 Coming up on DTNS, is it the end of the wake word for voice assistants? Why China made Ant Group cancel its huge IPO and Walmart calls time on shelf scanning robots. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And producing today's show, I'm Amos. Yes, Roger Chang has the week off, but thank you Amos for jumping in and filling in. We're also joined today by Nicole Lee, Senior Editor at Engadget. How's it going, Nicole? Hello, happy to be here. Happy to have you here. We were just talking about Godparents and Spotify on the Apple Watch, and so much more on Good Day Internet. You can get that expanded show by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Gboard users on Google's Pixel phones are starting to see an enhanced voice typing experience. It uses Google Assistant for better recognition and prediction, including some efficient features like saying clear to delete whatever you just voice typed. You can also use auto punctuation and faster voice typing, which doesn't use the cloud to process your voice. Google's Project Zero discovered a high severity flaw in GitHub's actions workflow commands and reported it to GitHub back on July 21st. GitHub issued an advisory on October 1st and deprecated the vulnerable commands, but argued the vulnerabilities should be classed as moderate. Now Project Zero proactively offered GitHub a 14-day grace period on the 90-day disclosure, extending it to November 2nd. And like me in junior high, the day before the deadline, GitHub asked for a 48-hour extension to notify customers and fix a hard date sometime in the future. Project Zero declined and disclosed the details of the bug on Monday. Some people who have ordered the Oculus Quest 2 Elite strap with battery and carrying case said that they've received emails that their orders have been delayed. The email says Oculus is quote, investigating some customer quality reports and has paused shipping while it looks into the problem. Other people on Reddit have reported that the strap is indeed breaking. Bloomberg sources say Apple and its overseas suppliers are producing three Macs with Apple Silicon inside. This is what we expect to hear in their November announcement, new 13-inch, 16-inch MacBook Pros, and a new 13-inch MacBook Air. Foxconn is reportedly assembling the two smaller laptops and Quanta computer is building the larger MacBook Pro, again, according to the sources. Did you know that Twitch's logo is called Glitch? I did not. Well, now you do. And it's important to know because Twitch just announced that TwitchCon, which had been canceled in 2020, is being replaced by an online event called GlitchCon happening on November 14th. We don't have any other details, but something's brewing. Just calling something streaming over the internet GlitchCon seems like you're inviting trouble, but all right. It really does, yeah. Let's talk a little more about the end of robots. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal reports that Walmart is ending its contract to use Boston Nova Robotics robots to keep track of its inventory in 500 of its store locations. Five years ago, Walmart began using the six-foot-tall inventory scanning machine, so they're big. If you're in the aisle with them, you're going to notice. The Wall Street Journal said that Walmart may have ended the partnership because increased online ordering meant that more humans were going to the shelves to fulfill online orders and could be used to do inventory instead of robots. Also, some in-store shoppers apparently just weren't crazy about being around a bunch of robots. Walmart said that it will continue to test new technologies. However, Boston Nova Robotics laid off 50 percent of its staff. Yeah, my first response to this was, ah, humans win a victory. My second response was, only because the robots were limited to shelf scanning. If the robots could do the inventory, the robots would win. So eventually we'll get robots that can do that. And then at the very end, I was like, wait, replacing the robots with humans that already had jobs at Walmart ended up with Boston Nova having to lay off humans. So is this a clever win for the robots? Nicole, what did you think of this? Is it a win for the robots? I don't know. It's very confusing. I think it's kind of just, it's still too early to tell. It's just the beginning of, they're just trying things out. And it didn't work this time. That doesn't mean it's not going to work next time. It's just, you know, they might have inventory robots in the future, and it might be as easy as no stocking shelves and doing all the mundane work of keeping inventory and like, oh, that's stuff. So I think that'd be fine. Yeah, I mean, the whole kind of like, hey, listen, we're in a pandemic, things have changed for lots of large stores, Walmart being one of them, you know, we kind of need humans on the ground to do things a little bit differently. That makes sense to me. The other part of the story of in-store customers who are still going into Walmart stores physically and saying, I don't like, I don't like that. That does not make me happy. You know, I don't want to be around that robot. That's the thing it's, you know, I kind of laughed about it at first, but it's like, I wonder why? I wonder what that is, because it's, again, it's not, this is not a, you know, you're not at the cash register, you're not talking. It's just kind of doing its thing around you like a Roomba, I guess, but just goes to show you sometimes people just aren't ready. I mean, once it becomes normalized, we don't notice anymore, right? Yeah. But