 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including John Atwood, Pat, and DeGrashe A. Daniels. Coming up on DTNS, why companies are giving up on voice assistance, dubbed YouTube videos are the next big video wave. And Dr. Nikki explains why a doctor could soon prescribe robots instead of traditional antibiotics. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 6th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rick Stravolino from Alabama. I'm Dr. Nikki Ackermans and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. My friends, we are going to fill you with robots today. Thanks to Dr. Nikki being here. I can't wait to talk about this story, but let's start with the quick hits. Back in 2021, WhatsApp said it would share business user data with Facebook and everybody freaked out and that led to the European Consumer Organization or the BEUC and the European Network of Consumer Authorities to argue last year that Meta's WhatsApp violated the law by not clarifying the changes in plain and intelligible language. On Monday, the European Commission announced Meta agreed to be more transparent about changes to its privacy policy. WhatsApp will explain changes to EU users' contracts, how these could affect their rights, will more prominently display ways for users to accept or reject the changes and make sure users can better control pop-up notifications on updates. Meta did not say if these changes will come to any markets where it doesn't have to do them. In other words, outside the EU. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, he's got sources and they report that Apple might ship a new iMac in the second half of the year at the earliest with new M-series chip and that would likely be an M3. Gurman's sources say three new Macs are set to launch in late spring and summer, likely a 15-inch MacBook Air, a Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra chip and a refreshed 13-inch MacBook Air. SoundCloud began testing a vertical discovery feed on its iOS and Android apps. With this, SoundCloud also rolled out 30-second previews. Users can like these snippets to add the full version to the playlist. SoundCloud also redesigned the Feed tab, which features a new discovery page with algorithmically suggested content as well as a following page. The Discover page will show captions saying what likes or followed artists it used to determine the suggestion and just checking. Yes, it's been about six years since people began predicting SoundCloud would go away any minute. Happy anniversary. Several Microsoft things to tell you about. They had all the news today. Microsoft announced a new experimental feature for Edge called Video Super Resolution, this upscale 720p or lower quality video that doesn't have DRM protection. It works on NVIDIA RTX 20, 30 and 40 series cards and AMD Radeon RX 5700 through RX 7800 cards. So it works on both not just tied into one graphics architecture. Currently, some users of Edge's Canary builds can access the feature. Microsoft also released a new AI Assistant in preview called Dynamics 365 co-pilot based on OpenAI's technology. The software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer questions, help marketers choose customer categories to target and write product listings to sell goods and services. We're not done yet, folks. Microsoft says more announcements are planned for a March 16th event at 11 a.m. Eastern related to workplace productivity, and that likely pertains to its office software suite. And finally, our outlook for Mac is now usable for free. You could always just download it, but until now, you needed a Microsoft 365 subscription or a license to use it. Now, you don't. And people seem excited about outlook. My another thing has changed over the past six years. All right, mark your calendars, folks. One last thing here. Nothing, the company is going to announce the Nothing Ear 2 wireless earbuds during a live stream announcement, March 22nd. If you remember, the Nothing Ear 1 was Nothing's first released product. So this is a big deal in its evolution. And that is a look at the quick hits. Well, with all the talk about generative AI and chat bots, you know, we got stories like these coming out every single day. It's easy to forget that less than a decade ago, a lot of the tech industry saw similar potential and definitely a lot of buzz in another emerging category, voice assistance. Apple's Siri was early the market in 2012, but Amazon launched the original Echo speaker in 2014 and it remains the market leader. Insider intelligence estimate it holds a 66% market share in the US among voice assistants and about 20% of all US households use it. And more good news for Amazon. It just keeps coming. Engagements are up more than 30% on the year in 2022 and more than half of customers use it to shop. And, you know, that's kind of big for Amazon. IDC found an average Echo device owner interacts with the assistant at least once a day. That's better than its competitors, Google or Apple. Sounds like things are doing great. So why then is the financial times where we pulled these numbers from running a story with the headline Amazon's big dreams for Alexa? Fall short. Ah, it's the economy. I will say it's the economy stupid, but that makes it sound like I'm going rich stupid, which I definitely have not. It's the economy. The economy is the problem. Amazon wants to make money off the Echo now. They're done funding big dreams. The financial and the financial time sources say Amazon execs are even saying things to the voice assistant development team. Like, quote, if you have anything you can do that you might be able to directly monetize, you should do it. Part of this time, part of this comes from the disappointing earning potential of skills. Those are the apps that you can add on Amazon's platform. A problem that is, you know, not unique to Amazon. Google calls them conversational actions and they plan to end access to third party conversational actions in June, replacing those with voice functionality in Android apps. And of course, some of the shine has come off what people think of voice assistants. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, for example, said they were all dumb as a rock. He included Cortana in that. He was like, they're all bad. Rich, is this the end for voice assistants? I don't think so. I mean, people have carved out use cases for these, right? That make a lot of sense for them. They're just much more limited. And in some ways, we've learned behavior that's like, okay, the voice assistant won't punish me if I try to say anything too complex. So I'm going to do kitchen timers, adding things to a to-do list and the three other things that people do with these. But that skills problem is a major problem. I think, you know, we also like, oh, there's a Jeopardy game that came out for, you know, Amazon or whatever. Like we also like some press release, like that sounds like fun. And we tried to use it. It was like this hemmed in weird experience. It was hard just to even get into a lot of those. So I think this is the, this is Amazon realizing they're, they're ahead in a, in a non-essential, or I don't even want to say non-essential because it is when it works well, it's great. I love having a voice assistant like in the kitchen. That's what it's designed for. But they're ahead in the category that's like really hard to actually monetize. And it seems like one that we've hit feature parody on, right? Yeah, Dickey, do you use any voice assistants in your daily life or part of the problem? Despite someone who comes on DTNS once a month, I'm so one of those curmudgeons who's like, I don't want it to listen to me, even though I don't have anything interesting going on in my kitchen. But I, I haven't, my partner has one. So I've interacted with them. And it, it still doesn't feel good enough to merit me buying one. Like I have friends who, when they walk into their house, they say, Alexa. Oh, sorry. They say voice thing, turn on the lights. And I was like, it would be so much faster to just switch on the lights. I disagree. I disagree. As someone who does exactly that, it is really nice when I walk in the bedroom, you know, and my hands are full to just be like, turn on the bedroom lights and they go on and I don't have to put stuff down and fumble around for the switch. That said, I get what you're saying. Like, I'm not sure if it's worth, you know, $85 just to do that. And, and this is the problem. Anything that Amazon has tried to make extra money has annoyed me. Like, hey, your recent shopping history shows that you might want to buy hair dye. And I'm like, well, first of all, it's not me. It's some it's another member of my household. So you're the dog. But also, no, we don't need anymore. That was like a one time thing. Stop, stop pushing things on me. So I'm concerned that these things that I do find very useful for very utilitarian and non monetizable things aren't going to be worthwhile in their current state and the utility I get from them, I go away. No one wants to give more money to Amazon unless it's for a really, really good reason, so they better come up with a really, really good reason that secretly doesn't piss anyone off. Yeah, like the value add for all of these came in the free tier. And after that, it always felt like we're we're getting some we're not getting the value that we were putting back into this. And the disappointing part of this is I guess I just kind of expected the service to get better over time. And I originally when I first set up my Alexa, like I was I opted into the yeah, you can save the recordings to improve the qualities of the service. And I never saw that. And then I turned it off and it was the exact same. So and not even like understanding me specifically, like what I wanted to do is to be able to and Google has tried to do this and they failed. Like they they have all all both of these companies have all the smart people working on this, but to like have any kind of contextual information of like, if I'm listening to a song and I say, play the rest of this album, there was never going to be a world where a voice assistant in their current carnation can do that. And that's where I think a lot of the excitement potentially with, you know, we're starting to hear buzz about, hey, with chat, GPT like thing, we're going to integrate that into our voice assistant. And if it can have a little bit more of that, I don't even know if you can do necessarily that contextual understanding, but eventually, you know, it's getting. I mean, I mean, chat GPT has better contextual understanding than the current voice speakers, which have some contextual understanding. So it's it's it's promising. But as long as it's not too smart, how do you make how do you make your money off of it is the thing? Can you just make money selling the product and then maybe charge a dollar a month for the service? Are people going to go for that? Maybe, maybe, yeah, yeah, all right. Let's let's talk about dubbing YouTube videos. A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned that YouTube expanded access for creators to upload dubbed audio to their videos in multiple languages. So, you know, we could have Daily Tech News show dubbed in another language. But YouTube is behind on this and creators may not use its feature because they're already using dubbed audio. Yeah, YouTube estimates two thirds of a creator's watch time comes from outside their home region. And rest of world.org reports creators have been making separate channels in