 People can argue whether it's definitive or not, right? But I did see Elvis having tea with John Lennon. Of course. Yeah, but you're down in Hollywood. I mean, they weren't there were just people dressed up for Hollywood Boulevard, but still still still. Oh, if Elvis was still alive, he'd be doing what and Wayne Newton was doing 20, 30 years ago. Or what Elvis was doing 20 or 30 years ago. No, I mean, just like just just like just that's just that's it. Just Vegas. I mean, that's all that's all Elvis was doing towards the end anyway. What's he still doing? I thought you still find out and doing concerts around the country. I don't think so. I think he was parked. He parked it. Oh, I think he was permanent resident at where was he, Caesars? Oh, my God. Salad. That was this. No, it was the Hilton Las Vegas Hilton. Oh, the Hilton. Yeah, because I have whenever I stayed there for CES, they had all kinds of memorials and stuff. They had they had velvet paintings of I think they did, actually. Don't you think you're rich? The only the only good Elvis song is this one. Hey, hey, hey, that's against our creed as podcasters, a little less conversation. Elvis had a pretty good set of repertoire of songs. No, I mean, sure. But that one gets me every time. Everything else I can take it or leave. You mean the the mashup of that song? Yeah, do you like the original or the the remix? The later a little of both. I just like it's to me. It's everything that I enjoy about Vegas, both good and bad. Like it's just this great, easy representation of body. I used to put on the Elvis hour on WG EL once a week. It was it was this syndicated show where they would just play Elvis stuff and the conceit was like, these are rare and, you know, unheard recordings and interview clips and stuff. But it was basically a clip show of concert recordings and stuff. And I have a I have a copy of that somewhere of one of the episodes because the episodes arrived on vinyl. How long ago was wow? That's intense. Yeah, I'm going to play one of those. I have also I have an American country countdown on vinyl from like 1985. Who was spending the big country hits was like Elvira and Bob Kingsley. Bob Kingsley, the Casey Kasem of country music, the Oak Ridge Boys. The Oak Ridge Boys, the Oak Ridge Mall catch them this weekend in San Josie. All right. Well, let's let's shall we do a little show, Roger? Would you like some control? Perhaps yes, that would be good. I'm not in control. There we go. All right, let's do this. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by you to find out more at the Daily Tech News Show dot com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 5th, 2017. I'm Tom Merritt, Scott Johnson, and I back from Snowbird, Utah. Although Scott stayed in Utah, you didn't have to go as far. Yeah, I decided not to leave. I'm going to hang it. I'm going to stick it out. Yeah, you're not in Snowbird anymore, though. No, they come down the mountain. Didn't you? Yeah. And I, by the way, when whenever we are in physical proximity, it's always good and it's always great. But I feel some loss when you and other producers are just sort of we get separated by, you know, time and space. And here you are back in LA and here I am still here. And here we are doing this again. And that's exciting, I guess, in its own way. Yeah. No, exactly. I mean, the funny thing about Nurtacular is that you and I got to talk for 15 minutes the first day and we were both like, wow, this is the most we've ever gotten to snuck to each other at a Nurtacular. No, that was really weird because usually we're so not able to do that at all. I was I was grateful for that. But even as it was happening, I was like, this is not going to last. It's going to be like Saturday late night when I finally see Tom again. Yeah, pretty close to being that. But we expect it. It's fine. So good to see everybody out there. Great DTNS and Frogpants fans coming together, having a great time for a weekend and a little sad it's gone, but also really happy to have done it. Now, one thing that got interrupted by Nurtacular was Scott and I's experience with the Amazon Echo Show. Both of us got them on Wednesday and then immediately got thrown into the the Melstrom. So when I got back, I was able to start using mine and you were able to start using yours. So given that Amazon has some new stats out about using their Amazon voice services, we're going to talk a little bit about our experiences with them. Yeah, I don't know. There wasn't a ton of time, like you said before the event, but since then I've put it through the paces. So today we will see what said paces showed us. All right, let's start off, however, with some tech things you should know about. Jay-Z's album 444 has been certified platinum, meaning it has one million album sales. By the way, these days, I didn't realize this 1500 streams is equivalent to one album sale so that your stream when you're streaming something, it will count towards going platinum. Anyway, the whole reason we're talking about Jay-Z and his new album and go in platinum is this album was released June 30th only for Sprint users to listen to on title, and yet it still went platinum, although it was made available to non Sprint title subscribers on Monday. But I think a lot of people scoffed at limiting your audience and yet here we go, still hitting platinum. I mean, it's still, when you're that big, I don't think it matters if you do that limit. And the only person I think they could beat his number, he's married to her. So yeah, that's right. Green Bay. She might be the only one. That's true. Uh, Lyft announced it has reached one million rides a day. Speaking of big numbers to reach a level Uber hit in 2014, Uber has more than 5 million per day now, but also operates in many places outside the US. So, uh, not bad, not too shabby considering they're still here in the, uh, the continental US. Yeah, it's hard to find. Nobody knows exactly what Uber is US. Well, I'm sure somebody at Uber does, but nobody knows here, uh, in public, what Uber's current rides per day. But a lot of people keeping an eye on this to see with all of the controversy and, and, and unsettling things happening at Uber, uh, is that giving Lyft a Lyft snap updated its Android and iOS apps to include a new feature called paper clip that lets you embed a link in your snaps for the first time. There's also a backdrop feature that lets you cut objects out and put them on new backgrounds and voice filters. Let's use those crazy voice filters that are in the, the, the image filters just in your regular snap. Continuing to provide weird stuff for people who like it is the best way I can put that for