it's the novelty of it where people are like, whoa, there's a robot in here, and there's a little bit of that robots are taking our jobs thing out. Sure. Yeah. And in the middle of a pandemic, when people are getting laid off, I could see that, you know, CEO John Ferner of Walmart was like, I was apparently worried that customers would not like seeing the robots in the company stores. So that's part of it too. But in bossa nova robotics defense, there was nothing wrong with what the robots were doing. The technology worked and it's proven. And it kind of sucks for them to be like, yeah, our technology totally worked. But suddenly there was a pandemic, and you have all this online ordering, which meant that humans were walking the floor a lot more and suddenly the efficiency we had went away. But I think it does mean that bossa nova robotics has a future, right? It's not like their technology didn't work. And it's not like this is the condition we'll have forever. Like you said, Nicole, we'll get we'll get robots that we'll be able to do inventory. It's important. Maybe bossa nova robotics will be that. I'm thinking, I look at thinking, look at the robot is completely like innocuous looking. It's like just it seems so friendly. It doesn't Oh, it's just scanning a shelf. What could possibly Well, listen, if you if you have a contract with a company like Walmart, I mean, that's a big get. So yeah, bossa nova's got to, you know, you know, lay off some people, you know, go back to the drawing board, I assume, you know, they're there, you know, there's there's definitely a future ahead for this kind of thing. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have trained a machine learning model to tell when you're talking to something just by the sound of your voice, it can estimate the direction from which your voice is projected, not just the direction it arrives, because your voice may arrive from multiple directions after bouncing off walls and such, right? There's something called multi pathing. This can tell Oh, the voice is actually coming, the source of the voice isn't the wall, the source of the voice is over there. The system does that by noting which sound is first and clearest. That's the one that's usually coming from the projection source, because other sounds bounce around and tend to get muffled and delayed. It also takes into account that human speech frequencies vary based on the direction higher frequencies are more directional that what we're saying directly to you is going to have more higher frequencies. When it bounces around, it starts to lose those higher frequencies and has a lower frequency. So it's able to tell that as the higher frequencies get absorbed during reflection. The model can work on a device, doesn't need the cloud to process, so less privacy problems there, but also less power. It's easier to implement that way. One use for it could be to let a smart speaker know when you are looking at it and talking to it, eliminating the need to use a wake word in those situations. If it knows like, oh, you're looking right at the smart speaker, I don't even have to use a camera because that has privacy implications too. I can tell you're talking to me. It also might be able to tell when a person is actually in the room with it, which would be a nice little bit of a security thing. You can't just play someone's recording because it's going to sound different and it's going to come from different directions. The code has been released publicly. It'll be a while before it gets implemented into any actual devices though. You know, we were talking in the pre-show of, because I think for some folks, it might be a little bit hard to wrap your head around, okay, what are we doing here? Don't I just say the wake word? But let's say I'm talking to Nicole and Nicole is facing away from me. I would say, hey, Nicole, and she'd go, oh, you're talking to me. Okay, now we're engaging. It's the wake word for Nicole, yeah. Right. But if we're standing right next to each other and I say something, she knows I'm talking to her because I'm there and there's that engagement. So this just, this gets me kind of excited. I mean, it seems like we're getting closer to just a little bit more that normal language that comes with a smart home and certain devices. I think also as more and more devices are able to have these voice commands, like not just your one echo speaker, but like your five echo speakers in your five Alexa things in your home, it will be even more important to figure out which is the thing that's listening and which is the thing that's able to respond to what you're saying. Yeah, that directionality is part of it too, right? I was, I want an answer from the echo that's in the living room because I'm looking in the living room, even though my voice will bounce into the other room where the one in the kitchen hears it, it'll be like, oh, that one's not meant for me because Tom's talking that direction. Like we said, it probably won't get rid of the need for a wake word because you're right, Sarah, sometimes you aren't going to be looking at the thing you want to hear it, hear you. And so you'll like, like, like the wake word for Nicole, you'll have that wake word, you know, it'd be like, hey, I'm talking to you even though I'm not pointed at you. But it would be nice to be able to like, oh, I'm looking right at my echo right now so I could just say, hey, what's the weather? I don't have this, just like when I'm talking to a person. So this is a nice little advance here. And I like that it's