various languages. A dubbing company called Unilingo signed up top YouTube creators, Mr. Beast, Dude Perfect, PewDiePie, Jubilee. The company estimates it's generated an additional $10 million by dubbing video in local languages. Unilingo charges a translation fee of 10 percent or translation fee plus 10 percent of ad revenues for dubbed channel. So they're on board if they're successful. That's just one example. Unilingo is not alone. India's Harsh Hassan added Tamil and Hindi dubs to her native Tolugu and added an additional 12 million subscribers when they did so. Pokemon added 15 million subscribers by dubbing its content in Hindi and Bahasa, Indonesia. And if creators don't want to do it, fans will do it. Sometimes creators even have to take on their own entrenched fan translations if they decide they want to provide official ones. Nikki, do you see this as a future of YouTube growth? Is this something you could see yourself taking advantage of? You know, any increase in access for accessibility for everyone is good. If there's people who don't speak multiple language and they can have better access to channels, then good. I don't really like watching dubbed stuff. I prefer to read subtitles. But, you know, I don't I see pros and cons for this. It's a shame that YouTube hasn't jumped on it because they they could be making revenue off of this. It's feeling a niche and it seems to be a relatively big niche from these numbers. So I think that that that's growth that can happen. I can continue to happen here. I think they made the right move. I'm honestly shocked YouTube doesn't automatic like with the launch of the of the multi-channel so the multiple language stuff that they didn't launch like an integration of here are trusted service providers, pay them. They'll send us a cut to do this. And like I almost think it's because like if YouTube does that at scale, like that is a tremendous amount of business. They I'm sure there might also be liability that goes. And well, I don't even know. I don't want to get into that whole aspect of it. But I'm surprised that YouTube is not trying to find a way to monetize that. Monetize. Yeah. Given that we're seeing that there is a tremendous appetite for it and kind of selfishly for myself, like I imagine there is increasingly going to be just a universe of content that's not in English that I'll either have to use subtitles for. But for some content where it's like, you know, where it's not like host stripping, right, where it's it's more, I don't know, like in documentary kind of stuff. I would totally want dubbed versions of that. And so I am I am happy to see that this is a continued trend like whoever, you know, for when there's craters that are going to have just cross it more crossover appeal and they're out there. I'm just not finding them. I'm excited this selfishly for English as well as as much as for for other for English content coming to other languages as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's you. I think you hit on it, which is a factual something that's a voiceover of an animation or something where I'm not connected to the person talking. Yeah, I want to dub because even if I do speak the other language, it's probably easier for me to understand in the language that I speak primarily, right? And that's going to be true for most people. So I'm all into that. On the other hand, you talk about dubbing Mr. Beast in Espanol, I'm like, OK, yeah, I'm sure that works for a lot of people. However, part of the the connection with a creator is their voice, even if you don't speak it. I am fans of a lot of Koreans on YouTube and I don't want to hear them dubbed. I want to hear them speaking and then I'll read subtitles because of that connection. So it apparently I'm wrong, though, because Mr. Beast is getting millions of people to listen to him dubbed by the person who did Spider-Man, according to Una Lingo. That's what that's the thing. It's if you only ever found that channel, right? If you see there's Mr. Beast and Mr. Beast in Espanol and you just click on that and that's kind of your initiation. And you never you never knew it any other way now. And they're hiring top quality voice talent. I mean, that was the other thing. I was expecting this to be like industrial grade. Like we're just, you know, we got someone on Fiverr. We're throwing them out. I mean, no, they're getting like it's just me sitting there going on young, I say, oh, I think the cool thing is you get the option. And that's what we want. We want more. Yeah, yeah. No, that's a really good point because it because sometimes I will want subtitles, but maybe like you say, every once in a while to be like, oh, yeah, I would I would like to have a dub on this. Do you have a thought? Do you prefer dubs or subtitles? Or have you figured out a third option? Let us know email us about anything to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. When we cover robots on the show, it's usually in the context of workplace automation, some big, scary Boston Dynamics robot meant for factories or maybe search and rescue. But robotics is about more than just physical labor and it's about more than just size. Microbiologist Anna Santos from Rice University in Houston, Texas and also at a university in Palma, Spain and her colleague, chemist James Tuer are developing molecule sized machines to fight bacteria from inside your body. Nikki, can you explain how this is going to be working? I'm confused. Yes, I'm so excited to talk about this. I saw the story and I said, DTS needs to hear about this. Yes, absolutely. You've probably heard this either at the doctor's office or it's happening to you personally, but a lot of bacteria have started to develop resistance to traditional antibiotics. So we're always looking