snap and snapchat. Now here's some more top stories. Nokia and Xiaomi signed a cellular patent cross licensing agreement with plans to collaborate on other projects as part of the agreement. Xiaomi is going to give some assistance to Nokia on virtual reality, uh, artificial intelligence internet of things. So Nokia will be able to kind of hand that along to their licensed devices, maybe in their, their network infrastructure stuff as well. While no clean Nokia will supply Xiaomi with network infrastructure equipment, which is one of its main businesses these days. Hmm. Yeah, I, I, it's an interesting real, um, alliance, I think it did. Microsoft doesn't own this, this version of Nokia, right? This is a different Nokia. No, uh, Microsoft owns nothing around Nokia anymore. Not my to, to, for those who may have missed previous episodes of the world, uh, Microsoft bought Nokia's handset technology and has now closed down most of that handset business. Uh, Microsoft had a limited license to use the Nokia name on its handsets, which it used for a while, but now that's expired. Nokia, what was left that wasn't its handset business, wasn't its phones, had, uh, infrastructure for, for selling, uh, for networking, had some research and development, and has started licensing its name and technology to a third party to create new handsets with the Nokia name on it. Very interesting. Well, to, we'll have to see how that alliance works out, uh, by thumb, the world's fourth, fourth largest cryptocurrency exchange confirmed, uh, confirmed an unknown amount of funds has been lost after an attack. Uh, this happened on Thursday evening, affecting its largest or I should say affecting largely Korean, uh, user base. That's mostly where it happened. An attacker accessed or accessed the personal computer of by thumb employee, uh, stealing the details of 31 800,000 users. Good heavens. By thumb provider compensation or up to 100, uh, up to 100,000 won Korean per affected user until midnight on July 5th. That's today, I guess it's already there tomorrow. Yeah, this is a, a big heist, uh, still excrual in the chats, like quote, lost. Sure. That's my word, not bit the sword. Uh, I, I said lost because we actually don't know where the money went. I mean, we have a pretty good idea. It was stolen, but lost is, is just more accurate because they're gone, uh, and, and we don't know where, but, uh, this is not good. And the kind of thing that shakes confidence and, and prevents people from getting into Bitcoin because. Hey, I don't think it's very safe out there yet. Well, okay. I know we talk about this all the time. I'm not trying to dig up old dirt and revival corpses or anything, but one of my original confusion slash fears about Bitcoin as we've talked about that and blockchain and all this stuff is that when something does get lost in, in straight up dollars terms, if you're talking about paper money cash, you can, you know, determine if it was shredded or burned, or there's a way to find out where that stuff went, even if it's not usable. Uh, here we're talking about just poof, right? Gone out. Well, yes and no. I mean, the, the idea of a blockchain is, uh, you know exactly where it's going even better than if somebody, if somebody takes a bunch of bills and burns them, you might not know. Right. But this, if anybody takes this, this, these coins and transfers them, you should be able to look at the blockchain and tell where they went. Uh, that, that's one of the weird things about this story is that you can't. Um, but that's not endemic to, to Bitcoin. That just means that bit thumb is not operating very well as an exchange. And in this case, it's no different than you having money in your bank. If you went and checked in at Bank of America and suddenly you found that your funds were gone. That's analogous to what this is. It's not necessarily about how Bitcoin works. It's about somebody was able to gain access to this exchanges server. I mean, getting a bunch of email addresses through a personal computer shouldn't be able to allow you to draw down a bunch of people's funds. Yeah. Well, either way, still bad, but all I've, I've maintained since the beginning, even as I've been a little bit naive to this stuff, these are necessary pitfalls or we, we will see these kinds of things happen and it will help solidify stuff down the road because I am sure there are still yet a handful of scenarios nobody has thought about. And when they happen, you course correct. And then people are more confident in the future. Yeah. Ticketmaster has partnered with data over audio company listener. I'm sure it's supposed to be listener, LISNR, uh, to use something called smart tones to replace QR codes for ticketing information. I mean, when we say replace, we mean you could use them in place of, it doesn't mean you'll stop using QR codes, but smart tones allow you to, uh, send a tone from one device to another in the 18.75 kilohertz to 19.2 kilohertz range. That's a range that 90% of people can't hear. Makes me wonder how the other 10% are going to feel with these things going off all around a minute concert. Uh, but they would be tied not only to your ticketmaster account, but also to your phone. So that would help fraud prevention because somebody couldn't just grab a copy of your QR code and then be able to impersonate you. And then when you show up to show your ticket, it's not there. You have to actually have the phone that the smart tone plays from smart tones can also allow proximity detection. So when you're walking around in the venue, you could get user specific messages, maybe help finding your seat, stuff like that, uh, as well as giving aggregate data just about how people move around during a concert, during an event, during a sporting event, et cetera. Uh, to me, it reminds me of like, uh, facial recognition became a more ubiquitous thing that's part of our everyday life because cameras got to a place where generally speaking, they all kind of can do about the same. And they can do enough quality that the recognition can happen. Uh, whereas prior to that, you might have a, you know, a crappier camera and therefore it doesn't have the resolution you need. And therefore you're going to get false positives, at least more often. This is also a case of where, you know, a phone's capability, they've all gotten to a certain place where if they're going to emit this tone, there's going to be a consistency there, uh, you're not going to get there with your crappy, slightly two year older phone and have the system not recognize it. Therefore you can't get into the concert. Uh, so that all seems kind of cool, but I am very curious about who can actually