 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including James C. Smith, Miranda Janell, and Justin Zellers. Coming up on DTNS, Amazon wants to preserve memories of the deceased. Meta goes all in on digital wallets. And wait, what did Michael Jackson do for Sega? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 23rd, 2022, from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Raffalino. From deep in the heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. So while turning into the Southern California sun, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, hopefully everybody stays cool. I don't know, get those popsicles out. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that the company is speaking with potential ad partners saying it will likely start an advertising business in partnership with an established player. The Wall Street Journal sources say that NBC Universal and Google are the top contenders to work with Netflix. General Motors said that all of its current and upcoming EVs built on its Altium platform, as well as most Chevy Bolt models, will support plug and charge capability on the Evgo network. Plug and charge stations recognize a vehicle as it parks and doesn't require pre-registrations per each station, and payments are handled and authenticated on a smartphone. So basically register once you can pull up and it just smooths out the whole process. GM also partnered with Evgo to add more than 3,250 fast chargers in the US by 2025. Of course, GM is not alone with supporting plug and charge. We have Volkswagen, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi, Hyundai, Lucid, and Polestar also supporting it. Meta began testing an age verification update to Instagram in the US, which will require additional verification for users if they edit a date of birth to be over 18 years old. Instagram will test three verification options, uploading IDs, asking adult Instagram friends to verify that person's age, or submitting videos for facial analysis. Instagram partnered with IoT on the facial analysis, that's the same company that provides age verification to the Evgo social app. We talked about that back on May 25th, if you recall. The Instagram system doesn't verify age when creating an account, however. The DNA Data Storage Alliance, one of my top 10 alliances, made up of Microsoft, Western Digital, Illumina, and Twist Bioscience, joined the Storage Networking Industry Association, or SNEA, as a technological affiliate. The group will work on standards to speed development of an interoperable DNA storage ecosystem. DNA offers a lot of potential as an archival storage system, offering density up to 100,000 times greater than magnetic tape. For example, it's able to store up to a Zetabyte per gram of DNA, and it can last for thousands of years. Right now, most work in it is theoretical. It has impractically slow read and write speeds, but joining SNEA is a major step into developing it as a product. At its ReMars conference, Amazon launched a new preview of Code Whisper, an AI programming tool that can auto-complete functions based either on commands from the programmer or the first few inputs of its name. Amazon claims this can even take into account your own coding style and variable names when auto-completing. The sounds familiar at all, GitHub just released its similar co-pilot service to all users this week. Code Whisper supports Java, JavaScript, and Python at launch and was trained on billions of lines of open source code, documentation, and code on public forums. The Code Whisper preview is available as part of the AWS IDE tool kit. All right, y'all, let's talk a little bit about Amazon being creepy, or I don't know, you might think creepy, you might not. Let's unpack this. If there's one thing that tech companies, not just Amazon, think that people want, it's having their loved ones brought back digitally. You might have a deceased parent or grandparent or family member or friend, and that would be in this queue. In the latest of these efforts, Amazon Senior Vice President Rohit Prasad said that the company is working on letting Amazon's assistant, you know her name, mimic the voice of anyone after training on less than a minute of audio of that person's voice, positioning it as a way to make the memories last using the voices of deceased loved ones. Amazon demoed the feature at its annual ReMars conference in it. Amazon showed a child asking an echo device to have his grandma finish reading the Wizard of Oz. This is part of an overall effort to add, quote unquote, human attributes to AI systems. Amazon says that the key to advancing this was approaching the issue as a voice conversation task rather than speech generation. Yeah, and if you're saying, well, this kind of speech replication isn't new, you're correct. It started to become generally available on the consumer level, but Amazon is not the first company to try to tackle this, but generally it needs a large sample of audio to work well. Otherwise not gonna sound like a grandma. Even then it's best used for quick edits, not necessarily reading an entire book type of thing. Movie studios have used it for people that have either passed away or whose voices have changed over time, such as creating an AI double of Anthony Bourdain in a recent documentary or Sonante creating an AI voice clone of Val Kimmer in the latest Top Gun movie. Amazon gave no indication when this feature will ever be made public, but frame that is saying that advances like this are proof that we live in the, quote unquote, golden age of AI. The only question whether or not it is more of a golden time with your friends and family or pet cemetery. Yeah. So, Sarah, I mean, we opened this as kind of joking. It's like, hey, this potentially could be super creepy. I feel like Amazon set themselves up for this because if they have it