publicly available code. Anybody can go grab it and start trying to implement it. For sure. Well, we got a couple interesting notes, news notes about messaging apps here. So let's start with WhatsApp, which has updated its storage usage, storage usage tool to add thumbnails of content to be deleted, and adding the ability to group data by forwarded many times and larger than five megabytes, along with previous ways of categorizing messages. Meanwhile, peer to peer offline messaging app Bridgify, which uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to directly route messages, even when there isn't any internet service, has added end to end encryption using the signal protocol. The app has been used to avoid censorship and outages in Hong Kong, the US, Thailand, Nigeria, and most recently for communication in earthquake hit areas of Turkey and Greece. Yeah, this Bridgify app is interesting. What's the name? There's another system that I was a Kickstarter backer for that was trying to do this with an add-on device, and I'm blanking on the name, but there have been a few of these sorts of attempts to do this kind of messaging using the equipment of your phone, even when the internet's either overloaded or down. A lot of times in the US, it's not that the internet got cut, it's that everybody's using the internet to get swamped, and so this is a way to not use the internet. There also might be fears of surveillance, and so if you're using a direct situation, that avoids having it out on the open internet, but if it wasn't ended encrypted, it could still be observed if people knew it was happening. End-to-end encryption is part of this on the activist side, on the protest side is something that people have wanted, and the end-to-end encryption for disaster recovery probably is just a sensible security precaution because you may be talking about sensitive stuff, and you only want your message to go to the people who need it, but it's also just an important use for Bridgify, especially as it was created because of earthquakes in Mexico, and it's most recently being used because of earthquakes in Turkey and Greece. I'm fascinated with that ability to say, like, hey, we've got all this equipment in smartphones, we don't need a cloud service, like we can broadcast directly to each other with Bluetooth, with Wi-Fi, and I'm surprised we haven't seen more of these kinds of apps out there. Yeah, and what you said earlier about the whole surveillance issue and the nanny state of being able to capture your WhatsApp messages and Facebook being able to access and all that sort of thing, this is a way to not have that, right, or at least is one way to do that. Of course, there's the potential for misuse, I kind of see that too, but hopefully there are ways to have that encryption be stronger and have that more oversight there, but it'd be very interesting to see how this is going to be used for protest movements and that kind of thing. Well, yeah, and all sort of the examples of, like, here's why this works is disaster stuff, or something like a protest situation where there's stifling of communication in general, but just to be able to say, oh, yeah, no, I mean, we can all talk to each other because we're using rich pie kind of thing. That's sort of the next progression of this and it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, Gotenna was the one that I was trying to think of a minute ago, and that one's still around. FireChat, I used a little bit for a while. It seems to, as TechCrunch refers to it, be gathering mothballs, but that's another one that attempted to do the same thing. I remember one of the earliest versions of this was meant for airports, because airport Wi-Fi was so bad for so long, there was like, well, if you want to chat with somebody in the airport here, here's one that'll just use your available. That's a great example of like, doesn't have to be a disaster, it's a place, you've got a lot of people, we're all moving, time is of the essence, you want to be able to communicate. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. We get a lot of great story ideas. I look at it every day. We look at it for Daily Tech headlines too, so keep those stories going. Submit them and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Ant Group has pulled its stock listing from Star Market in Shanghai, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This is a big deal. Ant's stock was set to debut Thursday and raised $34 billion, which would have made it the biggest stock debut in history, beating last December's Saudi Aramco IPO. Reuters reports Ant's controlling shareholder, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, and two other Ant executives met with four different Chinese financial regulators Monday, all in one meeting, and were told that Ant's online lending business needed to face further government scrutiny. China's banking regulator released new rules that same day on microlending, which would impact Ant's consumer and business lending unit. We don't know if that's related. Certainly wouldn't be the only thing that Ant was facing that would make it cancel a huge IPO like this. Ant operates Alipay. Alipay is the main payment system in China. I mean, it's an online payment system, but it is the main way you pay for stuff in China. It has long surpassed cash, credit cards, etc. Ant also sells insurance and mutual funds. Ant manages China's largest money market mutual fund, but Ant Group bills itself as a technology company, not a financial company, and therefore it avoids some of