In July of 2023, Google stopped offering new subscriptions of 1st gen Nest Aware, but allowed existing customers to continue using it. This May, Google will “no longer support the Nest Aware 1st generation service” in some regions.
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Side Quest, formerly called Mere Mortals, will premiere on March 26 on Apple TV+. It's the spin-off/expansion series for Mythic Quest, a comedy show on the streaming service about a video game studio developing an MMORPG of the same name. All four episodes of Side Quest will be available on the service on the same day the season four finale of Mythic Quest drops on the platform. Side Quest will revolve around the lives of the fictional studio's employees, as well as the players and fans impacted by the Mythic Quest game.
The show will take on an anthology format, with a bunch of actors taking on leading roles for each installment. It was created by Mythic Quest writers Ashly Burch, John Howell Harris and Katie McElhenney, who also served as executive producers. Burch plays the character of Rachel in the original show. Charlie Day, Megan Ganz and Rob McElhenney, who created the Mythic Quest series, served as executive producers for the spin-off, as well. Lionsgate, 3 Arts Entertainment and Ubisoft produced the show for Apple TV+.
In addition to announcing the show's premiere, Apple has also released the official trailer for the show, which gives you a pretty good idea of its tone and what you can expect if you watch it.
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© Apple
There are three inevitabilities in life: death, taxes, and tech platforms making design changes that are universally disliked. The latest victim to this phenomenon is the Apple Mail app, which got a major redesign in iOS 18. This update is also rolling out on iPads and MacBooks. The new Apple Mail design separates emails into […]
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Planning on spending your Sunday watching the 97th annual Academy Awards or catching up on the latest episode of Severance? If you don’t already own a smart TV, Amazon’s latest Fire TV Stick 4K Max can make setup easy and inexpensive, especially now that it’s down to just $39.99 ($20 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. That’s just $7 shy of its lowest price to date and the best price we’ve seen this year.
Amazon’s newest 4K-capable streaming device functions a lot like its predecessor, only with a few added benefits. It features an upgraded processor for faster performance, for one thing, along with twice the storage (16GB vs. 8GB) and support for Wi-Fi 6E. It also can function more akin to an Echo Show when idle, allowing you to check the weather, gloss reminders, and view a host of widgets at a glance. You can also have it display famous works of art or a series of AI-generated images, which you can personalize with a simple Alexa prompt.
Additionally, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max provides access to a wide selection of streaming apps and Dolby Atmos, allowing for more immersive audio. It offers broad HDR support — including support for Dolby Vision and HDR10 Plus — and works impressively well with Alexa, to the point where you can make commands as specific as “Alexa, turn to ESPN on Sling TV” via the included Alexa remote. Admittedly, the interface is too Prime-centric for some of us at The Verge, but hey, they can’t all be as slick as Google’s TV Streamer.
Apple’s recently announced iPhone 16e hit store shelves yesterday morning. It serves as a new entry point to the iPhone lineup, and replaces the family. While the iPhone 16e has a number of big upgrades over the iPhone SE 3 that it replaced, there are some smaller ones that might’ve slipped under the radar.
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In a TikTok video with over 3 million views, a woman in a fluffy, maximalist coat sits in the back seat of a luxury SUV, parked in the middle of a New York City street. Atop the 6-second video, a line of text reads, “our bodyguards got us matcha.” The camera zooms in on two […]
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Google Photos makes backing up photos and videos from your phone pretty seamless: set it to work in the background and all your precious memories are saved to the cloud without you having to do anything else. Â
The smoothness of this process does tend to mean you can find yourself with a rather gigantic collection, however â which then creates its own problems when it comes to finding specific items in your ever-growing library. But even if you have a photo library spanning decades, there are tools to help.
These are some of the search tricks you can try to find images and videos in Google Photos.
Google Photos can recognize people and pets in your photos, and it can even recognize individuals as they age over time.Â
If youâve never identified the person before or if the algorithm doesnât recognize them, you will have to help out with the identification.
