civilian life as well. “If you can deliver raw material and make it into anything, all of a sudden it becomes really interesting to people who manage supply chains,” Salvagione observed. “To sell a car in America means you have to stock 10 years’ worth of parts for that car in a warehouse somewhere and pay for that storage.” Instead, Salvagione argues that as many parts as can be 3D printed should be. “Then we can avoid paying the taxes on it for 10 years,” he said. “And we still have it available when customers need it, maybe even longer than that 10-year cycle.”

This future is still a little way off, mind you. The most popular example of 3D-printed military equipment these days is actually Humvee door handles, McNeal explained to Engadget. But the USMC is quickly expanding its printing capabilities into more-complex components including printed ammunition, though not yet the weapons with which to fire them. The Corps is also looking to print its new GPS-guided joint precision airdrop system (JPADS).

Overall, the Marine Corps is in the process of building out four full fabrication labs here in the US and has already sent 25 mobile production studios to units overseas for Marines, regardless of rank or occupation, to experiment with. “It is an exciting time and we are thrilled to be a part of it,” Pace told the MCT. “You can’t have innovation if you are beholden to systems that were created years ago.”

Lyft still sees a place for human drivers in an autonomous fleet

The prospect of self-driving cars is particularly concerning to people who make their living by driving, whether it’s a taxi or working for Uber or Lyft. Companies such as Lyft have made no secret about being interesting in adding autonomous vehicles to their fleets. But where does this leave their human drivers? Lyft’s product director Taggart Matthiesen told Recode that while the company is focusing on self-driving tech, they will always employ people as drivers.

Matthiesen explains that the company already has an advisory board that is working on how human drivers will fit into a vision of a driverless fleet. Humans can do things that self-driving cars simply cannot, such as help with suitcases or assist passengers with mobility impairments. He explained, “There are things we’re doing beyond getting a passenger from point A to point B, additional services that we as a company can look at.”

Still, it’s likely that eventually that most of Lyft’s drivers will eventually be replaced by self-driving tech. Last month, the company announced they were opening a research division in Palo Alto focused exclusively on autonomous vehicles. Human drivers may serve more of a concierge function, taking on passengers that need extra help, while self-driving cars will likely take on the bulk of straightforward rides.

Source: Recode

MIT’s new AI can keep streaming video from buffering

Buffering and pixelation are the scourge of streaming video. It ruins the experience for viewers, robs advertisers of revenue as said viewers tune out, and causes technical headaches for streaming services which have to engineer solutions. But a new neural network AI from MIT CSAIL may be just what the internet needs for velvety smooth streaming services.

The video above that you’re streaming isn’t arriving to your computer in one complete chunk. That would take entirely too much bandwidth. So instead, that data is chopped up into smaller pieces and sent sequentially. But to ensure that the video quality is sufficient, sites like YouTube leverage ABR (Adaptive BitRate) algorithms to determine at what resolution the video will play. ABRs generally come in two styles: those that measure how fast a network can transmit data and those that work to maintain a sufficient buffer at the head of the video.

If the rate-based algorithm fails, the video will suffer pixelation as the system drops the bitrate to ensure that the video keeps playing. But if you try to skip too far ahead, it causes havoc with the buffer-based system which then has to freeze playback while it loads both the new chunk of video and the buffer ahead of it. Both of these ABRs are essentially addressing two sides of the same overarching issue, but neither is fully capable of solving it. And that’s where AI comes in.

There’s actually already been a bit of research into this issue. A research team from Carnegie Mellon recently developed a “model predictive control” (MPC) scheme that attempts to predict how network conditions will change over time and make optimizations decisions based on that model. The problem with that system, however, is that it will only ever be as good as the model itself and it is ill-suited for networks that see sudden or drastic changes in traffic flows.

CSAIL’s AI, dubbed Pensive, does not rely on a model. Instead it’s used machine learning to figure out when (and under what conditions) to switch between rate and buffer-based ABRs. Like other neural networks, Pensive uses rewards and penalties to weight the results of each trial. Over time, the system is able to tune its behavior to consistently receive the highest reward. Interestingly, since the rewards can be adjusted, the entire system can be tuned to behave however we want.

“Our system is flexible for whatever you want to optimize it for,” MIT professor Mohammad Alizadeh said in a statement. “You could even imagine a user personalizing their own streaming experience based on whether they want to prioritize rebuffering versus resolution.” The team trained this neural network on just a month’s worth of downloaded video content and yet was able to get the same resolution quality as the MPC system but with 10 to 30 percent less buffering.

We should eventually see this technology be adopted by the likes of YouTube and Netflix but first, the MIT team hopes to apply the AI to VR. “The bitrates you need for 4K-quality VR can easily top hundreds of megabits per second, which today’s networks simply can’t support,” Alizadeh said. “We’re excited to see what systems like Pensieve can do for things like VR. This is really just the first step in seeing what we can do.”