hear this. Well, my dog, you know, my grandpa will not be able to hear, not going to use this at the dog show. We'll do my, I don't know. I don't know about you. I've occasionally just to test my own hearing, I will whip out an app that does dog whistle sounds. Just above where I can hear it. So I can't hear anything at all. And I will test to see who does. And it's usually children, like zero to 18 and once in a while, another adult will hear it. And I just kind of think somebody somewhere in that line is going to be just going, oh my God, I got to get out of here. I mean, maybe it just sounds like me, and it's ultra fast as well as ultrasonic and its changes in amplitudes. By the way, the reason that you would even do this is it's really cheap to add this to the existing infrastructure. You don't have to put a Bluetooth reader. You don't have to put an NFC reader. It's, it's much according to Ticketmaster. It's much easier to integrate this into the existing ticket taking mechanism because it's just, it just needs a microphone, essentially. Well, next concert you go to, you might drive there in a car that has no combustion or at least Volvo thinks maybe your next Volvo might be that way. They announced all of its car models launched after 2019. This is a short couple of years will be hybrid or all electric. No pure gas combustion engines. Most automakers have been moving towards this anyway, but Volvo is the first to set a date, just kind of plant their flag in the ground. In addition, Volvo's parent company, Geely, has acquired Terrafugia, makers of the transition, vertical takeoff and landing flying car. Those are cool, except I don't think I have my own one anyway. The transition is the, is the only road on air legal vehicle. I wrote it, wrote an air. So it's legal for, for the road. It's legal for the air. Right, right, right. They, they, I was saying this on TMS, the more I thought about it, the more I think I think this is true. This is a great way for Volvo to kind of stay on brand as a reliable forward thinking, you know, car that can take a real beating sort of attitude they've always had long before they were owned by a Chinese company and, and say, look, we, we are smart enough to know that this is the future, even though all the other car makers know that this is what's happening and are all moving in that direction, I think they made a really great PR move, a great marketing move here to be the first to actually say it and, and say it in a way that is public facing and not in some boardroom at Ford or Mazda or something. Yeah, it's like, I bit said this on, on the morning stream this morning, but it's like being first on a comment thread, you know, they're like, hey, 2019 first, we're the first, we're first. Well, I mean, somebody could still beat them to the date, but they were the first ones to actually set a date. And just the fact that anybody is setting a date for this, I think is a bellwether as far as the changing manufacturing of cars. Now, it's not as big as some of these headlines are making it seem because hybrid cars still have combustion engines in them. So it's not like all the gas stations are going out of business, you know, in 2019, because all the cars are suddenly electric. But that said, it will be a big deal when, you know, five years down the road from now, if enough of these companies are doing this, most of the cars on the road are at least capable of being electric, if not electric only. Well, at the least they're they're saying out loud that we think will be in a place where where hybrid or noncombustion engines are going to be not just viable, but people who would normally choose to go gas combustion for whatever various reasons they may have now no longer really have an excuse. You know, like broadband internet or any other technology, you finally get to a place where it's like, well, why am I still paying for dial up? I'll just get broadband. It's the same price and it's 300 times faster. And so I just get it. They're making this prediction that by 2019, that's kind of where everybody's heads are going to be. And that's a little risky. I mean, what are we going to do about trucks then? What are we going to maybe they'll be up to par maybe finally hybrid trucks make sense and they're the pulling towing power is where you can do that. You can do that already. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But you know what I mean? Like there's going to be whatever your holdouts are, you got to get a place where they don't have an excuse anymore outside of the, you know, specialist market where people want souped up gas cars from the 70s or whatever for collector reasons or whatever. What do you think this does to Tesla? Oh, because Tesla doesn't fit into this first model because Tesla doesn't do any combustion engines. It doesn't do hybrids or anything. But does this is this a rising tide that floats the Tesla boat, which is what Elon Musk has been gambling on? Or does does this take away its first mover advantage? And suddenly with Volvo out there and I assume a bunch of other automakers are going to be having really compelling affordable electric cars. Is this bad news for the Model Three and beyond? Well, it reminds me of, I don't know, you don't want them to be. You don't want them to be the diamond Rio of their time at a much larger scale. Yeah. You have an innovative idea that is really, really, truly ahead of its time. And then somebody comes along and scoops you and it could be a traditional name like an American automaker or somebody in Europe or whatever, but somebody with big name recognition swoops in and says, all right, well, that was great and all Tesla thanks for being the impetus for this, but we'll take it from here. Hold my beer sort of thing. Do you mind if I interject? Yeah, please, Roger. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, it actually might benefit be beneficial and Tesla in the long run because if there are more automakers that require the same components, specifically the battery, you could lower the price. A lot of those because suddenly starts selling the batteries to the other automakers. That's a good point. I mean, they could they could do that. But I mean, suddenly there's a huge demand and you can build capacity beyond Tesla's own corporate ability to fund it. And so, you know, people who work in the auto industry realize that. And there's a reason why there was a huge bail light bail bail out for GM and for not for but GM and Chrysler is because there's a lot of tangential manufacturers that make parts, right? They make driveline components that make steering components. If there's enough of these, these companies can suddenly start producing them and mass lowering the price of the components, allowing Tesla to be even more competitive in that in that space. So they're not a boutique guy or company making, you know, limited selection of parts just for their car. Now they can go to Magna or someone else who is, you know, pumping out a million of these, you know, pieces of an electric car or hybrid car that they can reuse. That doesn't seem to be what they want to do. So that would be a change. I think Elon Musk wants to be the parts supplier too. And you could go either way. But once you can get once you can get a lot of those components and a lot of those pieces and you don't need to have the finished product. I'm not saying that they're going to build motors, but you just, you know, whether Tesla takes advantage of it or not, the scale will bring down the cost of parts. And that's a good thing. Plus Tesla will be competing on quality, not on uniqueness, right? Right now, a lot of people buy a Tesla because, hey, it's the only sports car that's all electric. It's for a while was really the only all electric car. That's not true anymore. And it's getting less true all the time. But now it'll be like, oh, I bought a Tesla because it's just a really good car. And, you know, the other thing is like, hey, gas stations or hotels or wherever people parked their cars will like, there's going to be a lot more of these cars around. Maybe I can make money by setting up a charging station or something. You know, it could be at a best Western, it could be at a gas station, whatever. But suddenly there's a more demand, which means infrastructural, you know, will develop even quicker to meet that demand, which will be a boon for everyone involved. Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is developing a smart speaker powered by its Bixby voice assistant codename Vega. Specifications price and release date for the device are still in flux. Progress on the device has been slowed by development on Bixby itself, which only rolled out in a preview for English users last month and English being one of the most common languages. It would need that to be able to get a lot of sales momentum. But everybody's coming with a smart speaker, Scott. Yeah, I'm not calling anything Bixby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Samsung. You got a bill. Give me some. Yeah. Sorry, Bill Bixby. David Banner, not Bruce. I it's fine. Everyone's getting into this. Great. We all need them. It's the hot new thing. I totally get it. And I have no problem with everybody trying to put their foot in that pool. Let's see how it susses out who's the best. But I'm not saying Bixby to a device. It's a horrible. It's a hard name to say. Bixby do a thing. It's hard to say. It's not fun to say. It doesn't roll off the tongue like some of the others we have. But that's your main objection to this forthcoming product. It totally is. It's my same problem with Cortana. I don't like it there either. I think they're just annoying and they're hard to say. I feel like the A word over there is fine. I think the S word on Apple is is is fine and easy to say and kind of rolls off the tongue. And I even think what Google's doing is all right. Is OK also except that it's a little bland. But but Bixby's an annoying annoying annoying thing. You call you name your you're like you're I don't know your poodle that Bixby the poodle. It's not your helper thing. Forget it. I like the way you avoided you deftly avoided hopefully setting off anybody's device unless they have a Bixby device. But there's not too many people would have that at this point. Hey folks. Well that's all the headlines we're going to talk about today. But if you want to get all the headlines each day in just about five minutes subscribe to Daily Tech headlines dot com. You can also get it as an Amazon Echo Flash Briefing and on the anchor app at anchor dot FM. Speaking of Amazon they confirmed or it confirmed it's not a person. Amazon could unless you can pleasure to talk about some record loss Amazon confirmed that its voice platform now has more than 15,000 skills up from a confirmed 10,000 in February according to the analytics firm Voicebot a new skill introductions increased 23 percent in June. Flash Briefings remain the most popular skill making up around 20 percent of the skills out there and hearing about this these numbers came out on Monday. It made me think about us using that Amazon Echo show and and figured this is a good time as any talk about the skills we're using and whether they're changing given the fact that we both have the Amazon Echo show now if you're not aware of the Amazon Echo show it's basically an Amazon Echo with Amazon voice assistant built in has a speaker but it also has a touch screen so it can play videos. It can show you data. You can touch it to do certain operations. And of course the big thing Amazon showing off is the fact that has a little camera in there so you can do video calls. Scott and I did one of those before the show. Compared to the Amazon Echo Smart Speaker how are you feeling about the Amazon Echo show Scott. Well from a let's talk about a speaker for a second just at a very baseline a lot of people use their echoes. I assume even their dots I've a dot over here that does some of this sort of stuff for me would usually talk radio but a lot of people use them for music and they're great that way either as a Bluetooth connected device to their phones or using built-in Echo based services like Amazon music and so on. And I have to say I decided to do this before I put them in their respective new places I had them together side by side and tested Bluetooth connectivity music playback on both of them and I was using Apple music on my phone and then using these devices as speakers and there is a huge jump in quality to the show for me over the previous Echo and my wife couldn't hear quite as much or at least she was like that's about the same to me. I could definitely go louder with the show and get more base than I could on the Echo. I think that also speaks well of the regular Echo as having a pretty good speaker. It's a it's a decent playback device. So that was cool and I was pleased with that. That was something I was really hoping to get out of this devices as slightly more robust didn't have to be over the over the world crazy good but better or you know in line at least with what was already happening. So I really like the speaker right off the bat. I'm still trying to get my head around how the screen is going to work in my life because as a guy with a lot of screens you have a certain sort of flow that you use them for and the Echo traditionally