as, hey, dad's out of town or, oh, I lost my voice. I got laryngitis, I can't talk, but I can do, like make it so that it's like, okay, this helps separate a gap or something like that. I feel like when you make it so saccharine and also bring in, hey, it's old deceased grandma over there, that to me is like, turning on all the bells and whistles for people to be like, ooh, this doesn't feel right. It's not saccharine, it's weird. Forever, Apple has kind of understood this in terms of their PR. There's a reason why they make commercials like they do where they put realistic situations that either tug at the hard strings or demonstrate how technology will better your life with your family. But it is very, very, very few and far between outside of that company in terms of trying to leverage its PR. I think we might all remember the Samsung ad where a wife digitally tap-transferred what she was insinuating to be, may or may not be a sex tape to her husband. I don't remember that commercial. That one looked like, wow. She was to show that you could tap and transfer stuff using the NFT technology that was new at the time. Anyway, there is a million ways that you can do this. You can do the teenager who gets mad at their parents but secretly is using Amazon to replicate their parents' voice to read them a story or something like that. You don't have to go all the way to dead grandma and tie it to the pandemic, which he did during this. It shows tone deafness. Listen, I do not have children of my own, but I know a lot of people on this panel are parents. I have parent friends who talk regularly about how the kid might go a little off the rails. These are younger kids, but they want the parents' voice there. Maybe mom or dad has to travel out of town. Maybe both of them do type of thing. I can see where this actually would come in handy and be just kind of a security blanket type thing. It's when you go into the deceased. That's when everyone goes, well, hold on a second, Amazon. What the heck are you doing? And I think a lot of this is grandma. I didn't even know grandma was alive until you introduced a grandma. Yeah, didn't grandma die? How's this happening? That's a whole other conversation. Which is the whole other element of this. I think a lot of the problems that people are having with this is Amazon basically just threw this out here, and we don't have a lot of the details about how this will be implemented. Because I can definitely see if they throw this out and it's like, here's an API. You can plug it in. It's free. You can use it with any single app ever. Yeah, there's all sorts of problematic use cases that that could get into trouble with. However, they're like, if we're going to include this in like, here are these set five categories of apps that we're going to do. And we're going to human review all of these. And you can report. If you put up enough guardrails around this specific implementation, I'm not talking about the potential for deep fake audio. In general, I mean, obviously those solutions are out there across a wide spectrum of product. But just for this Amazon integration, I do think there is a way to set it up in a way that could be done responsibly and with minimum. I guess you would have to be like, I consent to this weird creepy recreation of a dead person's voice. But Amazon didn't do that. They just said, here's this creepy use case. Enjoy, have at it, internet. I think we're going off a little bit of the Braille seat. This is not the end of days here for Amazon. It was a sloppy and ugly PR slip up during a largely developers conference. The fact that we have a bright spotlight here is what it is. But this technology is out there. Descript is a program that's available right now. And you can do the exact same thing. In fact, our friend Andrew Heaton did exactly that, trained his voice, and then called his father with the AI generated voice. And his dad was none the wiser. So this is all we have there. Oh, that's like a cool trick to play on parents. I'm going to do that with my mom. Sorry, mom. Spoiler, next time I call you, might not be me. All right, moving on to the metaverse, because we all love talking about the metaverse. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps you've heard of him, announced on Wednesday that Facebook Pay is now called MetaPay. Not a huge surprise. The company announced its intentions to rebrand last month. Yeah, what's making more waves is that Zuckerberg also said the company wants MetaPay to become the wallet for the metaverse that can manage identities, items, and payment methods across digital worlds. Zuckerberg's post focuses mostly on how the company's metaverse wallet will enable proof of digital ownership. He mentions how it could be used to create and buy digital clothing, art, videos, music, experiences, virtual events, and more. Now, if you're thinking to yourself, OK, sounds good, isn't this just an NFT wallet that does all the things? Zuckerberg doesn't say that specifically, but the company has recently been working on integrating NFTs into Instagram and Facebook together. He also says Meta's wallet will be interoperable so you can use your goods in any metaverse experience. That part is unclear to me. How many metaverses are we going to have? But OK, there's some questions about how that's going to work, obviously. But Meta did join a standards group with the goal of getting everybody on the same page when it comes to language and tech related to this metaverse. Yeah, and that's the key part, right, at the end. Because if a couple of days ago they had announced this MetaPay initiative, I would have been very skeptical of being like, OK, this is just a rebrand. Yes, they have visions of it. But how applicable is this? The idea that there are numerous big companies that aren't named Apple and Google that are all working together on metaverse