What’s new
Facebook acquired startup Ozlo to build up AI for Messenger
Ozlo specializes in understanding text-based conversations, and claims it can understand and provide answers to questions that don’t necessarily have simple yes or no answers or “probabilistic assertions of truth”. On the company’s website, for example, a short demo shows its AI assistant answering a question about whether or not a restaurant is “group friendly” based on understanding multiple reviews. Ozlo’s website claims it has 30 employees, and a Facebook spokesperson says the “majority of the team” will be joining Messenger in Facebook’s offices.
You can read more here.
Amazon suspends the sales of Blu phones for including preloaded spyware
Blu has been suspended from selling on Amazon after cybersecurity experts detailed how software preloaded onto its devices collects sensitive user data and sends it overseas. “Because security and privacy of our customers is of the utmost importance, all BLU phone models have been made unavailable for purchase on Amazon.com until the issue is resolved,” Amazon said in a statement.
More info are available here.
New products
Xiaomi Mi 5X
The phone has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC and 4GB of RAM. It comes with 64GB of internal storage and a 3,080mAh battery.
More info here.
Samsung Galaxy Note 8
The Galaxy Note8 will be announced on August 23 in New York City. The phone will have a 6.4-inch display and a dual-lens camera on back with 3x optical zoom.
More info here.
You might want to know about this
Google’s Android Nearby Connections 2.0 API is now available
The Nearby Connections 2.0 API, previewed at Google I/O earlier this year, offers offline, high-bandwidth peer-to-peer communication by leveraging Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE and classic Bluetooth connections. It’s now publicly available on all Android devices running Google Play services 11.0 and up.
You can read more here.
A new update lets Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange work together
It’s not unusual for a company to still use both Google’s G Suite tools and Microsoft Exchange in parallel, and with this update, G Suite admins can now allow their users to see real-time information across the two systems. This means tools like Google Calendar’s Find a Time feature and Outlook’s Scheduling Assistant can now easily talk to each other, for example.
More info can be found here.
Fun stuff
The annual RoboCup soccer contest is aiming to beat a team of professional human players by 2050
The annual championship, which was held in the central Japanese city of Nagoya, started 20 years ago when a computer beat the top human player in chess, “a big event which prompted computer engineers to set the next goal”, said Itsuki Noda, the president of the RoboCup Federation.
You can read more here.