for a solution, either better antibiotics or other solutions. This falls into the other category. So these two scientists, instead of looking for a new antimicrobial compound, the microbiologists and chemists paired up to design these spinning microscopic machines that actually drill holes inside of infectious pathogens. OK, so how I mean, I can I know that antibodies don't usually drill holes. So there's a difference one. How else is this different than just developing like like with vaccines like antibodies? Yeah, so instead of it being physiological, where you're trying to get your body to respond to these pathogens, it's actually mechanical. So the advantage of this drilling mechanism is that it doesn't already exist in nature, and so it makes it kind of impossible for the pathogens to evolve any resistance against it. And that's how they were able to do it in the past. And these machines or these nano machines have actually shown some promising results in initial trials against antimicrobial resistant infections. But of course, it still remains to be seen how this is actually going to work in the real world. Yeah, so how does this work? Yeah, so these are teeny tiny machines that are less than a micrometer in size and they can incorporate these controllable moving parts. And this is not actually that new. The twenty sixteen Nobel Prize in physics actually went to Ben Ferrigina for these types of organic motors, but applying this knowledge to anti bacterial resistant bacteria, anti microbial resistant bacteria is what is the new part. So how they move, it actually is powered by either a chemical reaction, electrical energy or sometimes even light, which is sort of a form of electrical energy. So these two scientists, Santos and Tour, work together to create this nanomachine design using different molecular groups and compounds and specifically some that produce nitrogen. And that's because nitrogen can react with visible light and power another molecule group that starts to spin on its own. And they just tweaked it until they got to a certain speed that was fast enough to bore through a bacterial cell. And they actually tested this on E. Coli and Staphylococcus aureatus, which is the bacteria that's responsible for MRSA. And they were able to kill them in as little as two minutes. So pretty impressive. Yeah, so I love this. They've engineered the molecules to make like a very little tiny robot. I remember recovering some of tours early work of just making micro machines that can even walk. So now they've got spinning things and they can drill in that all makes sense. And I guess if you can just put it on the skin's surface where there's visible light, then you can control it there. That makes sense. A lot of infections that are topical that it can help with. But what about where the light don't shine? Any progress there? So they're still working on that as you know, as it goes with science, we always say we're still working on that. But they're testing in for infrared light as a way to power these machines, nanomachines, even though it's a little bit less powerful, it does have a longer wavelength, so it can go a little bit deeper through the tissue than visible light. And they're also working on more accurate targeting. Yeah, you want these things to target specific cells and not all of your cells. And so one thing they're considering is using other transporter nanomachines to deliver these mini drills to the correct cell types, like a cancer cell or even a fat cell, because anti antibiotic resistance is not necessarily the only thing they can do they could potentially deliver chemo. At least these are some future big ideas. But yeah, you want to make sure they're going towards the right cells. Yeah, and I think one thing I thought when I started reading this is the drilling was all that needed to be done, which I think in some cases may be true, but in other cases, you're still using it to deliver something inside the cell that kills it, like you're saying with chemo. So I can imagine this as sort of a there's there's a molecule that has an antigen that's going to bind to only the things you want to damage. And then there's a process once it's bound that that will automatically open up. And the little nano machine can then start drilling and delivering its chemo or or whatever it's going to do. I imagine it is a very small 1930s gangster molecule just shooting, shooting cells. That's how they're going to work on the targeting. They're also talking about like, little tiny nanomachines that they can actually pilot. And I love to see that as well. It's like misfrizzle. But then you could you could steer it to exactly, you know, like a lesion or something using. Yeah, yeah. You wouldn't it wouldn't have to find it on its own. You could you could get it there. That's that's great. Yeah. I next thing we need is just be able to shrink down and ride these ourselves, you know, and then it's total fantastic for next month on DTNs. Hopefully. Rich, what time is it on the moon right now? You know, that's a very interesting question, Tom. And we might actually have an answer sooner than later. That's because during a meeting at the European Space Agency's ESTEC Technology Center in the Netherlands last year, multiple organizations stressed the importance and urgency of defining a common lunar reference time. Now the ESA has announced that it's going to try to achieve Lunanet, framework of mutually agreed upon standards, protocols and interface requirements. Right now, space agencies and private companies just all kind of use their own various home time zones, you know, home is where the moon is, I guess, for onboard chronometers and two way communication systems. A standard lunar time could make partnering on joint observations and