standards makes me kind of reconsider this a little bit, other than it just being, oh, OK, they're doing NFT wallets. Because yeah, that is what it sounds like. One, I do think this is something of Meta just kind of realizing, hey, NFT is like a loaded word for a lot of people. It sounds like there's a lot of hype around it. Maybe let's just back off on that until we can actually deliver something that people want. But also, I do think that there are meaningfully grander ambitions to this. Obviously, Facebook thinks the metaverse is going to eat everything. But I do think having a standards committee like that, or standards alliance, or whatever you want to call it, makes this a lot more meaningful than a first blush. I do think it's also utilitarian. Being in virtual reality, which is going to be the pathway for the metaverse experience, is something for which getting out your wallet effectively breaks immersion. And the idea of having something that is built from the ground up to be integrated within a virtual world is good. Yeah, I think that I would probably buy more stuff if it were easier to pay for things while I was in virtual reality. And if you kind of close your eyes and squint really hard, I do also see a little bit of a similar idea to what Inrupt is doing, a Tim Berners-Lee company with their pods kind of system. It's not nearly as ambitious, at least by the way Zuckerberg is making it sound like. That's more about like, hey, I own all of my personal data. I can take it kind of wherever I want, and I own it, and I have stewardship of it. But I do feel like in its intention, I feel like when you're talking about bundling it, again, not just being a way to transact commerce, which is important, again, to having that seamless experience, but kind of having ownership of like digital assets within that, I'm not saying they're one to one. I'm not saying they're even related. But I feel like there is some purchase to this idea of kind of having this pod that moves across ecosystems. And it's kind of surprising to see Meta going forward and saying this will be interoperable. I feel like that we're kind of entering into a new era, though, where the idea of interoperability is going to be more of a thing. We've heard the super app label thrown around a few times recently. I think it was like somewhere between antitrust and the fact that all these companies have kind of reached maturity. We are now, at least for the top players, they're like, maybe we can unwall our gardens just a touch. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, so much of this is like as an enthusiastic VR user, and I use a Quest, so it's a meta company. I'm like, OK, this is awesome. If there's more life to be had while I'm in that world, great. Love the metaverse. None of that is real, though, right now. We're talking about it a lot. We're talking about what the future is going to be like. This metaverse that no one really knows how to even get there type thing. It'll be fascinating to see how this shakes out. I wonder how metaverse real estate prices are holding up. Is that a leading or lagging indicator for the economic ability of the country? Yes, we're in a metaverse bear market. It's really bad. Well, if you want to hear us talk about metaverse things or non-metaverse things, one way to let us know what you care about is in our subreddits. We look at it every day and you help us choose a lot of stories. So thank you in advance. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right. So on DTNS, we cover our share of EV related news. We try to focus on everything, you know, because stuff is happening all across the world. But there's a whole booming tech industry around other mobility services. A lot of the time when we hear about those, we think of electric scooter companies like Lime or Bird. But there's also a booming industry with e-bikes. According to NPD Group, e-bike sales grew 47% on the year in 2021 after seeing 145% growth in a pandemic fueled 2020. A lot of people getting on those bikes. Now, with people looking to potentially avoid rising fuel costs, they're proving to be a popular option. You can save some money by doing it. And, you know, maybe get a little healthier. Rich, I know you've been looking at this market recently, right? Yeah, I've been looking at me and my wife Jackie recently decided to downsize to a one car household. We just ended up having a car in the garage 99% of the time. And, you know, for the first couple of months, I would say there's been a handful of times where I was like, oh, darn, it'd be nice to go to the store. We live out in the Burbs. So like the grocery, like the nearest park, if I want to take the kids to the park, it's about a mile away. It's not undoable to walk with that four and a five year old. The walk backs kind of, you know, kind of a pain, to be quite honest. The nearest grocery store is like two miles away. Again, if there was an emergency, I need, you know, I really need that EVOO. I can just, you know, run up to the giant eagle, be back, probably, you know, take a little bit of time, but I could do it. Not the most friendly thing to do. But I was looking, I was like, okay, I don't want to buy another used car because I'm already spending money. It's not a great market for it. E-Bike kind of sprung to mind as like, hey, this is something that I can transport fairly quickly. It's not like going to absolutely destroy my completely ripped and awesome physique. And, you know, it's something I can also, you know, kind of carry cargo on at the same time. It really seemed to fill a niche. And I was fascinated to discover like this rising market, you know, as I started to research the options that are out there. Yeah, I mean, I think that you are a fairly ideal person for whom to do that. Yeah, and looking at like what, like, because I've mentioned this to friends