 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listeners, thanks to every single one of you, including Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, and our brand new patron. You get all the love if you're the new patron, Jeff. Welcome Jeff. On this episode of DTNS, streaming services start to blur their lines. Snapchat wants you to use AI in their selfies and Google Cloud Next wants to put AI in pretty much everything. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 29th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from the studio that still has no name, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Or is that its name? I don't know. The fact that it has your name? Studio Roger Chang sounds pretty good. No, it could be. I don't know. Roger, you'd have to pay for the naming rights if you do that. Yeah, yeah. Or would you have to pay me to use my name? Friendship wise. See, it's a whole negotiation. Just becomes, yeah, a crazy thing. Well, let's take this offline. All right. Also, it's official. Apple just sent out the invites for an announcement on September 12th. All the rumors were right. It's got, on the invite, it's got a dissolving Apple logo. Kind of looks like, you know, in Avengers, when Thanos snapped and everything dissolved. And just the word, Wanderlust, not Wanderlust. Wanderlust. That seems a little sexy for Apple. All right. Let's see what else is in Quickets. This isn't sexy, but lots of announcements coming out of Google's Cloud Next conference, like Google's DeepMind, which developed a watermark for machine-generated images that you can't see with a human eye, but would be extremely difficult to remove after the fact. It's called SynthID. It's embedded in the pixels and detectable by a tool created by DeepMind, even if the image is cropped or resized. Now, DeepMind hasn't shared details about how exactly the system works in order to deter hackers from using workarounds, because everybody's going to try to do this. But it is rolling out first to Google Cloud customers who use the Vertex AI system, an image and generator. The company says it would like SynthID to eventually become an internet standard. You might say, isn't there one already? A group of other companies are already working on a standard called C2PA. Good news Zenfone fans. Monday, we reported that tech news Taiwan thought ASUS might wind down the Zenfone brand since it had laid off much of its team. But ASUS responded with an official press release saying no. This isn't one of those like weasel words we're trying to get around it. ASUS wrote, we would like to address the rumor that ASUS Zenfone 10 will be the last generation of the series and the ASUS Zenfone product line will be shut down. This is not true. Period. We will continue our two main phone business product lines, the ROG phone and the Zenfone. ASUS has a strong commitment to our smartphone business and customers. So that's what I get for trusting tech news Taiwan. I won't make that mistake again. Also, sometimes these responses, you still can sort of go like, well, but Yeah, not in this one. This one, they're like, no, it's not true. We're going to be making Zenfones. They were just flat out wrong. Exactly. Well, in news that is real, Google home users have 18 new routines that both starters and actions can take care of. Starters respond to another device, like turning off thermostat. If you have a window sensor, for example, that knows you just open the window and the thermostat should go up or down as a result. New starters include whether a device is open or closed, a change in the humidity sensor, a change in temperature or whether a device is docked or undocked. Actions respond to people like fading up your lights after you dismiss your home alarm and you come home. For example, new actions include pause and unpause, mute and unmute, light effects like pulse and color loop. Still don't know who uses those, but hey, have fun at your party. Software updates and also rebooting a device. The new starters and actions are available now in the routine section of the Google home app. Now, if you like to make routines yourself, the script editor will now be available in the home app and also supports camera event starters, custom notifications, starter suppression, and even pet detection. So if you want the TV to turn on and play the Equestrian channel when your dog walks into the room, you can script that. You're going to do that, aren't you? Have fun. Well, I don't know how much Otis likes horses, but why not give it a shot? More Otis friendly channel possibly. Digital Analytics Company's similar web estimates that daily active users and time spent on Facebook and Canada hasn't changed at all since Metta started blocking news sharing on the platform. If you recall, Canada's online news act will require platforms of Facebook's size to pay to carry links from news publishers. It was passed in June and goes into effect before the end of the year. Metta got ahead of the game and started blocking news links on Facebook and Instagram in advance of the law to make a point, I think. Google is also affected by this, but it has not yet begun blocking news links, although it said it might. So we'll see what happens there. Well, speaking of