Month: May 2018

Enlarge / The insanely colorful Android P Easter Egg. (credit: Android)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Google I/O 2018 has officially kicked off, and with it comes the traditional release of a new Android developer preview. While Android P, as the next major update is still called for now, still has a long way to go until its final release—Google still has three more developer previews planned, with a final consumer build scheduled for Q3 2018—Google took some time at the keynote of its annual developer conference to detail a few new features Android users can expect to see.

The biggest news in Preview 1 was a new design style that was applied to the notification panel, main settings screen, and some system UI bits. Burke recapped a couple of changes that had already been announced in that earlier preview, including a revamped volume control widget and the option to change the screen orientation even when you've locked the device in portrait mode.

At Google's I/O keynote, Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke expanded on the forthcoming update's features, saying that it will generally center on three key pillars: intelligence, simplicity, and digital wellbeing.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

At Google I/O today, Google debuted its revamped Google News program that attempts to highlight "the best of what journalism has to offer." The new program, redesigned using Google's Material Design, tackles three goals: helping users keep up with stories they care about, helping those users understand stories fully, and making it easier for users to support news organizations they trust.

The company demoed the new Google News during the I/O keynote, showing off many features in mobile-app form. A general briefing sits at the top of the mobile app, highlighting five of the biggest stories happening now that users should know about. Google News users AI to populate the rest of the news feed, picking out news stories from across the web that appeal to you and your interests. It will also feature local stories and events based on your location.

Unlike other news aggregation services, Google News doesn't make you pick out your interests from a long list of topics. Rather, the program users reinforcement learning to know more about you the more you use it. We also suspect that Google News will also use your Google account and all the information associated with it to find out more about you, your interests, and the stories you may like.

Enlarge / This is a colorized transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of an Ebola virus virion. (Cynthia Goldsmith) (credit: CDC)

Two out of five samples from patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have tested positive for Ebola virus disease, sparking the DRC government to declare an outbreak, the World Health Organization confirmed Tuesday.

The five samples are all from the iIkoko Iponge health facility near Bikoro in Equateur Province, which is located in the northwestern part of the country along the shores of Lake Tumba. In the past five weeks, the area has reported 21 cases, including 17 deaths, suspected to be from a viral haemorrhagic fever. This is a generic term for illnesses involving fever and bleeding that are caused by a variety of viruses, including Ebola.

The WHO notes that Bikoro’s health facilities have “limited functionality” and largely rely on international aid and supplies. The DRC’s Ministry of Health tested the five patient samples at the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB) in Kinshasa, the country’s capital.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Tuesday's I/O keynote included a segment on Google Assistant with a slew of newly announced features, but none was as startling as its rollout of Google Duplex: a voice-powered service that pretends to be human and calls businesses on your behalf.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai played back two phone conversations that he alleged were 100-percent legitimate, in which Google's AI-driven voice service called real-world businesses and scheduled appointments based on a user's data. In both cases, voices that sounded decidedly more human and realistic than the default female Google Assistant voice used seemingly natural speech patterns. Phrases like "um" and a decidedly West Coast question-like tilt could be heard as Google Duplex confirmed both a salon appointment and a dinner reservation. (The two calls were completed with different voices: one male, one female.)

"We are still developing this technology," Pichai told the I/O crowd, and he admitted many calls in Duplex's testing phase "didn't quite go as expected." (Pichai did not play any sample audio of these failed tests.)

Enlarge (credit: Rom Amadeo)

At today's I/O keynote, Google announced a new Gmail feature dubbed "smart compose." This AI-based system will let Gmail users write messages faster by suggesting phrases as they type out emails.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai presented a short demo of the new feature, showing how the AI suggests words and phrases and even completes sentences as you type out messages in a new email window. Smart compose will suggest options for what you may want to say next based on what you've already typed. If it works as well as it did in the demo, smart compose should help Gmail users write emails much faster and more efficiently.

We've seen features similar to "smart compose" in other contexts, like smartphone messaging apps. However, those apps typically stop at suggesting words and short phrases—Google's new AI feature for Gmail goes even further to suggest full sentences. "Smart compose" will be rolling out to Gmail users this month.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a deal on Amazon's diminutive Echo Dot speaker, as you can now grab two units for $60. A single Echo Dot normally goes for $50, so you're saving about $40 buying in bulk here. The discount will show up at checkout.

As we noted in our Mother's Day gift guide earlier in the week, you probably know whether you're comfortable with the idea of a smart speaker in your home at this point. If you can't get past the creepiness of it all, we won't chastise you. But if you've been curious about jumping aboard the bandwagon, the Echo Dot is an easy entry point. It does all the convenient things smart speakers are known to do—set timers and reminders, answer general questions, fire up music, and the like—at what's now a very affordable price. It's a pretty terrible speaker on its own, but it works well enough for podcasts, it can hook up to existing speaker systems, and having two units lessens the need to walk to one section of the house to actually hear it.

If you have no time for Alexa, we also have deals on various laptops, headphones, smartphones, SSDs, and plenty of other gadgets. Have a look for yourself below.