the capital requirements and other regulations that banks are subject to in China. Sound familiar? This has happened a lot in the U.S., and here it is, an example in China. Jack Ma may also have irritated the Chinese government at a FinTech conference last month. Ma compared traditional banks to pawnshops, and appeared to flatly contradict China's Vice President Wang Qishan. At the conference, the vice president said that China needed to safeguard its financial system from systemic risks. Seems like a perfectly non-controversial thing for the vice president of China to say. But Jack Ma, speaking later, said, quote, there's no systemic financial risks in China because there's no financial system in China. So the general feeling about Jack Ma is that he's been veering a little farther from government control than they would like. And therefore, after the meeting Monday, Ant Group said in a statement that it is, quote, committed to implementing the meeting opinions in depth and continuing our course based on the principles of stable innovation, embrace of regulation, and service to the real economy and win-win cooperation. So Ant is talking all the nicest things it can say, but it doesn't change the fact that this IPO is done. This is not happening. And everyone from China's national pension to Blackrock was buying into this thing. And now Ant Group says that early subscribers to the IPO will have their money refunded. I mean, this is Titanic in the financial world, and it's very interesting in the technology world, I think. Nicole, what do you make of this? It's certainly in Asia quite a story this morning. And the whole kind of Jack Ma, was he behaving in a way that set the Chinese government off to the point that this would get stifled? I mean, it's pretty big deal. I think it is because Jack Ma is probably one of the most successful stories out of China in the past decade or so. And he is definitely one of the Chinese stars, I think, of the China's new sort of newfound capitalist technology focused movement here. And to see him going against the government like this is kind of a soap opera and a drama to making here. And it's, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure they'll still make money, right? Like, that's kind of their thing. But this whole IPO pulling thing, I don't know where this is going to go. I mean, I don't know either. I mean, they will eventually IPO again, but it'll be years now because it'll take a long time for them to unwind all this. They'll have to win back trust. They'll have to prove to people like you're not going to have the government pull the rug out from under you again. Like this is going to keep ant from IPOing for a while. It's unfortunate. But this has been a long time coming, I feel like. There have been longer hits for a while now. So I don't know. We'll see what happens next. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to the way that finances, transactions happen. The fact that Jack Ma said there's no systemic financial risks because there's no financial system in China doesn't mean like there's no finances. I feel like I get maybe a flippant way to say, we're in the future now. So for the government to say, yeah, I don't like this. There's a little bit too much power going on here, which is not untrue. Whoever heard of a tech entrepreneur claiming against the government's wishes that they were immune to regulation in ways that previous companies wouldn't have been. So true. Well, let's talk Hollywood, shall we? The Wall Street Journal notes that the trend of Hollywood visual effects artists going to work for Google, Facebook and Apple is real. Artists from ILM, Digital Domain, WIDA and more have moved to tech companies for higher salaries, job security, more hours and better benefits. Movie effects have seen falling prices and falling compensation as a result. Whereas tech companies are increasing spending on AR from $21 billion this year to an expected $121 billion by 2023, that's according to Accenture. Award winning visual effects artist and head of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Paul Debevec, has been working for Google for four and a half years and has brought three colleagues over with him. Debevec helped design the light stage that's a nine foot diameter spherical device with 14,000 lights and more than 40 cameras that captures and recreates actors' heads, like Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button, think of it that way. Debevec also helped Google build its own version that can capture the entire body, not just the head, to help create convincing digital people, a whole body for AR. Apple bought facial tracking technology developed by Debevec's predecessor at USC, Howe Lee, and used it in its Animoji. Some of Lee's colleagues went to work for Apple shortly after the sale. So we're seeing a bit of a trend. Yeah, I mean, the guy who made Benjamin Button now works for Google. That's the log line here, right? We are going to see once augmented reality finally happens. We're in the Blackberry and Palm Trio stage of augmented reality, right? It exists. There are products. It's kind of okay. You've got to see what it might do. But at some point, it's going to happen and suddenly we're going to get that level of avatars and reality in front of us. And that's kind of exciting. What will happen to the movies, Tom? The movies. They'll still find visual effects artists with stars in their eyes fresh out of college to work with the VFX minds, I guess. That's a good question. Yeah. I don't know. I think the movie industry