has been I say a thing and it plays back a thing and I was talking to you earlier how it kind of reminds me of an iPod shuffle in a weird way. The old one was just this non visual device and it it was never tied to anything visual. Now we have this whole new dimension of interacting with it and I'm not exactly sure how it wants me to yet. I'm kind of learning a new where I should speak where I should then touch. Sometimes it's immediately right after each other. It's like show me recipes and it shows those and then I could figure out complex language to have it skip through the different recipes until I found one I liked but I can just reach for yeah my finger but the key to that first of all when I said I need to find a recipe it suggested would you like to add the all recipe skill which I thought was great. I'm like oh yeah I don't want to go open my app and do that. Thank you. Yes. Add the all recipe skill. Great. And then once I found the recipe I was looking at it said just say next page to scroll down like you say when you're looking through a bunch of recipes you want the option to be able to touch it and scan faster. But when I got my hands wet or covered in Greece I want to be able to say like yeah next page I just want to see the next instructions. That's killer. I love that. Yeah it's a great that's in fact you've just illustrated it completely why multi input is probably the future of everything. Like as much as we all want to think oh it's all going to be voice and AI. Sure but there are cases where that just is cumbersome or or not as fast or or whatever we're going to we're always going to be tactile creatures who want to reach out and push this and touch that move this. So giving us that with this new interface has been kind of eye opening. It's like a reminder and I guess our phones were already sorted sort of this in a lot of ways too. But the primary input isn't always the best for the situation that you're in. You know gamers know this sometimes a mouse and a keyboard is the only way you want to play a certain genre of game. But sometimes a keyboard is terrible for a certain sort of game. So a controller is the perfect analog. And so what do you do when you try to go for the best of both worlds and I feel like that's what they're doing here. They've created a device that that's still letting me speak to it in intelligent meaningful ways getting it back to things I want from that method. But I can intervene if I need to in a more direct way gives you more options. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I think I so far I really like this device. We should probably talk about that call when the only really other complaint I have is I don't think that camera is that great. It's OK. Yeah. It was fine. I could see you and it does some auto focusing and stuff. But but it is really just meant to show you like here's the thing not not give you good lighting or you couldn't you couldn't do a high quality video stream from that. Yeah. And video out quite a bit of work anyway. Yeah. And video drop in is interesting being able to I tested this over the weekend. We were at Nerdtacular and I thought I just want to look in the kitchen and see what's going on. Nobody's home or we're out for the weekend. And I don't know so much as I was relying on that as a security method or anything. I just curious. Right. Yeah. I just want to see and it kind of had trouble adjusting to the dark and finding a point to focus on. I don't think it's really meant for that. But it is nice for me to say I can just pop in not not wonder if the kids are too far to answer it in time or whatever. I can just pop in and go Carter come here. I need you to grab something for me or show me this thing that I forgot to grab or whatever. There's something really cool about that. Some people think there's something really creepy about that. But in your own sort of home network you got to be you got to lock it down. I chose the same option you did which is someone who is in my account can use it so I can use it from my app to call my own show. But nobody from outside. Yeah. Exactly. Small funny side note on that. I bought two of them at the same time as they had that deal. And one of them was for Brian and one was for me. And I knew when he got here so like I'd give him his and I did that. But I had forgotten that Amazon ships everything all these devices that they ship with any kind of account information driven stuff. They set it up for you. Yeah. So it's it's got one with your name on it literally. So like fire stick or any of these same thing happens with the show. It's got my info. So when he plugs that in it's going to go hello Scott. Would you like me to be up but it's already there. And then he'll ask a lot of toilet paper to be delivered to his house on your dime. So I have to completely rely on my friend to not do anything weird. But you know what funny thing about that is we've had an Amazon Echo for a while and Eileen has refused to talk to it. I've mentioned this before. She just thinks it sounds rude. She doesn't think it likes her voice. She didn't like the speaker got the Amazon Echo show. She's in love with that thing. Just putting that video on there and probably probably the new speaker as well. She she's now using it in the morning to play her Spotify. She's asking it funny questions. So it has totally changed her opinion on the positive side on the negative side. I've noticed it messing up more than I ever noticed with the Amazon Echo. And that's probably because they have these little suggestions that say like hey try asking it to play the puppy video or what's trending or whatever which is kind of cool. But a couple of times like today or yesterday it said video puppy reunited with toy video and it said try saying you know play the puppy video which I did and it started playing Guardians of the Galaxy Volume One. And then I said no no no no play the puppy video and it started playing a little bit of Fry and Laurie which is out of my Amazon video library. And I'm like OK fine. Now you're you're messing up. So it's it's not perfect by any stretch and that that actually is one of my criticisms is a lot of times you can say something that makes sense but it doesn't quite get it. You have to know how to say it. That is true. And I think just well who knows. We're in the what first two weeks of the release of this thing. So the first two weeks of the release of the Amazon voice services. But yeah all right we're still in early it's a really good point. The difference here is maybe I don't know fine tuning with the hardware it's matched with maybe that can be improved. I don't know. I don't know if it's