Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 05/07 - All The Headlines From Google I/O

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

All the news that I could possibly grab from Google’s I/O keynote, again, Alexa IS spying on you, Cruise Automation raises a big round... and will we ever actually see the Galaxy Fold? Sponsors: Lightstream.com/ride Metalab.co Links: THE PIXEL 3A PUTS GOOGLE’S PHENOMENAL CAMERA IN A $400 PHONE (The Verge) Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time (The Washington Post) Check your Alexa recording archive here Study: Voice Assistants Far From Hot Marketplace For Buying (MediaPost) GM’s self-driving division Cruise raises another $1.15 billion (The Verge) How Chinese Spies Got the N.S.A.’s Hacking Tools, and Used Them for Attacks (NYTimes) Samsung Electronics says no anticipated shipping date yet for Galaxy Fold (Reuters) Subscribe to the Premium Ad-Free Feed right here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Techmeme ride home for Tuesday, May 7th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the news that I could possibly grab from Google's I.O. keynote.

Again, Alexa is spying on you. Cruise automation raises a big round, and will we ever actually see the Galaxy Fold? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Oh, Lord, y'all. Of all of the big tech event days of the year, Google I.O. is the hardest to cover because it's just something. much. There's hardware, there's software, there's developer initiatives, there's consumer products and services. I'm just going to watch this thing and do my best not to miss anything. And because

I'm going to do it in real time, I'm going in roughly chronological order here because they tend to go so late. I might not be able to make 5 p.m. otherwise. Let's go. Today at I.O. Google Lens is coming to Google Search. Some search results. results will now include 3D models for augmented reality views of what you search for. Google Lens, of course, can already be used for object recognition, language translations, and even shopping. And it is coming to low-end phones as well. In essence, the G-Wiz thing that they showed off with the Google Lens today from the stage was that you can snap a photo of a menu when you're in a restaurant, and Lens can tell you what to order.

Also, duplex, that eerily human bot that can make restaurant reservations for you over the phone that debuted at I.O. last year is now coming to the web. So instead of phone calls, you can use duplex on the web to still make bookings, but basically doing it by filling out the forms that will help you do things like get car rentals and order movie tickets. You can just say, hey, Google, get me a rental car from National for my next trip. And instead of making a phone, phone call, it pulls up the website and starts filling out the order using information from your calendar, Gmail, and even Chrome Auto Fill for credit card information and logging credentials and the like. Google Assistant is getting a driving mode with large, touch-friendly shortcuts to navigate

and make calls whilst in the car. This update is coming this summer on Android phones, and just before it does so, Google Assistant is also coming to Waze starting in the next couple of weeks. and Google says that the upcoming next generation of Google Assistant is 10 times faster than the previous version and includes more app-specific functionality, and is coming to pixel phones later this year. But yes, the hardware probably will get the pride of place in the headlines. Google unveiled the Pixel 3A and Pixel 3AXL, both going on sale this week for $399 and $479 respectively. If your jaw just dropped at the mention of those prices, these are the mid-range pixel phones, not the flagship pixels. They have slightly less powerful chips, lesser screens, plastic cases, but they are pixels, so they'll have the latest androids on them. And they have really decent cameras, apparently.

Dieter Bone said that the cameras were some of the best out there in terms of phone cameras. In fact, I'm just going to quote the lead from Dieter's Pixel 3A review from The Verge, which just dropped. Quote, I'm going to break an unwritten rule of tech reviews and tell you the ending right at the top. If you want to buy a new smartphone that costs between $300 and $500, you should buy a Pixel 3A or Pixel 3AXL. It is the best phone in that price range, and it is actually competitive with more expensive phones in one very important way. The Pixel 3A has a great camera, end quote. interesting details to note about these phones. They only have 64 gigabytes of storage. That's for both versions, both models. Both phones have got actual and factual. Three and a half millimeter