and they say, well, why don't you just get like a moped or a scooter? I know in the state of Ohio, a lot of other U.S. states, this requires a motorcycle license and I'm not 100% certain of my capability to get that. And it's, you know, it's a hassle to go there. There's fees involved and stuff like that. You know, it's more like, I don't want to go through with that. E-bikes don't really have that restrictions. And they're much more friendly for transporting kids. You can get like cargo E-bikes. You can put two seats on those or like a kind of a kid carrying rack and fit two small humans on there. So there is a lot of versatility out there that kind of made it stand out from a lot of the other, you know, kind of motorized two-wheel options. Like a scooter doesn't really have the cargo capacity also would like murder my children. I'm not a fan of that. So. Well, that's, that's, that's good, good for you, Rich. But, you know, I know that the e-bike thing has at least in California because California notoriously full of hills. So, you know, if you live in San Francisco, it's like, I mean, even if you're like really into fitness and, you know, you feel, you feel great about it. It's like, there are just certain hills you're not going to be able to get up. Some people can, I can't. So the e-bike thing has been really attractive to me just in terms of like, okay, where I'd like to get around and I'd like to exercise and I, you know, it's going to be a lot faster than even jogging, but I get a little help, you know, on the other side. And I think that that for, for a lot of people who go, I can't live with a bicycle, like that's insane. Well, maybe the e-bike thing, you know, is something to look into. Yeah. And it's, it's an interesting accessory because, you know, to your point, all of the, at least in the U.S., there are three classes of e-bikes. All of them offer some form of pedal assistance is what they call basically, I've, I've heard it described as, it feels like there's two or three of me doing the pedals. So a class one is purely a pedal assisted e-bike that can go up to 20 miles per hour, but the engine, the engine cuts off as soon as you stop pedaling and it won't let you accelerate basically past 20 miles an hour. That's a hard stop on that. Then there are class two e-bikes that can also go up to 20 miles per hour, but they can include an optional throttle. Basically like a motorcycle, you just twist the throttle and it'll do the acceleration on itself. It takes more wear out of the battery, so you don't get quite as good of range on those if you're leaning into that all that much. But, you know, if you're coming home from a long trip, can be useful. And then there are class three, which are just more powerful pedal assisted, no throttle, but you can go up to 28 miles per hour, which, you know, is at or above the speed limit, depending on what city streets you are. So you're really, at that point, not sacrificing necessarily any speed on your journey and at that point. And those are all, you know, permissible across the U.S. Do we get a sense of that might change any? Because that's pretty fast. Yeah, that is. And especially in Europe, they've capped that much lower. I think 15 is the limit on those. And we're actually, one of the reasons that there aren't, like depending on the type of engine that you have in it, if it's a European motor, like a mid bike motor that sits on where the pedals are, most of those are made in Europe. And so they actually, like a lot of those don't have a lot of the higher end speeds, even though they're extremely well regarded motors because they're catering to that European market. We are seeing some, particularly like parks and trails and stuff like that. Some states making some laws, forbidding e-bikes, especially with throttles on there because they do tear up trails. But right now, I don't hear any particular headwinds in terms of like overall street usage, although something with 28 miles per hour on a sidewalk, probably not ideal. Yeah, that's an etiquette thing. People need to understand, especially on the scooters too, it's like, you don't need to be tearing down the sidewalk. Yeah, and just real quick, in terms of cost, the, these have, it's interesting because up until about 2020, we were seeing the cost in these going down, hitting right just above the 1000 mark for kind of the budget from, budget offerings from well-known brands that would offer like customer service, something like Radpower bikes and stuff like that. Right now, we're seeing prices more for like the, for like the budget entry level models around 1500 to $1800. And a lot of that is because of supply chain issues. Batteries are just harder to source. These are huge. These are pretty big batteries we're talking about, like anywhere from three to 700 watt hours on these, the way about anywhere from five to seven pounds. So we're seeing the cost on even the entry level models going up appreciably. And some places are having a hard time keeping them in stock, especially because we are starting to see some states offer some subsidies, and especially locally worth getting some subsidies and Colorado is doing a $12 million program across the States. And they've actually had to coordinate with local stores to make sure that they, like before they fully rolled us out to make sure the stores are stocked up enough to meet the demand that this would generate. Ron, real quick thing before we get out on this, we're also seeing other like kind of mobility companies getting into e-bikes. Earlier this month, Porsche announced it was going to acquire the e-bike drivetrain maker, Fosua. This is Porsche's second major investment in e-bikes. They also acquired the e-bike company Grape last year. Spelled word, but it's pronounced Grape. What's interesting about Fausa is its system combines the drivetrain, the battery