In late 2022, initial payments for the Small Developer Assistance Fund started going out, with each eligible US developer receiving at least $1000 – up to 4x the projected minimum payout. A second round of payouts begun toward the end of 2023, and now the third and final round of payments started going out this week.
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Alphabet has announced a new development for Taara's technology that could lead to low-cost, high-speed internet connectivity, even in far-flung locations. Taara's general manager, Mahesh Krishnaswamy, has introduced the Taara chip, a silicon photonic chip that uses light to transmit high-speed data through the air. The Taara chip is abut the size of a fingernail, far smaller than the technology the Alphabet division has been using. Taara Lightbridge, which is what its first-generation technology is called, is the size of a traffic light and uses a system of mirrors and sensors to physically steer light to where it needs to go. The new chip uses software instead.
Taara is a project under X, Alphabet's moonshot factory. The high speed wireless optical link technology underpinning the project was originally developed for X's Project Loon internet broadcasting balloons. Alphabet pulled the plug on Loon in 2021 and focused on Taara instead, using its technology to beam broadband across the Congo River and the streets of Nairobi. Even years before Loon shut down, Alphabet's X was already toying with the idea of using light to beam internet and tested the technology in India.
Taara's technology works by using a "very narrow, invisible light beam to transmit data at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second, up to distances of 20 kilometers (12.1 miles)." It's like traditional fiber, in the sense that it uses light to carry data, except that light doesn't travel through cables. Instead, Taara's hardware emits beams of light. The beams from two units must be aligned with each other to be able to form a secure link that can transmit data, which is why Lightbridge was fitted with the parts needed to be able to physically steer the light. Taara's new chip doesn't need those components: It contains hundreds of tiny light emitters controlled by software with automatic steering
Krishnaswamy said Taara's light-beaming units will only take days to install instead of the months or years it can take to lay fiber. During tests in the lab, the Taara team was able to transmit data at speeds of 10 Gbps over a distance of one kilometer (0.62 miles) using two of the new chips. They're now looking to improve the chip's capacity and range by creating an "iteration with thousands of [light] emitters." The team expects the chip to be available in 2026.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/alphabets-taara-chip-uses-light-beams-to-provide-high-speed-internet-140040922.html?src=rss©
© Alphabet
Amazon’s long-awaited update to its assistant is almost here. About 18 months after the company first previewed the “next-gen Alexa” built with generative AI, it unveiled Alexa+, and early access will be available starting in March. Alexa+ will exist alongside the older Alexa and will cost $20 a month, unless you have a Prime membership, which will make it free to use. The new assistant will come with all the modern upgrades that its contemporaries like the redesigned Siri or Gemini offer, like more conversational interaction, better contextual understanding and the ability to “summarize complex topics” and “make suggestions based on your interests.” But it does one thing differently, and it’s the way Amazon purports to integrate with third-party apps and the rest of the internet that could set it apart.
At the presentation, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch outlined three ways the new assistant can integrate with other services you use. Firstly, it already works with “tens of thousands” of integrations already available, with Uber, Sonos, Samsung and Xbox being a few of the many logos that were displayed when Rausch said this. Presumably, that means Amazon worked with these partners to get their apps to play nicely with Alexa+ through their APIs.
Secondly, for the large swath of the online world that doesn’t have apps or the resources to code an API just for Alexa+, the assistant should be able to scour the internet for their website and navigate it on your behalf. During the presentation, Rausch demonstrated how Alexa+ was able to go to the Thumbtack website to hire a professional to fix his oven. Instead of having to whip out a phone or laptop to click through menus himself, Rausch could just verbally tell Alexa+ what he needed and what times he was available, and the AI did the rest.