YouTube is testing live viewer counts on mobile

YouTube video views have gotten a lot of attention lately thanks to the record for the most watched video shifting so much. Well, if you want to keep up with how may people are watching “Despacito” with you while you’re using YouTube’s mobile app, now you can. Only a few people can at the moment, as Android Police reports. The counter sits just underneath the video title and looks pretty unobtrusive.

This appears to be a server side upgrade, and, like AP notes, this really hasn’t been done anywhere else YouTube operates. We’ve reached out to Google’s video wing for more information and will update this post should it arrive.

Source: Android Police

Google adds voice recognition for Indian and African languages

For quick reminders and messages, it is a lot faster and more convenient to simply talk to your phone, rather than pull up an app and type on a keyboard. That’s part of the reason Google has been updating Gboard for Android with voice support for more international languages, working with native speakers to train machine learning models. Today, Google announced that it’s supporting an additional 20 languages and also adding English dialects for four African countries. This means language support for a total of 30 new international locations, mostly centered on the Indian subcontinent and Africa.

The full list of languages is: Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, English (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania), Georgian, Gujurati, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Sinhala, Sundanese, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. In total, this brings the grand total of Gboard’s voice recognition to 119 languages.

Google has also added the ability for US English users to add emoji with simple voice dictation. If you say, “winky face emoji,” the proper emoji will appear. Google’s working on expanding this feature to more languages in the near future.

You can access these languages today in Cloud Speech API, which means that they will soon be available across Google services and products, including in apps such as Google Translate. You can download Gboard for Android from the Google Play store.

Source: Google

New Blurry Videos Potentially Show iPhone 8 on Production Line at Factory

Less than one month before Apple is expected to unveil its new iPhone lineup, two videos have surfaced that may show the so-called iPhone 8 passing through the production line at a factory presumably located in China.

The videos surfaced on Chinese microblogging service Weibo earlier today, and were later uploaded to YouTube by Dutch blog TechTastic.

Both videos are short and blurry, so it’s hard to make out exactly what is being shown. The production line could simply be for the multitude of iPhone 8 dummy models that have surfaced over the past few months.

Apple’s contract manufacturers like Foxconn have strict security measures in place to prevent employees from bringing smartphones inside factories, so the videos could very well be completely unrelated to real iPhone 8 production.

In the first clip, factory workers appear to be polishing or cleaning the rear shell of what could be the iPhone 8. At the very least, the device appears to have a vertically-aligned camera, one of the smartphone’s frequently rumored features.

In the second clip, just eight seconds long, dozens of potential iPhone 8 devices appear to be affixed to some kind of metal shelving rack.

Given the lack of real iPhone 8 part leaks, we’re still stuck firmly in iPhone silly season—including infamously low-quality videos.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will begin production verification tests for the iPhone 8 in late August, followed by mass production in mid-September, so higher-quality leaks could be on the horizon.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8
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Canary Announces Two-Way Audio Calling Between Security Camera and iOS App

Security camera company Canary recently announced a trio of new features coming to its smart home security system and mobile apps, including two-way audio calls between a Canary camera and smartphone, a live security feed with reduced latency, and an all-new web app with live streaming.

Rolling out over the course of this week is a refreshed version of Canary’s “Watch Live” feature, which “dramatically” reduces the latency of live videos being recorded by the Canary camera. The company said it’s done away with a five second delay previously found in Watch Live, allowing users a “virtually real-time” look into their home while watching on an iOS or Android device.

Prior to the release of 2.7.0, you may have experienced a delay of about 5 seconds between what you saw in the Canary app and the activity that was actually occurring in an environment. With the new and improved Watch Live experience, latency has decreased, giving you a virtually real-time view into your home.

To achieve this, we completely redesigned the backend of Watch Live to prioritize real-time video delivery. By implementing a dedicated video pipeline, and adding adaptive video quality to the Watch Live experience, we were able to make Watch Live truly live.

Canary also announced a user-requested feature that enables two-way audio calls between the security camera in a home, and a user with a smartphone outside of the home. Called “Canary Talk,” the company described the feature as a home intercom, allowing users to simply tap a microphone button when in Watch Live to have their voice broadcast to anyone in the vicinity of their Canary. At-home users can then respond to the call by simply talking anywhere near the Canary.

Canary Talk will be available in the new version update 2.7.0 on the company’s iOS and Android apps, but will debut first in the Canary All-in-One device, then launch sometime in September for Canary Flex devices. No matter which Canary it’s used on, Canary Talk will require the company’s $9.99/month subscription membership.

Whether you’re using it to talk to the kids, a nanny, an aging parent, your new puppy, or to ward off an intruder, Canary Talk gives you a voice at home no matter how far from it you are.

Additionally, any Canary membership users can now stream live video and view recorded content from their camera while on a desktop or mobile browser. The company said that the introduction of its new live-streaming web app will help Canary users watch their home while they are at work, without needing to bring up their smartphone.

The 2.7.0 update for Canary is available to download now on the iOS App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Canary
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