into a single unit. Usually those are separate. The battery will sit along kind of where your seat post is. It's looking to use these acquisitions to form joint ventures, not just for Porsche branded e-bikes, which I guess would be cool and presumably unaffordable, but for further micro-mobility platforms for fleet uses and that kind of stuff. I love it. I love it, you know, e-bike tech. Good stuff, Rich. Also good stuff. If you happen to be a Sonic the Hedgehog fan, with the release of Sonic Origins creator, Nujinaka has confirmed a bit of an urban legend that's been going on for quite some time in Sonic the Hedgehog history that Michael Jackson, yes, that Michael Jackson wrote the music for Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Nujinaka tweeted on Thursday asking if the music for Sonic 3 and Knuckles had changed in Sonic Origins at all since he produced the original game in 1993 through 94. He quickly followed up with another tweet saying, oh my God, the music for Sonic 3 has changed. Even though Sega official uses Michael Jackson's music. And to say this is a... I think we're pretty clear on what happened at this point. And this has kind of been going around since like, I think there was like a 2006 YouTube video was where this like theory first popped off where people were doing comparisons with Michael Jackson songs and stuff like that. So there has been a lot of speculation about this, but we have it from the creator's mouth, I guess. Me too. Kind of offhandedly confirming it. Which I don't think that he did all of the music. This wasn't like a passion project where he was working on every note here. But there was music that he apparently had input on. And that was where the urban legend came from because it bore a melodic similarity to another Michael Jackson song. And we've seen Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles and not be in certain Sonic compilation. So there were always some speculation. Oh, that's because it's tied up with rights to the music. And that's why we haven't been able to do it. And it seems like maybe that's the case also here because they did change the music. Yeah. Indeed. Over in the mail bag, we got a real good one from Daniel in Cincinnati. Hi, Daniel. Daniel, this is in response to a conversation we had yesterday about the Amazon Proteus Bot in Amazon warehouses. Daniel says, you mentioned it's designed to move large carts in warehouses. I work in one of the places that they were deploying them. While this robot does replace people from moving full carts of packages from one place to another, it's not taking someone's job. Right now, heavy or extra large packages are too big for the conveyor belt. They enter the building, they're brought to one location for sorting, workers scan those packages, then they put them into carts. Then those same people have to move the heavy carts, long paths to many other locations in the building. For example, location one through six. Every day, each location receives different quantities of these large packages. The same workers that fill the carts then move the carts when they're full. No one's hired to just move carts. So Proteus is like a more flexible conveyor belt. No company hires 2,000 employees just to move every product or box one at a time through an assembly liner warehouse. Proteus is a cart mover to move heavy carts through the large buildings, but it uses the flat floor to transport as opposed to a fixed conveyor belt. Daniel closes by saying, yeah, Proteus is like an industrial Starship Technologies robot. Good context from on the ground. Super appreciate that. Yeah, no kidding. I mean, it's like a short of employees all on e-bikes. I feel like Proteus is just a better idea, you know? You got a big warehouse. You got a lot of big old heavy boxes. Let's help the employees help themselves. So thanks to you, Daniel, and thanks to everybody who writes in every day. Keep those emails coming. We'd love to hear your feedback. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. Also thanks to you just from Robert Young for being with Rich and I today. What's been going on since we saw you last? Well, friends, you know, I am just a one-man podcasting machine. So I am continuing to let you know that We're Not Wrong is the panel show discussing politics with me and two other independent political podcast creators, Jen Briney of The Congressional Dish and Andrew Heaton, who we already mentioned in this episode from the political orphanage. We have a brand new episode out, including January 6th, whether or not it's dirty pool to have campaigns run ads for other parties, candidates that you would like to beat other people. And of course, the great question of whether or not an elephant in the zoo gets sentience. Right. Whether or not it should be mandated by law to be led out of the zoo. Although that was last week, but I only said that because I forgot the third topic of what we talked about last week. What are you talking about? This is the life of a podcaster. I'm like, what did I talk about yesterday? I don't know. Daniel reminded me with his email. Special thanks to Liz Kohy, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. We'd like to thank you whenever we can. So Liz, today's your day. Thank you for all the years of support. And it was Ben Stiller visiting Ukraine. I just remembered it. Anyway, go ahead. Oh, there it is. There it is. Just a reminder, which we can talk about in the after show. There is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet, available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Do check it out, if you think you should. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC on this here show. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Lamar Wilson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. And the club hopes you have enjoyed this program.