receiving me in the same way or volume in the room is affecting it differently than the standard echo. Like all those things are questions. I did. There's a couple things I got wrong. In fact one time I asked it to please play Deadmau5 and it said collecting playlist of Deadmau5 from whatever. And it was on music and then it played it and it was great. Someone came in the room I said I said a word pause. And she did like she always does and we talked for a minute. And I said all right resume it started the song then stop dead. And I said resume and it didn't do anything. I said and then I started the whole thing over play me a dead mouse play dead mouse. And she says I can't find any dead mouse in the Amazon. Like some disconnect the things turn it off and on again like literally the old stereotype turning it off and on again. I see you know we're in the early days and again not of the voice assistant. So that stuff needs to you know we'll see how that all that goes but most of the time I had a really good time with it like this morning I said you know let's hear MPR let's see some video news updates. Let's do some of these things that I do a lot with this device. And everything pop up and show me news clips video clips in the kitchen while I'm glancing at it is pretty awesome. Now am I going to sit down and watch a two hour movie on it. No I'm probably not could but I'm probably not going to do it. But I might put a movie on like I might put Guardians of the Galaxy on while I'm cooking if I if I didn't need it for the recipes. Just have it in the background maybe I mean that's an option something where I don't need to be looking at it all the time but it's kind of a cool thing to have on the background maybe. I'm from a form standpoint it's telling you before it's like a big industrial looking Captain Kirk desk screen model unit that's heavier than you expect. Wider thicker it definitely doesn't look like it was made in the thin screen era that we're in now even though I know that's not the screen necessarily but it does have this like large Star Trek console style to it and I'm kind of torn on it I kind of don't think it looks great but I want something heavy duty in my kitchen which is where I have it. I want that to feel sturdy and not like it's going to tip over or be too dainty or get gummed up so I think they had to make maybe a compromise there. Well and and honestly I just see the screen now I thought the same thing when I opened it up I'm like wow things a whole lot deeper than I would have expected but once you put it in place you kind of you kind of see the back of it the way I've got it positioned anyway. You know we went from it primarily being a music device on the old Echo which we've now moved to the bedroom this one now is so much more my wife's using it for like we said recipes and other stuff that we just didn't use the other device for so so the use case has grown even in the short time we've been able to use it and I'm really curious what kind of feedback you're going to get from the audience because there's got to be even more going on with this thing than we've been able to kind of tweak at. Daily Tech News Show.com and thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit that's how we find some of the cooler more interesting stories especially things that happen really fast early in the day or just things that may be getting missed by some of the other buzzy resources out there you can submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech News Show. Reddit.com Let's take a quick moment check in with Chris Christensen the amateur traveler This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. Recently the most popular cell phone plan at least if for people in the United States who are travelers has been the plan from T-Mobile because that also gives you access when you're roaming even though to lower speed data but that can be very handy when you're traveling to not need to get an additional SIM card overseas but there is a new contender this week Virgin Mobile has launched a plan that one has some interesting discounts and when you buy the phone from Virgin or Apple the first 12 months of the service will cost you a dollar that's interesting enough that it will be $50 after your first 12 months the more interesting thing for travelers is that you can get a companion ticket on Virgin Atlantic for only the price of the fees and the taxes although that may be more than you think into places like Heathrow then you can also save 20% off of Virgin America flights and get a third night free at Virgin America so that might be an interesting plan for someone who is a traveler I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler got some emails here first ones from Carl who says it was great seeing you all at Nerdtacular though I'm sorry I missed Scott's secret Midnight Blockchain lecture I look forward to seeing it next time oh man that's too bad you're really missed out I had a dark part of the lobby of the token ring for Scott last week's coverage failed to talk a lot about how the token ring might work with transit I'm sorry last week's coverage did talk a lot about how the token ring might work with transit because it's got NFC unfortunately if the token ring is only able to output a simple NFC code or ID it might not work in my metro area many large areas use stored value cards data with readers providing information to readers and receiving updates in return that needs more than just outputting a simple code that being said latest Apple products have support for Sveka the similar stored valued system in Japan so maybe the token ring can combine an app Bluetooth and NFC to give me a good backup for my clipper card I wish them a good backup I'm going to do it there with your name again it's not the only one doing it we have a couple of people point out there's other rings out there but this seems like the kind of thing that might start being adopted the more I get into it the more I like it but I also remember I've got a fit bit on this wrist and I've got a lot of things that I could use to communicate this stuff around kind of like having a notebook a desktop and a phone in a lot of ways they'll share a lot of similar jobs why couldn't we start having smaller devices do that then I don't have to have a ring necessarily and bang that around forget it or drop it or have it be too loose there's a lot of those issues that we didn't even discuss I also talked about Project Loon from Google Jim says if a tornado earthquake flood or fire happens cell towers will be out of commission flying drones for internet would be highly useful in areas of natural disasters absolutely thank you