blocking, sometimes you want to block anyone besides you to see your photos, but you don't want to, I don't know, put them, you want to put them somewhere that is safe. Maybe it's a backup of Berry Treasure that you have a map to. Or something otherwise personal that we don't have to talk about here. Your business, not mine. Thank you. Until now, Google Photos offered locked folders. That worked pretty well, but they weren't backed up to the cloud, so it could be a pain to transfer to new devices type of thing. Starting today, Android users can back up their locked folders to access Google Photos devices, including web, iPhone, iPad. Pretty standard. It is optional in case you don't want to risk anyone knowing. All right, Snapchat wants to create your next A.I. selfie with a new feature called Dreams. Users in Australia and New Zealand. You're the lucky ones. You get Dreams now. Rest of the world will get it over the next few weeks. Sarah, you've been looking at the details. What is this and how does it work for those of us who can't try it out? Right, right. So in Snapchat's app, in the camera roll section of Snapchat called Memories, which by the way, I got to say, I don't use Snapchat all that often, so it took me a little bit of time to find this. UI is a little messy, but hey, Snapchat users who know it and use it all the time, you can laugh at me. Dreams, the new feature, asks you to upload a series of real life selfies. It's kind of like what a facial recognition app might ask you for, like, turn your head left, turn your head right, up, down, you know, let's find out where your eyes are, make sure that it looks like you, to get a sense of what your face looks like. Then Dreams displays a series of eight photo packs to choose from with various themes. Some of them are fun like fantasy or back to school or stuff that Snapchat thinks that you would care about, all designed to be fun and shareable. Dreams is free to make once. Each additional pack is $1 per pack of eight. It's an in-app purchase, so it's probably how Snapchat thinks they might make some money. The verges Alex Heath tried it out and noted that most of the images did not seem to capture his likeness, at least to compare to other apps like Lenza, for example, that have gotten a lot of attention and a lot of usage. Custom prompts could help with that, you know, if you were to say like, I want my new dream to be me sitting on a rainbow type thing. Dreams doesn't offer any of that functionality just yet, but this is also not Snap's first for Array into AI. It uses OpenAI's ChatGBT for its MyAI Chatbot, but Dreams is open source. The company says the art styles were made internally by their employees. The company also says it'll let people add their friends to their Dreams, something you have to agree to before using Dreams. This is actually kind of important. Even if you only use photos of yourself, you have to opt into the fact that a person on Snapchat that you are friends with, you're giving the thumbs up that they might put you in a Dreams in the future. Yeah, so I don't use Snapchat a lot, so I am uniquely unqualified to judge whether this is something that Snapchat folks want or not, but it doesn't seem to me out of the gate the kind of thing that's going to recapture the excitement around lenses, and it feels like from everything Snap is saying that they want it to. They're talking about like, yeah, in the early days we did all the lenses, and then eventually we opened it up and it blew up and everybody loves lenses, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will blow up and everybody will love it, but again, like you said, Sarah, from the Verges experience with it, they don't seem very compelling yet, and maybe it's just too early. Maybe they'll get good, but this just feels like something that's a couple of years old. The lens of craze, I remember the lens of craze where everybody was doing lens of post, that was like two years ago, so this feels behind the curve. Yeah, one of the first thing I did this morning was be like, you know, let me do some dreams, and then I was like, oh man, I'm in the US, not Australia or New Zealand, so I actually don't have access to this yet, but knowing what I understand of what is given to you, it's like, okay, it's kind of fun AI photos of yourself that might look like you or not look like you, or otherwise be funny or playful or, I don't know, even strange. That's always what Snapchat has been good at, right? Even back in the day when that app coined the whole funny filters, oh, you're vomiting in a rainbow, all that stuff, that was Snapchat. It just got absorbed by a lot of other apps who did a lot of other things, and I am definitely one of those people who's like, who uses Snapchat anymore? Well, a lot of people do. Hundreds of millions of people. The usage has been going up and up and up, not you think it was going down and down and down the way some people talk, but it's actually more popular now than it's ever been, just if you don't think it's popular, it's probably popular with people that you're not friends with. And it's a good check for yourself to be like, well, I didn't like these fun, kitschy features or ways to DM people that I've figured out other ways to do, but a lot of