Day: June 11, 2020

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Google Assistant Is About to Get More Useful On Every Smart Device

https://gizmodo.com/google-assistant-is-about-to-get-more-useful-on-every-s-1844000602

Photo: Andrew Liszewski (Gizmodo)

Google Assistant is incredibly useful, but depending on which devices you own, you might not have access to all of its commands and features. Google plans to change that. In an update announced today, the company pledged to make more of its Assistant’s abilities available on as many devices as possible, starting with three important additions.

The first feature that will become available on more devices is Voice Match, which allows the Google Assistant to recognize who’s asking a question simply by hearing them speak. This is critically important, because the Google Assistant uses your identity to relay relevant information about your schedule, commute, and so on—details which might not apply to everyone in your house. On top of that, every smart speaker or smart display can support Voice Match for up to six people, so unless you have a really big family, everyone should be able to get individualized responses.

The second feature that will become available on more devices is hotword sensitivity, which allows you to customize how responsive the Google Assistant will be when you say, “Hey, Google,” or, “OK, Google.” Admittedly, for a lot of native English speakers in the U.S., the Google Assistant is already pretty good at responding in a timely manner when you ask. However, for people with accents, tweaking the Assistant’s hotword sensitivity can go a long way toward making voice commands easier to use.

Finally, the third feature that will get wider support is the ability to choose which speaker is your default speaker for playing music or other audio. Setting up a new default speaker should be as easy as opening the Google Home app, and then selecting your speaker of choice. That said, if there’s ever a time when you want to music to play on a different speaker in your home, you can also specify that at the end of a command: “OK, Google, play Daft Punk on the kitchen speaker.”

Regardless, for some smart speakers (I’m looking at you Sonos) that took years to get even the most basic Google Assistant functionality, it’s nice to see Google committing to bring more of the Assistant’s features to a wider range of devices.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

June 11, 2020 at 03:57PM

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EPA orders Amazon and eBay to remove products posing as coronavirus remedies

https://www.engadget.com/epa-orders-amazon-and-e-bay-to-remove-products-posing-as-coronavirus-remedies-104539085.html

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ordered Amazon and eBay to stop selling products that falsely claim to kill coronavirus. Around 70 products were specified in the EPA’s order, including paint stripper, tablets containing chlorine dioxide and disinfectant sprays, all of which were marketed as antidotes to COVID-19, and in some cases, touted as “preventing epidemics.” Failure to comply with the notice could cost the companies up to $20,288 per sale.

According to the EPA, both companies have a duty of care to their customers, even though these products may be sold by third-party sellers. Speaking to Bloomberg, EPA associate deputy administrator Doug Benevento said, “eBay and Amazon certainly have a legal obligation, but also sort of a corporate obligation to ensure products like this aren’t on their site.” He added that the EPA has targeted the ecommerce marketplaces directly in order to most effectively cut off the sale of products “that are ineffective or potentially dangerous to people.”

This will be eBay’s first stop-sale notice from the EPA, but marks the fourth for Amazon within the past five years — the company has frequently been found to facilitate unregistered pesticide sales. It also comes as another indictment of the way it’s handled its operations during the coronavirus pandemic. The company has been criticized for its poor response to price gouging, and is now the subject of a lawsuit because of its alleged failure to keep workers safe.

 

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

June 11, 2020 at 05:51AM

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Apple pressured to remove respected podcast app Pocket Casts in China

https://www.engadget.com/apple-pocket-casts-removed-china-app-store-120544731.html

Apple has pulled Pocket Casts, one of the most popular podcast apps on iOS, from its App Store in China. China’s regulator made the demand to Pocket Casts through Apple, according a Pocket Casts Twitter thread. It was told that the app “include[s] content that is illegal in China as determined by the CAC [Cyberspace Administration of China].”

Pocket Casts suggested that the app could be restored if it pulled down specific content, but declined to do so. “We believe podcasting is and should remain an open medium, free of government censorship,” it tweeted. “As such we won’t be censoring podcast content at their request.” The company added that Apple told it to contact the CAC directly to find out what content presented a problem, but “we assumed that what they’d want us to remove are specific podcasts and possibly some of the Black Lives Matter content we’d posted.”

Apple also recently removed Castro Podcasts from the App Store for similar reasons. “We think it might have been our support of the protests in the Discover tab,” Castro tweeted. “We were not given specifics.”

China is Apple’s third largest market after the US and Europe. To that end, it often obliges requests to censor apps and content deemed sensitive by the Chinese government including games like Plague, Inc. Foreign podcasts have been banned in China for years, but Apple Podcast recently opened up a window to foreign content in the nation. However, the latest actions suggest that window might be closing fast.

“The very small amount of warning we were given between there being a problem, and our app being completely removed from the Chinese app store was quite alarming,” a Pocket Casts spokersperson told TechCrunch.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

June 11, 2020 at 07:15AM