This example in particular struck me as very similar to Google’s restaurant-reservation system Duplex, which, since way back in 2018, could call businesses on your behalf to book a table. All you had to do was tell Google what date and times you were considering, how many people were in your party and it would make the call for you, even speaking in a human-sounding voice to the restaurant. The way Alexa+ would click around websites on your behalf seems like Duplex on steroids.
Finally, Alexa+ can work with the “AI agents” on other sites, so you can talk to just one assistant instead of dozens of chatbots. In the presentation, Rausch got Alexa+ to work with the AI music generator Suno to come up with a country-style song about bodega cats.
After the company’s presentation, I spoke with Rausch to get more clarity on how Alexa+ will work with the rest of the online world. For one, I wanted to know for sure if that third method would work with customer service chatbots from companies like Capital One, United Airlines and more. While Rausch said that he had no details to share on specific names or services, he did confirm that “the SDK is all about integrations like that,” saying it’s for people to use Alexa to connect with agents on their behalf to complete tasks.
Rausch is aware that any friction at all in the adoption and setup process can turn people away. To that end, upgrading to Alexa+ should not require any additional sign-ins or authentication. You should be able to have all your connected appliances, security cameras and home routines carry over without any effort.
“The reason that customers love Alexa is it takes away all the complexity,” Rausch said. People don’t need to remember the brand of the WeMo plug they bought, for example, to be able to tell Alexa to turn off a lamp. “We would never take that away,” he said. When you’re adding new services after upgrading to Alexa+, Rausch said you’ll either do so “in the ways that you do it today” or that it’ll get even easier, since “Alexa can walk you through those setups in many more cases.”
According to Rausch, instead of having to “dig around in the Alexa app, you just say ‘Alexa, I want to set up a streaming account with Hulu' or something.” You’ll be presented with a QR code on an Echo device with a screen to facilitate that, and the assistant should guide users along the way.
“We like to say Alexa is an expert, and now an expert on herself.”
Amazon isn't the only company that has made its assistant perform tech support for users. This approach is very similar to how Siri can teach you how to, say, shoot a video in Cinematic mode or create a Genmoji. Where better to get help about a product you’re using than the product itself? Why make me go to a different place for information?
“From a customer experience perspective, customers just want the thing done,” Rausch said. “They don’t have to be responsible or care about any of these things, right?” He believes people just want the plumber or a reservation booked, and don’t want to fuss around with websites and phone calls.
People do want their digital assistant to be helpful and easy to use, but isn’t it equally important that these AI services are accurate and reliable?
When I asked Rausch how Amazon worked around the tendency of generative AI to hallucinate and sometimes spread misinformation, he said “I actually think in the industry, there’s been a mistake of thinking a model is a product.” He also said “LLMs are at the foundation of the architecture, but they’re not the only thing answering the question.”
In other words, Alexa+ is using a combination of Amazon’s knowledge graphs, reliable sources on the internet and partnerships with authoritative outlets. “Other products will simply give you an answer out of the LLM. If you're asking for an authoritative answer, that's not actually sometimes the way to get one. and I think that's what you're highlighting,” he said.
Rausch added that Amazon has “taken great care” with Alexa. “Will it make mistakes? Every piece of software makes mistakes,” he said. “But we’re working hard to ground it in knowledge.”
I’ve yet to try out Alexa+ for myself, and everything we’ve seen so far has been in highly controlled demos, so it’s hard to tell what real world performance will be like. But if the new Alexa is truly able to work with third-party services in a way that’s seamless and effective, it would not only bring Amazon back into the consumer AI race, but could possibly give it an advantage over the likes of Google, Apple and OpenAI. Considering Amazon really brought the idea of a virtual assistant into homes around the world, this could also have an impact that goes beyond the tech-savvy users of today’s AI services.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazons-generative-ai-vision-for-alexa-is-appealing-but-unproven-140014416.html?src=rss©
© Sam Rutherford for Engadget
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Since its founding in 2021, OpenAI Startup Fund has invested in over a dozen startups, including many of the hottest startups in AI.
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