MINI TECH 🔥🔥

Last week was Google I/O, and there was a lot of discussion around one of their keynote demos: Google Duplex. This is a service that acts like a human, and makes phone calls on your behalf. You can watch the demos  on YouTube  – one has Duplex booking a haircut, another trying to book a table at a restaurant. From a technical perspective, I think it’s very impressive. I still have memories of primitive speech-to-text voices, so the vocal quality of that demo  and  the understanding of the other person  and the near-instant responses feels very futuristic. But I’ve heard people dismissing it as a toy for rich lazy people, and that feels a bit ableist to me. Lots of people have trouble with phone calls, for a variety of reasons. Maybe hearing is difficult. Perhaps they can’t speak, or they have speech difficulties or an accent that make it hard to be understood. Or they have anxiety talking to strangers on the phone, or waiting on hold uses energy they d...

If you hope to ride in a driverless car someday, chances are that the trip will take place in an urban area. When offering jaunts to the public in autonomous cars, companies like Waymo and Drive.ai choose regions such as Phoenix, Arizona, and Frisco, Texas, respectively, where there are plenty of people who might want to jump into a futuristic car to go from one point to another. And Cruise, a part of General Motors, plans to offer an autonomous taxi service next year in a major U.S. city. But what about running an autonomous car on a stretch of rural road—just an asphalt strip with natural objects like grass and trees nearby, and no detailed, three-dimensional map for the vehicle to reference? Researchers from MIT have been working on that problem, and their strategy involves teaching cars to drive like humans. The area where the MIT team worked was Devon, Massachusetts, and they didn’t have detailed maps. Consider the way a map app, like Google Maps, appears on your phone. Th...

DIY Muting, snoozing, and other ways to quietly ignore people on social media Dial down the volume on your most attention-seeking friends. By  RI TE SH   moments ago   Make your social media apps quieter. David Nield Sure, you love your friends and family—but that doesn't mean you need to hear absolutely everything they post on  social media . Just a few too-chatty contacts can hog all of your attention on Instagram,  Facebook , and Twitter. Luckily, all three of these social networks, as well as instant messaging apps like  WhatsApp , offer tools for muting certain contacts—or at least dialing down the number of their posts you see. They won't know you're ignoring their latest updates, but your  social feed  will feel much quieter. Instagram Instagram recently added an option to mute any of your contacts. Under this setting, you won't see their posts...but they won't...