If you’re like me, you’re constantly looking for ways to save time. I’m not all that busy, mind you: I’m mostly just lazy. And the less time I spend doing stuff, the more time I have to not do stuff. Enter Google Assistant. It’s very good at setting timers, which must be among its most oft-requested tasks. But it can do a whole lot more, some of which can result in real time-savings each day. Here are a handful of Google Assistant commands that I use every day
Google opened its I/O developer conference with a grab-bag of a keynote. Over two hours Wednesday, a cast of characters from the Mountain View, California, tech giant covered everything from AI-assisted ukulele lessons to the company’s carbon-free ambitions for its data centers. There wasn’t always much new to the event, but four I/O items stood out as surprising. Augmenting AR searches Google’s upcoming upgrades to its search features will include “scene exploration,
At its I/O developer event Wednesday, Google said it will release its own smartwatch, called the Pixel Watch, this fall. Until now Google had provided the operating systems for smartwatches, but never the watches themselves. The Pixel Watch is built “inside and out” by Google, as Rick Osterloh, the company’s senior vice president of devices and services, put it during the keynote address. It’s also the first Google product to fully embody the technology the company pu
The already-crowded world of voice assistants is getting some new competition, with Sonos announcing today it will launch its own voice assistant on June 1. While a number of Sonos speakers already support Alexa and Google Assistant, the company’s new voice assistant will focus on audio playback. “Hey Sonos” voice commands will work with Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Pandora, and Sonos Radio to start, with more audio services to come in the future. In a twist, the initi
When Google turned into Alphabet back in 2015, it decided to spin off one of its internal startups, Niantic Labs (later renamed Niantic, Inc.), which had been developing augmented reality experiences. Now, seven years later, Google appears to be going into direct competition with Niantic. At its I/O conference Wednesday, Google announced that it’s offering AR developers a virtual map of the world to which developers can anchor AR graphics. This might allow them make AR experiences that ar
At the Google IO keynote on Wednesday, the tech giant announced two payment initiatives—a digital wallet and a virtual card—which are designed to both improve security and convenience for consumers. Google Wallet is a new service that will allow Android users to store everything from payment services to tickets to vaccine records. Google is a latecomer to the digital wallet space. Apple first introduced the concept with the release of iOS 6 in 2012 (though it wasn’t formally
Google announced a set of initiatives Wednesday aimed at creating a more equitable product experience for people across the skin-tone spectrum. At its Google I/O conference, the company unveiled a new, 10-point skin tone scale—that is, a set of 10 representative human skin tones that people can match to their own, or to skin tones shown in photographs—developed with Ellis Monk, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard University known for his research into skin tone and color
Not only are entrepreneurship opportunities fully available to (ahem) older people, but experience and wisdom can be secret weapons in business. To paraphrase a line in the John Mayer song, “Who Says,” it’s been a long time since 34—which is claimed by some to be the average age of successful startup founders. For me, that awkward age was marked by weekends on the sidelines of soccer games, evenings trying to catch up on endless email, and workdays making one mistake
Consolidation in the video game industry hasn’t been this robust for over a decade. And while rumors are swirling about plenty of potential next targets, no company is being talked about as frequently as Ubisoft. The gossip mill makes a lot of sense. Ubisoft’s stock is well off of its 52-week high, down 30% from the peaks it hit last May, and it’s trading for less than half of what it did in July 2018. The game publisher also has a rich catalog of O&O franchises including As
It’s rare for a tech company to issue a press release announcing that it’s discontinuing a product—especially one whose profile had already eroded into near invisibility. But there’s no mystery about why Apple chose to formally acknowledge that it’s ceasing production of the iPod Touch. Introduced in September 2007, the Touch has always been most easily described as a device that could do everything an iPhone could . . . except make phone calls. But it was also