Google CEO Sundar Pichai stood on stage at the company’s yearly developer conference on Tuesday and rolled out some of its most advanced technology: an assistant that can schedule appointments for you over the phone, customized suggestions in Google Maps, and even a new feature that can help finish your sentences as you type an […]
Following widespread outcry over the ethical dilemmas raised by Google’s new Duplex system, which lets AI mimic a human voice to make appointments, Google now says the experimental system will have “disclosure built-in.” That seems to mean that whatever eventual shape Duplex takes as a consumer product will involve some type of verbal announcement to […]
Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts-based company that builds increasingly sophisticated robots that enjoy opening doors, has released two more videos of its robots doing very clever things that will definitely not come back to haunt humanity at a later date. In the first video, Boston Dynamics’ humanoid robot Atlas is out jogging, all the better to […]
It came as a total surprise: the most impressive demonstration at Google’s I/O conference yesterday was a phone call to book a haircut. Of course, this was a phone call with a difference. It wasn’t made by a human, but by the Google Assistant, which did an uncannily good job of asking the right questions, […]
For decades, astrophysicists have pondered the odd movements of galaxies across the cosmos. The visible matter of the universe appears to be tugged around by an invisible counterpart, material that does not interact with surrounding matter in any observable way save gravity: dark matter. Refined measurements have since led scientists to hypothesize that 85 percent […]
A groundbreaking quantum experiment recently confirmed the reality of “spooky action-at-a-distance” — the bizarre phenomenon that Einstein hated — in which linked particles seemingly communicate faster than the speed of light. And all it took was 12 teams of physicists in 10 countries, more than 100,000 volunteer gamers and over 97 million data units — […]
Chalk up another win for the Standard Model, the remarkably successful theory that describes how all the known fundamental particles interact. Physicists have made the most precise measurement yet of how strongly the weak force — one of nature’s four fundamental forces — acts on the proton. The results, published today (May 9) in the […]
After two days of Microsoft Build keynotes, we’ve seen a lot. There were cloud APIs. Live coding demonstrations. One time Microsoft pulled away a wall to reveal a demo meeting room. It was truly a thrilling event. But mixed within all of that were some exciting announcements: new Windows features, improvements for voice assistants, and […]
Facebook instituted its biggest executive shakeup in its 15-year history this week, appointing new leaders for WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook’s core app while giving other longtime Facebook executives new responsibilities, including a new effort to tackle blockchain technology. The moves, which were announced internally to employees today, are meant to improve executive communication and user […]
It turns out that the Google-branded Android TV dongle that showed up at the FCC awhile back isn’t a consumer product. Instead, Google is offering it to developers as a reference product for testing their TV applications on. You can apply to receive one of the ADT-2 units from Google directly. The dongle supports 4K […]
Are atoms real? Of course they are. Everybody believes in atoms, even people who don’t believe in evolution or climate change. If we didn’t have atoms, how could we have atomic bombs? But you can’t see an atom directly. And even though atoms were first conceived and named by ancient Greeks, it was not until […]
Microsoft’s annual Build conference for developers kicked off the week starting with a keynote provided by CEO Satya Nadella. He didn’t reveal any new Windows 10 hardware, but instead focused his presentation on solutions spanning from the intelligent cloud to the intelligent edge, the latter of which simply classifies everything we use ranging from smart […]