Jim another good use for those kinds of technologies and thank you Scott Johnson for putting on Nerdtacular and also for joining us today well thanks they were not they were not equal tasks but they were tasks well and just so happy to have seen so many of you people there who am I calling you people DTNS supporters that's what I'm talking about there's a lot of crossover with our communities and there's probably no better place than that event to kind of show that off so thank you to everybody who came out everybody who watched the streams everybody who's listened to podcast content since then that we pulled down from it we don't know what the future looks like for these events but there's a lot of chatter and talk about what that might be so thank you thank you as always best one yet like a bunch of brothers who came from different mothers as the stereotype says and I love that but if you want to find out what's going on with me since all that has happened and the dust has settled you can follow me on twitter at scottjohnson and of course all my stuff can be found at frogpants.com thank you everyone who supports this show if you don't yet support the show ask yourself this was today's show and it's a show you also get a patron only rss feed of exclusive content and a weekly news update and exclusive column you can sign up at patreon.com slash dtns our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. eastern 2030 utc at alphagiegradio.com and diamondclub.tv or at facebook.com slash dailytechnewshow and our website is dailytechnewshow.com back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young talk to you then as part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com I hope you have enjoyed this program I forgot I was going to thank Roger again for popping in with the automotive comments sorry I'm still here well good I'm glad you're still here I can't get rid of me what do we got for titles right Scott won't say Bixby wasn't that a video game Scott won't say Bixby was a video game Bixby I think Bixby was a video game wasn't it it's time to play the music it's time to light the light it's time to meet Alexa on the Echo show tonight don't say oh well I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry ordered chocolate chips that won't happen it's time for Roger to college fund Amazon Echo show Intel Ace of Tech said Eileen smells wait when did you say that that was pre-show that was pre-show and it's gone virtual also I didn't say she smelled it's a long story but there was an odor two bit I know I said that she could smell things that I can't that's all I actually was applying that I smell I didn't know that my wife does that oh yeah so Tom smells he smells everything I can't smell anything I like two bit to fail now tones have become smart two bit to fail is not bad yeah revolvolutionary transition I see what he's going for much yeah yeah yeah no I get it because of the transition and the Volvo and the yeah absolute power carups absolutely Jay-Z sprints to platinum separated by type of space shared ride lifts all carpools Volvo first Tesla ooh evolving toward the future evolving evolving Volvo Volvo how do you say that Volvo I said Volvo I say Volvo Volvo evolve or Volvo I say Volvo I like Tom and Scott talk about Echo Tom and Scott talk about Echo I like Tom I like Scott wants to touch Tom wants to talk I like that one a lot Volvo says no no to petrol how do you say I thought it was by thumbing it's not I thought it was I don't know I said bit them because it's a Bitcoin company yeah but I know it only has one T so they're missing a T I should have asked before the show we're gonna go but oh this is my future pronouncing all the foreign companies that are taking everything over this is your future no it's just I just picture myself into the future saying Xiaomi and a million other names of companies that are quickly becoming huge Toyota Toyota Nissan Sony those are easy because Virgin Virgin that's not the last thing Virgin's Virgin's Benz how can people ever forget the other guy that started the company Volvo that's Viking for Rob Duff that's truth right isn't that what that means yeah probably means truth prob debt to power I think the winning one is not going to win get which one Scott won't say Bixby because he refuses to even let it in the title wait a minute just got freeze for you Scott can you say something Scott are you there well now well you can name it whatever we want uh no I was going to go with Amazon Echo show and tell cool I go with that because that's our main topic it's Bixby Mazda Mazda is not based on the Japanese person's last name or Japanese term it's based on the Zathuras Zathura thus Sprock Zarathustra yes Huda Mazda Bombardier so I wonder if he if his internet went out oh power went out oh no oh no that could have been worse timing honestly you got the show done it actually turned out pretty well tell him to pop open a cold beverage and relax in his house relax in his house hammock I was naive enough to believe that at this time in our feature when I was a kid I believed there would be house hammocks something like you know I have an ironing board that folds out of a wall you would have a hammock that would fold out of a wall like a Murphy bed UPC is apparently crap or not powerful enough to keep my rig on no tell him to get cyber power those are pretty pretty good generally I've been not recommending APC as much I have APCs I have it's worked once for sure I mean it's not that it didn't work but like just the I get so much more features out of a cyber power UPS you should get solar panels the stoics that squirrel here Ian says he's also I'm here for house hammocks oh yeah so house hammocks would be that's my start up house hammocks got time you know how you have time to lean you got time to clean you got time to hang you have time to hang a hammock I don't know I think you need to workshop that a little bit I'll work it a little bit but there's something there house hammocks TBZgun wants me to pass along something to Scott but I'm gonna wait and see if he comes back he said he's gonna try it I got my APCs pretty pretty cheap crew saying APC cost more and cyber power has the same features for less but my APCs were not expensive I will say to crew that's my experience but for feature set like I can get the same I get more features for the same price point that APC used to sell them this those maybe years ago maybe their pricing is adjusted to net guy in the chat room who says capacity planning is very important also maintenance battery swaps super important I had to do that before I moved and this is the thing most people don't realize but APC UPS batteries are