headphone jacks. The headphone jack is back, baby. Hopefully I can dive more into the reviews tomorrow, but that price, that package, super, super compelling. And after years of being exclusive to Verizon, both the Pixel 3 and the Pixel 3A lineups, are now available on Sprint, T-Mobile, and even U.S. cellular. And there was more hardware. Google unveiled the Google Nest Hub Max, a 10-inch smart display with a built-in camera that can act as an indoor security camera as well

coming this fall for $229. P.S., Google is apparently also rebranding all smart home products to Nest. So, Nest brand for the win. But of course, you know, I.O. is actually a developer's conference, so Pride of Place also went to the rollout of the next generation of Android, Android Q. Among the bells and whistles, there is now a dark mode, better gesture controls, improvements to OS security updates via project mainline, a focus mode and more. But maybe the most impressive bell and or whistle is something called live caption, which shows a real-time transcription of any video or audio a user plays on their phone. It works on everything from YouTube to Instagram to PocketCast, even video chat apps.

And apparently the transcription is super accurate. By the way, Google also bragged about Android numbers as they're want to do. Apparently, Android now has more than 2.5 billion active devices in the world compared to the little over 2 billion devices it had in May of 2017. What else? Incognito mode is coming to Google Maps later this year, allowing users to hide any data they create. And when you search in incognito mode, the data will not be tied to your overall Google account. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Google will update Android Auto in the summer to make it

more intuitive with features like a dynamic persistent bar for navigating apps and a default dark mode. Google Assistant has a new Picks for You feature that can take into account user preferences to help when recommending things like recipes and podcasts. Speaking of podcasts, Google Search will get the full coverage feature from Google News, which uses machine learning to give you multiple angles of a big story, and Google Search will officially be able to index and surface podcast content that will be listed directly in the search results. So if you search for a topic, search will be able to surface relevant podcast episodes based on the content itself, not just the title. But hey, remember a few weeks ago when we did that Google Search experiment where I read

random words on the pod and we were able to find that in search within a couple of hours. Cool. And you can listen to podcast right in Google search results, which, given last week's luminary controversies, I'm sure we'll learn shortly if podcasters will get credit, downloads credit for any listens that happened in search. You can also save podcast episodes from search for later listening. There's a time lapse camera mode available now on all Google Pixel phones that will be natively supported in Google Photos. There was a bunch of AI stuff at the end. Google is using a method known as testing with concept activation vectors to help understand what signals neural networks use for predictions to help identify AI bias.

And yeah, I'm sure there are a couple of things that I probably missed. If you feel like I just threw a whole bunch of stuff at you. Yeah, I did. Imagine trying to catch all of that stuff in real time. We'll try to sort out the important stuff tomorrow to underline it. But right now, I got to go into the box and start recording if we're going to have any hope of getting this episode to you by five. In the self-driving wars, don't sleep on cruise automation GM's entrant into the space. Waymo might generally be considered to be the furthest to head with the best tech. But Cruise is apparently right there with them and with the resources of a nearly 100-year-old car company behind them.

And Cruz has got even more resources since it's been announced that cruise automation has raised $1.15 billion at a $19 billion valuation from investors including SoftBank, Honda, and Tiro Price Associates, quoting the Verge. It's another enormous boost for GM's Cruise. Last May, it announced a $2.25 billion investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a major venture investment effort that was started by the Japanese tech giant in 2016. Then in October, GM said it would team up with Honda to design a purpose-built self-driving car. The Japanese automaker said it would devote $2 billion to the effort over 12 years,

including a $750 million equity investment in Cruise. GM bought Cruise in 2016 for $1 billion to jumpstart its self-driving efforts. The company has said it plans to deploy its fully driverless cars without steering. ringwheel or pedals for commercial ride hailing use as early as 2019, end quote. Ah yes, self-driving cars on the road by 2020. You know how I feel about that one. Hey, guess what? When you trigger A-L-E-X-A with her wake word, Amazon keeps a recording of the conversations that ensue after she is summoned, and you do not have the option to opt out of the collection of those recordings.

Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. Siri does the same thing. And until recently, Google Assistant did as well. The Washington Post technology columnist Jeffrey Fowler delivers this news. That wasn't exactly a huge secret, but still not widely known. Quote, I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life. Spaghetti timer requests, joking house guests, and random snippets of Downton Abbey. There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's Wake Word to start recording, including my family discussing medication, and a friend conducting a business deal, end quote.

There is a link in the show notes if you want to listen to your own A-L-E-X-A archive. Again, there's a rational reason for your conversations being saved. It helps Amazon, Google, Apple, everyone improve the performance of their systems. When you use a voice assistant, it's not just helping you. you're helping it by training it with a corpus of data. But since all of these companies have gotten your consent to collect this data in the first place, they're just keeping it around because, you know, nothing says they can't. And they never know if it might or might not turn out to be useful in the future, right?

That's basically the state of the surveillance economy in 2019. In a nutshell, hopefully in its most benign form. You'd better hope they never find a use for that data. because if they do, you think you stand a chance in hell of ever getting it back. Anywho, tangentially related story, according to a new study of 4,500 consumers in four countries, only 17% of smart device owners buy products using voice assistance, and that is up from 11% a year ago. Quoting media posts, those statistics actually might look good compared to another widely repeated story.

The information reported last August that sources who saw Amazon, Amazon data said only 2% of the 50 million ALEXA owners used it to make a purchase, and 90% of them decided they wouldn't do it again. Amazon strenuously denied the story. Still, while Epicurvers' numbers are less bleak, they're still not stellar, end quote. And hey, this is fun. The NSA apparently created some pretty sophisticated hacking tools, used them to attempt to hack some Chinese hackers, but then the hack was detected, and then the original NSA exploit was co-opted by Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups and repurposed to then attack U.S. allies and private companies in Europe and Asia back in 2016.

Quoting the New York Times, based on the timing of the attacks and clues in the computer code, researchers with the firm Symantec believe the Chinese did not steal the code, but captured it from an NSA attack on their own computers, like a gunslinger who grabs an enemy's rifle and starts blasting away. The Chinese action shows how proliferating cyber conflict is creating a digital wild west with few rules or certainties, and how difficult it is for the United States to keep track of the malware it uses to break into foreign networks and attack adversaries' infrastructure. The losses have touched off a debate within the intelligence community over whether the United States should continue to develop some of the world's most high-tech, stealthy cyber

weapons if it is unable to keep them under lock and key, end quote. Gee, you think. Samsung says it cannot confirm the shipping date for its Galaxy Fold flagship foldable phone. If you have pre-ordered and aren't okay waiting for some unknowable release date, you can cancel. In fact, Samsung says unless you tell them not to, they will cancel. your pre-order automatically if the phones do not ship by May 31st. Apparently, U.S. regulations

require customers to be notified if pre-orders do not ship by the date promised when the customer originally put in their pre-order. Quoting from Reuters, though the issue does not hurt Samsung's balance sheet, the postponement damages the firm's efforts to portray itself as an innovative first mover, analysts have said. Samsung has said it plans to make at least one million fold handsets in the first year, versus the total 300 million phones it produces annually on average. It closed Galaxy Fold pre-orders earlier due to what it said was, quote, high demand, end quote. Damages the firm's reputation, you think? Again, if this were another company with a high-profile product that couldn't ship on time because kind of maybe the technology is not fully baked,

you would never hear the end of this. I guess people just weren't all that excited about getting their hands on a foldable phone to begin with, no matter what Samsung says, because seriously, this could be a much, much bigger story, especially because, you know, I don't know anything about anything, but I have the sneaking suspicion that the odds that this particular device might never ship are not exactly zero. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Post to our subreddit and tip me stories at our slash right home. So much news from I.O. today that, of course, I couldn't really do it justice in a podcast, but that's what techmeme.com is for. The editors do an amazing job

of arranging all the news into digestible, meaningful headlines. And don't forget, if you appreciate this podcast and want to support it financially, the link to the subscription, ad-free premium feed is the last link in the show notes. You can sign up right in your podcast in like three taps. Talk to you tomorrow.