It’s official: Amazon’s Alexa and Echo will finally speak Aussie in early 2018
After months of speculation, Amazon has finally announced that its Amazon Echo smart speaker range, which are powered by the company’s Alexa smart AI assistant, will be arriving in Australia early in 2018. Much like Google’s recently-launched Home and Home Mini devices, the Amazon Echo is a small web-connected speaker that’s host to a voice-enabled …
Amazon adds in-skill purchases to Alexa
There was clearly a lot of ground to cover at tonight’s AWS re:Invent Alexa State of the Union — but lets be real, the most important bit was how the company plans to make a little money for its developers. After all, Amazon appears to be raking in the dough, with all of the Alexa …
Velodyne LiDAR helps self-driving cars operate at highway speeds
As the company’s Anand Gopalan explained to The Verge, this could be crucial for the kind of dangers you see on the highway. An autonomous vehicle blasting down the road needs to very quickly determine whether or not an object is dangerous enough to require evasive action — you want the car to avoid an …
Watch Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War First Full Trailer Right Here
[embedded content] If you’re merely a casual fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the arrival of the first trailer for Avengers: Infinity War might not seem like a huge deal: After all, pretty much every Marvel movie now feels like an Avengers movie, with the team’s various heroes playing crucial supporting roles in such recent …
Alexa is arriving in Australia and New Zealand early next year
One more bit of news out of tonight’s Alexa State of the Union Keynote at AWS Re:Invent in Vegas. Amazon is finally bringing its voice service to Oceania. After several months of rumblings, the company announced today that Alexa will be arriving in Australia and New Zealand at some unspecified point in early 2018. In …
Facebook wants you to send a selfie, at least if your account seems up to no good
The next time something fishy is going on with your Facebook account, don’t be surprised if you get a message from the gargantuan social media company asking to verify your identity with a selfie. Facebook has been using the selfie verification feature to test for suspicious activity for the better part of a year now, …
New story in Technology from Time: ‘Destiny 2’ Is Adding An Interesting Perk for Amazon Echo Users
Voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa have always invited comparisons to robotic companions and artificially intelligent helpers from science fiction. Perhaps then it comes as no surprise that video game makers are seeing an opportunity in Alexa — specifically when it comes to Destiny 2. Bungie and Activision are releasing a new Alexa skill Wednesday that …
New story in Technology from Time: Former Twitter Worker Who Shut Down Trump’s Account: ‘It Was Just Random’
(SAN FRANCISCO) — A German man has come forward as the former Twitter employee who shut down the account of U.S. President Donald Trump for 11 minutes this month on his last day of work at the social network. The technology news website TechCrunch published an interview on Wednesday with Bahtiyar Duysak, whom it called …
Verizon will launch 5G home internet access in 2018
It’s no shock as to why Verizon is showing its cards so early. The carrier is in fierce competition with fellow incumbent AT&T, which has also been trialing 5G and hopes to deploy it nationwide by the end of 2018. Verizon wants you to know it’s keeping pace and will have a real, publicly available …