will be fine because I feel like Hollywood has its own star power. I know the tech companies have money and all of that other stuff, but there's the glamour and there's the fame and all the trappings of Hollywood. I'm sure that will still be a draw for many people. Academy Awards and Emmy Awards and all that stuff. That's totally enough of a draw for a lot of people. I mean, I think all three of us know that media tends to try to tell you that you don't need to make as much money with them because you get to work in media and isn't that fun? That's why we all work for ourselves here. Well, and I think a lot of the longstanding Hollywood studios that have made lots of money but don't necessarily seem like the forefront of technology will be very different companies in just a few years. Yeah. I mean, I think they're becoming Hollywood companies, right? You look at Amazon, you look at Apple, they're making content, too. So they're simpler. Yeah, that's true. Well, let's celebrate an anniversary, shall we? Oh, yeah. Nintendo and Amazon, speaking of Amazon, are celebrating Mario's 35th anniversary by sending out some Amazon orders in Mario-themed boxes. So you don't necessarily get one, but you might get into boxes random. You aren't guaranteed. But again, you might get one. Amazon also launched a new Super Mario splash page featuring a timeline of the franchise. Yeah, this is fun. I've gotten... Nicole's laughing and I bet I know why. It's just a box. It's just a box. It's a box. You're going to throw away the box, unless you're a huge Mario fan, I guess, which you might keep it. Well, and if you're a huge Mario fan and you know about this and you don't get the box, you'd be like, what did I do? You're like, exactly. I want the box. This is actually, we're doing Amazon and Nintendo a disservice by talking about this story. This is the kind of thing that works if you don't know it's coming, right? If your box shows up and it's like special Mario 35th anniversary, you're like, oh, that's cool. But if you want it, because you heard about it on Daily Tech News Show, and there's no way for you to get it, you're just going to keep ordering stuff and being frustrated because it comes in the plain old brown box. Can you imagine if somebody got the box and then eBay'd it for like, oh, I'm sure that will happen, right? Oh, I'm positive. Yeah, there's going to pull it up in the look right now. Jeff out there, DTNS audience members like, I did not get my Mario box. I want it. I would pay a top dollar. That's right. Yeah. Or a few dollars anyway. Yeah. Hey, it's a box. They're very useful. Not I'm not finding it yet. I'm looking on eBay right now. Amazon mystery box, Amazon return box. Wow, you can get Amazon wholesale return boxes full of unknown stuff. They auctioned it on eBay. We may have unlocked a whole meme. Yeah, I can't finish the show. I have to look at these return boxes. It's like a blind box of returned electronics. And you might get something good or not. Five bucks. Weird. Okay, that's a whole separate thing. Anyway, yes, I, you know, we got our Amazon fresh order with bags that were themed for the boys the week that it premiered on Amazon Prime Video. That was fun because I didn't expect it. And I was like, Oh, this is cool. Nice little promotion. They were nice bags and everything. I can keep it. I didn't sell them on. I should have sold them on eBay. What was I doing? Yeah, I know. Got to flip that stuff, Tom. Well, I'll know for next time. Meanwhile, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. So today, Tuesday, November 3rd in the USA, a day like any other. Sure. But Gregory wrote in and, you know, he had something we thought would be apropos at the end of the show. Greg says, I would very much like to thank you for not inserting your or anyone else's political opinions into the show. Personally, I tune in to hear about tech news, not the show's guests, individual opinions. I'm extraordinarily grateful for their absence. Again, thank you very much and keep up the good work. Oh, Gregory. Thank you. Our guiding principle has always been, even back when Sarah and I were doing tech news today, if it pertains to understanding tech, we're going to talk about it. We're going to give our opinions on it. But if it would get in the way of anyone enjoying understanding tech or not understanding it, then why bother? It's not really helpful for anybody. So I'm glad you appreciate that, Gregory. Yeah. Yeah. We'd try really hard not to include stories or include too many opinions that veer away from the tech aspect of it. So yeah, thanks, Gregory, and thanks to everybody who writes us feedback, questions, comments, all that good stuff. If you've got one feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Indeed it is. Let's shout out patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Allison Jobby, Paul Thiessen and Kevin. I just have to always say it that way. Kevin, love you. Thanks also to Nicole Lee. Nicole, it's been a while. So glad to have you back on the show. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. You can always go to twitter.com slash Nicole, although in the days following the election, I'm not sure if you want to. But you can go ahead and check it there if you want to. And I also recently started a new newsletter at NicoleLee.Substack.com, and it's about food and tech and culture and things like that. I'm still trying it out. But go ahead and subscribe and see what you get. Excellent. Go check it out, NicoleLee.Substack.com. 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