overall communications just a lot easier. Someone will have to be in charge of lunar time similar to how the BIPM is in charge of UTC on Earth. And UTC is based on inputs from a collections of atomic clocks maintained by institutions around the world. But you'll be able to, you know, set your watch to moon time for all of your moon visits. Tom, very excited. Yeah, GPS runs into small relativistic effects when it's in orbit when the satellites are in orbit because time is slower for something in orbit, infinitesimally. But at the incredibly small amount of deviance that you want with GPS, you need to account for that. So that's where these UTC atomic clocks come in is they know like, oh, you're that far away. Okay, then you're probably running a little slow. Let me adjust and get everything in sync. There's nothing like that for the moon where satellites are in different orbits around the moon. And is there going to be a thing on the moon that's like UTC and Greenwich that's like, here's the baseline that we're all correcting to. So this is going to be important. The more operations we we have happening on the moon, we need moon GPS and moon UTC. The only thing that makes me sad about this is I have my my citizen watch right here that is synced up to the atomic clock. It's thanks to the atomic clock every single day. So it's always right on time. And it has time zone around the dial. So I can set it if I'm traveling around the world, I can travel and set it have an exact time zone, never have to worry about it. It's now going to be out of date when they set the lunar time. I won't have a lunar option. If I choose now, do I travel outside of Eastern time at all? That's not the point. Almost certainly not. It's the capability. And now citizen get on is what I'm saying. I'm just imagining the scientists trying to work together and be like, okay, so he was on the left side of the moon in UTC. And then the other group was on the right side, but they were in China time. So how Oh, yeah, that's painful. Yeah, you think metric to Imperial is hard. My gosh. We're going to figure this out and everyone use the same lunar time. All right, let's not have like one country hold out. My goodness. Speaking of the world, Nate Langson is here to tell us how the UK might handle the use of AI in education in this week's text message. Ah, thank you for having me. Well, this week, we have talked about plans that are happening in the UK to let students use AI services like chat GBT in their school work. This is something being discussed with the exam bodies that set the tests and the exams. And there's actually a lot more enthusiasm for it than you might first expect. Certainly more than I would have expected. You can get that at UK tech show.com. Thank you, Nate. A wonderful discussion. It was I listened to it just this morning. Tom, can you help us out? Let's check what's in the mail bag. All right. Damon wrote in and said, Hey, DTNS crew, I really enjoyed the discussion on your show about EVs and range anxiety. One thing I'm surprised was missing conversation. I'm sorry, David, I always laugh when people say I was surprised you didn't say this. We can't say everything. Don't be so surprised. Anyway, I'm kidding. One thing that was missing from the conversation about EVs is how cold temperatures can drastically increase charging times. I would really love to hear what some of your special EV guests have to say about how the climate can affect battery life and charging. I live in the Midwest and temperatures can get as low as 20 degrees below zero during the winter months. Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated. Keep up the great work. Damon, thanks, Damon. I actually emailed Chris, who's the one who was having the conversation about range anxiety with us. He lives in Maryland, so it gets pretty cold there. And he said, first and foremost, expect range loss in colder temps. So plan your drives accordingly. It's not like it goes to zero, but you'll get a little less. So you'll need to figure out, you know, how to adjust. Also, make sure you leave the EV plugged in when you can so that it does not use the battery to warm up. And if you can use your heated seats and steering wheel in lieu of running the actual heater, that'll save you a little battery life as well during the cold times. Thank you, Chris, Ashley, and thank you, Damon. And thank you also to Dr. Nicky Acrimans for being on the show. We're learning about molecular machines that are just murdering bacteria. It's awesome. Dr. Nicky, where can people follow you online if they want to follow your fine work? People can find me at nickalacrimans.com or the backwards version is Acrimans Nicole on Twitter while it's still here. And I've been saying that for like four months now. So it's here. And it's still here. It's the new SoundCloud. Hanging on by Fred. Also, thanks to our brand new boss. We are only supported by you. We get advertising on the public feed, but let's be honest, we would not be able to do this show at the level we do it with just that. It is powered by the patrons and thank you, Thomas, not me, who just started back on us on Patreon. Thank you, Thomas. Excellent first name. Excellent choice to back us on Patreon. You are now with all the rest of the patrons going to get access to that extended show, Good Day Internet. Yeah, and Thomas, you're in for a fun conversation about how an in-sex bathroom habits revealed a way to potentially make waterproofing gadgets more efficient. It's very exciting. And I can't wait. Oh my gosh. You can also catch the show live, but it through Friday, four p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Nicole Lee. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at Frog Pants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.