other people have. Snap reported 397 million daily users last quarter. The company also says that memories, and that's where Dreams is going to be embedded in. Content gets shared 280 million times per day. So there is a lot of potential users for this. A lot of fun. The other thing people do a lot is stream TV. Oh boy. Well, I'm one of those people and Tom, I'm getting more confused by the day. So we've been talking a lot about how streaming TV is moving from expansion. Everybody's doing it into consolidation. Who? Everybody can't make money. How do we all do this? As it makes that transition, you can expect to see lots of partnerships, collaborations. So we have an example today, Tom. Yeah, this is a typical business cycle. I always hurry to remind people that this isn't companies being dumb. I think there's a hint of like all these stupid companies tried to lodge streaming services and now they're failing. It's like, no, there's a huge demand for streaming services and everybody tried to be the one that succeeded and there just isn't room for all of them. So now we see the part of a typical business cycle where companies that aren't doing as well, see if they can figure out a new role for themselves to succeed, even if it's not being the dominant platform. And that's what's going on with AMC and Max. Max, if you don't remember, that's the one with HBO, will offer 200 episodes of titles from rival streaming service AMC Plus for two months, September 1st to October 31st. AMC Plus is the streaming service for the AMC family of networks. So you get things like Killing Eve, Fear the Walking Dead, Interview with the Vampire. They are not going to do all their back catalog. You're not going to see Mad Men on Max. They haven't made a complete list. But yeah, there's stuff that's already on Netflix like Better Call Saul that will not be doing this. But it sounds like Killing Eve, Fear the Walking Dead, and Interview with the Vampire are three of the shows that will be featured on Max. The shows will show up in a tab labeled AMC Plus Picks on Max, and they won't have ads run against them. Even if you're paying for the cheaper version that has ads, you won't have ads run against the AMC Plus Picks on Max. So I don't know, Sarah, it feels like AMC Plus is definitely trying to get more awareness by doing this. That's a big promotion to raise awareness. But it could also be testing the waters on becoming a supplier of shows. Maybe they think if these do really well for Max, Max might want to pay to keep them on the platform. What do you think is going on here? Well, I mean, look at all of the streaming services that were very promising. Netflix, HBO Go before it was Max, Disney Plus, CNN Plus. I mean, the list goes on. We can't all win. The people who love television, I count myself one of them, you can't watch all this stuff. You simply can't. And in many ways, it's monetary. I only want to pay for a couple of services, so I'm going to pay for those services. But it's also a time thing. You just can't win. We can't all win. So something like AMC Plus getting embedded, even for a short period of time, let's call it a trial and see how it goes on something like Max, I think makes a lot more sense. Do I think it's going to be best for the consumer for all this consolidation to inevitably happen? Not necessarily. I think we almost look like we're going back to a cable subscription model at that point, but we're not there yet. And I kind of love that AMC Plus being like, standalone app, not great. We're better off on Max, at least for now. And let's see what people like, even though some of our biggest shows are still licensed elsewhere, so you can't get that library on this particular offering. But I don't know how many people know where the libraries really are at this point. And I think that's where these companies might have some leverage, is just like, hey, we're giving you a bunch of shows. Maybe you've seen them. Maybe you haven't. And hoping discovery goes from there. Yeah, the strategy that AMC Plus has pursued up till now will be an add-on. We don't expect to be the platform. We're not trying to be Disney Plus. We're not trying to be Netflix. But if you get Amazon Prime Video, you can add AMC Plus to that for a little bit of extra money. I think it's like five bucks. If you get Apple TV, you can add AMC Plus. So Max isn't doing that yet. I don't know that this means that Max is entertaining the idea of doing add-on channels like that yet. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Maybe this is a step that way. But it does feel like AMC Plus is wondering if its future is as an add-on channel, or if its future is being something a little more integrated and saying, rather than just having our shows show up on Netflix with no branding, we could brand AMC. The way HBO is branded within Max, right? HBO isn't in the name of Max anymore. But you know a show is quality when you see HBO. Maybe AMC could be that. It doesn't matter if you get the shows from their service. You could see an AMC show on the service you're using, and they could be on multiple services. And no, oh, that's the quality show. That's the Mad Men people. That's the Walking Dead people. That's the Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad people. But you know, the Better Call Saul people are like, you know, that would not be part of this offering, you know? Well, not yet. Not at this time because they already have a previous contract with Netflix. But this could be testing the waters for a future where they do license them non-exclusively more widely, if that's going to make them more money. I think, I mean, you know, all kidding aside about, you know, who wins here, it makes a lot of sense to me that a company like, let's say Max, because, you know, the company behind Max is quite large, to bring in licensing and say, here's what you get for the next year or two kind of thing. That makes the most sense for me as a consumer when I have $7 to give to, you know, this company or the next. Yeah. And I think the fears that we're going to go back to cable are overblown. We still have a lot more control. We have a lot more choice. We have the ability to turn off any part of our service at any time versus cable where you're stuck. You pay for the whole thing. And a lot of times you're locked in, you know, at a contract for a year or more, right? Yeah. So I still think this is infinitely preferable. And I think we have a long way to go before the consolidation takes us down to cable levels where you add one, maybe two options in your region. Well, folks, if you are interested in podcasting, and I know a few of you are, I taught a seminar about it recently. And I know not everybody could make that because we, you know, we wanted to keep the class size manageable. So we made it available online. How to make a great podcast is available in our brand new DTNS Patreon store. This is a new thing Patreon's doing, letting you sell stuff through the store, digital stuff. So you can get either a streaming version if that's more convenient for you or a downloadable version that then you can keep track of yourselves and get the class as a streaming video over. It's not just a downloadable audio file. It's a downloadable video file or a streaming video. All you got to do is go to patreon.com slash DTNS slash shop and check it out. Please do. One of the announcements from Google Cloud Next getting the most attention is Duet AI come into Google workspace. If you don't know workspace, it's it's essentially Google's answer to Microsoft 365, right, which is office plus other things, Microsoft Teams there, and they Google has Google chat, Google docs and Microsoft has office workspace. It's a place where you do a bunch of work. Duet is an AI assistant that can summarize documents, recap conversations, all those things that these AI tools are doing these days. It can search across your workspace chats, your documents, your email and answer questions about your stuff. They showed this off at IO and it was really compelling to say, oh, it's not trying to use the entire internet to answer your question. You can say, just take the answer from my own things. It can also help create apps in AppSheet, Google's no code platform. So yeah, Sarah, it's kind of a cool thing because it's trained on you. I mean, we, yeah, sorry. This feature, as I mentioned that Google announced at IO that you can ask to take an outline in docs and turn it into a presentation in slides, for example, or take data from a spreadsheet and make a chart. It can also write emails for you, create images, check grammar, Google chat, which is the Google Teams competitor, or sorry, the Microsoft Teams competitor, used to be called Hangouts. Remember when it was called Hangouts? I do. We used it. Yeah, we used Hangouts on air. But that was a different version of Hangouts than this version of Hangouts. I know. Well, that's Google for you. 16 versions of Hangouts. But anyway, now it's called Google chat. Do it, can search through your chats, answer questions, summarize things. It also works in Google Meet, which is their Zoom competitor. So it can do things like adjust your lighting and sound, create meeting notes and summaries. Even if you're not there, in fact, check this one out, Sarah, you can click attend for me and it will auto generate discussion topics on your behalf and show them to other meeting participants. Oh, my gosh. I mean, talk to me on a Monday morning, you know, where I'm like, I've got cucumbers on my eyes. It has been a tough one. I just want, I want two at AI to kind of run this thing. Yeah. That I'm joking. But I mean, I feel like that would be where we're going. It's also useful if you've just got overlapping meetings. And that happens a lot these days. People just generally don't respect your calendar and will just throw meetings on it. So if you got two meetings at the same time, you can pick one, but still have yourself represented in the other one. They did check. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I just had this happen earlier today, where there was a calendar snafu of sorts. It was human error, no big deal. Maybe in like, oh, hi, won't be able to make that time. But I was like, once I was reading more about what Duet AI was capable of, it's like this could potentially just cut down on those four emails. We all had to send each other about why this wouldn't work for Sarah versus the other person versus the other person. Yeah. Just let Duet schedule your meetings for you. Maybe you won't have overlapping meetings. Right. Like there just wouldn't be one scheduled if it's not possible. Jay Peters from the Verge asked the question that I immediately had, which is, so what happens if everybody lets Duet attend for them and no one's in the meeting? Turns out it will cancel the meeting at that point. It won't just show notes to itself. You need one human. You have to have a human in there. One human. Okay. So yeah, this remains to be road tested at scale, but it has the promise to sort of be a good use of these generative models to help give you shortcuts. All the articles I read about it were hastened to say you should not blindly rely on this, even if it's just trained on your stuff. You want to make sure that it's accurate because these tools are not foolproof and they don't always get things exactly right. But I think it is a time saver and large organizations are going to get it first. If you're a big enterprise, you'll pay $30 per user per month. They have not announced a small organization price or a consumer price, but they are going to bring it to both. So we'll be able to get it on our own if you're a single proprietor or just a consumer who's interested in this. That $30 per user per month, by the way, is the same as what Microsoft charges for Microsoft 365 co-pilot. So that is an industry standard now, since two big companies are doing it. One other thing here that I thought was interesting out of Google Cloud Next, they're going to start offering products from competing AI providers on Google Cloud. So not just Duet and Bard and all the things that Google's developing, but they are going to include Lama 2 from Meta. They are going to include Claude 2 from Anthropic. I did not see OpenAI announced because they're all tied up with Microsoft, but it does seem like Google wants to be the one-stop-shop if you want anything but OpenAI to get AI services. Well, as somebody who uses Google Docs every day for our show, DTNS, Daily Tech Headlines, and a variety of other things, we use these spreadsheets in an unusual way because we're doing rundown stuff that won't apply to everybody. But I try to think of this as like, okay, if it was a spreadsheet that would apply to me in more of like a, I don't know, maybe I'm submitting an invoice or doing all sorts of stuff that the suite of apps would be helpful with, this is great. Who is not happy about something like this working? Perhaps, I don't know, a financial department who's like, well, your invoice was not submitted correctly, the AI sucked kind of thing. I don't think that's what Google is going for here. I think it's kind of just taking again, we've talked about this ad nauseam, taking mundane things off of human hands and making them behind the scenes stuff that allows us to not have to submit invoices all day every day. Yeah, Google doesn't want you to run all your accounting department through Duet, but your accountants and their assistants should use Duet, and then they should make sure that everything's right. Don't blame the AI because you are responsible for it being correct, but it can speed up your work. I agree. And then you'll have saved so much money with those productivity increases that you'll be able to afford a ridiculously expensive television that Sarah is going to tell us about. Oh, Tom, if only that were true. And you know what? I don't want to look at your bank account. Maybe this is true for you. Samsung announced an 85 inch version, big version of its outdoor TV called the terrace. The terrace has been around for a while. It's designed to handle the elements like direct sunlight, being able to see a picture if it's really sunny outside, intense rain, you know, on the other side of it. It's an outdoor TV that doesn't have to be covered and coddled. The new model also adds a mini LED backlighting. It calls Neo QLED for a better overall picture contrast, blacks and whites, that sort of thing. It's available for pre-order now and you might say, well, great, I've got a backyard and I'm ready to make it cool. Well, I hope you have $19,999 because that's what this costs. If the price doesn't send you running for the hills, well, okay, you're doing better than me. The new terrace has an IP56 dust and water resistance rating, which is durable enough to withstand high pressure water from any direction. I mean, you're not going to like. Don't power wash it. Don't power wash the television, but otherwise it's designed to be outdoors, whether there's an overhang over it or not. It's designed to be okay in the elements. That's the idea and it's going to cost you $20,000. Well, patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told Amazon employees, if they don't come back to the office at least three days a week, quote, it's probably not going to work out for you. That's almost mobster-like. Why the intense corporate push for the return to the office? We're going to talk about that and my upcoming trip to Korea. Stick around. You can also catch this show live Monday through Friday because that's when we do it live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tom, we'll be back tomorrow, but we'll be back doing it all again with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then.