pretty standardized so you can go to a batteries plus or you can buy them online the one thing to be careful of when buying batteries online is that because lead acid batteries are super heavy you're not gonna return it you're just gonna be stuck with it so I mean you can return it but it's prohibitively expensive exactly you're not getting your money back spending more to return it then you might get back but yeah I swapped out the battery three times in this UPS cyber power that I've had since 2004 and it's been through two blackouts and at least nine or ten brownouts oh look Scott's back hi I am back I'm on the phone now you gave us a chance to talk about UPCs though oh really UPS is UPS is not UPS is not UPC no we did not talk about UPC codes UPS is we were debating cyber power versus APC I think that's why I said UPC yeah I could use some cyber powered APCs or ATVs I want a cyber powered ATV so you know what it is I wouldn't call it a heat wave but we've had temperatures way higher than this normal time of year and we're like 105 or something today so I think that's probably something to do with it do you have a dual air conditioners at your place or just one? just one and it was it's pretty efficient it's not like running all day or anything the first thing I did to go check was to see if a fuse had blown because sometimes I wouldn't and it wasn't that it looks like the whole grid that's neighborhoods down so something else is going on and this happened at my sister's sister in law's place like a week ago just up the street so I don't know they said that was heat related so who knows I don't know I mean we were spoiled at snowbird it was only like what 70 every day you know it was even like in the 30's that first night we were there at night it was cold at night but I don't know what's going on so it looks like something up the road somewhere someone drove into the power transformer could have been I've heard weirder things happen you know Patrick is thinking about this because the place he's going to be in Finland for the winter they say gets fairly regular power outages during the winter just because snow builds up power lines go down etc and I mean he said yeah they have power outages that last for hours and I'm like yeah I remember having power outages that lasted like quite a long time in the winters in Illinois so that doesn't surprise me yeah plus when you guys when you guys were having your biggest you're the worst part of the yellow heat wave stuff didn't you have kind of rolling brown out stuff going on when I was living in San Francisco we did I don't actually know if they had them down here it was off in California that was part of the whole Enron thing but that was just it was crazy I remember we had the tech TV studios had to buy an extra generator and they had a I mean it was expensive it was not just a generator you had to get a helicopter to fly it up and then get a bunch of guys to bolt it in because I remember a couple of times power went out at the Townsend offices and we all just stood around waiting for it to come back we didn't do anything we used to talk so much crap about everything we would listen but the thing is you've had any work then you would go down to the studio because it was great because it really showed the true personality of the different departments so the web team which did all the writing on the website they all got together and started doing tequila shots because they're writers that's what writers do they default to drinking the engineering team all got together and started creating new materials that they could get into bouncy bowls and stuff because they're engineers that's what they do and the TV production people had to work except the TV production people had to go over to the studio and keep working because they had a generator going yeah that's what we did work because that's all TV production people do I have a UPC that should have done well it's supposed to be rated to do it but it's been so long since I've checked that the batteries degrade I guess the batteries you need to swap every three to four years so it might not have kept your connection going anyway I don't know oh that's true I wouldn't depends on you that's in the other room so I think the input would have gone down but anyway see look this is the magic of technology though I can call back on a phone yeah we can run down your battery that you can't recharge until a power comes back on yeah exactly and we can get what I really want is at the end of the month to have AT&T tell me I'm over that'll be fun I love when I do that because usually actually the last time they did that I caught them on I said you guys I don't remember what my argument was but I ended up winning and they waved it oh nice does Utah offer any rebates on installing solar panels on your roof oh yeah they have some federal power wall yeah that's what I want power wall I want all power I want a future where we are surrounded by electrical fields all the time and it's just everything's always electrified and always working and running and it's got nothing to do with I don't know what that technology is yet I don't know where it comes from but that's what we got to do the human body your body generates electricity every day there you go we just need a big gelatinous flesh based creature in our backyards well that was one of the things for like a future battery is to have something a little more organic although not gelatinous like I'm sorry I was like Chris just wanted to pop in there I was trying to remove his bit from my soundboard that actually started it alright well folks thanks again for hanging around good to see some of you I know I saw cow and big Jim and shnago and dark redeemer and bunch of you folks Carl out there in your tag there and that was really fun so thank you again for saying hey yeah absolutely I feel like I got to say hi to so many people yeah I hope I didn't miss anybody I know there may be someone who tried you know that couldn't get up an error or whatever but it ended up being way more than usual another Jay Martin came up and introduced himself as whatever his name is which I now don't remember and he's like I'm also another Jay Martin and I was like oh my gosh like the king of our subreddits like every week on Currykeek and a bunch of DTNS stories so that was great yeah you see him everywhere he's in there TMS stuff all the time like he's everywhere and when you meet a guy like that you're like what this person exists in real life yeah yeah someday I want to meet surprise truck yep I do too I just a surprise truck yeah hopefully alright thanks everybody for watching we'll talk to you later goodbye