 Coming up on DTNS, Yelp really wants to help you find your favorite spot is Microsoft gearing up for a dual-screen device and why Homer sound open sourcing. Let's do that again. I just wrote this too. In five, four, three, two. Coming up on DTNS, Yelp really wants to help you find your favorite spot is Microsoft gearing up for a dual-screen device and why open sourcing voice AI will help us all. Today, August 27th, 2019, from the PewDiePie line, I'm Sarah Lane. And from a personal place of happiness because I've got a haircut, I'm Patrick Beichel. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And I'm Amos assisting in today's production. Excellent. Kind of funny, Patrick. You managed to avoid Tom for two weeks in a row. Now, very tricky of you. I wonder if he might not be the one avoiding me, the real Frenchman of the show. Tom Merritt is out today. He's doing a special night attack with our buddies in Austin. He'll be back on the show tomorrow. But Patrick, your haircut looks very nice. Thank you. Much nicer than no haircut, which was last week. Before the show, we were talking about music genres. What is emo? Does emo still exist? Who is Eeyore? To you. And much more. If you're interested, you can get the wider conversation in our expanded show, Good Day Internet, by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. For now, though, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Former Google Autonomous Vehicle Research Engineer, Anthony Lewandowski, was charged by federal prosecutors Tuesday with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. These charges are from the United States Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California and are the latest in a legal battle involving Google, self-driving car spin-off Waymo, and rival Uber. Lewandowski is accused of downloading more than 14,000 critical files about Google's autonomous vehicle research before leaving the company in 2016 and joining Uber the same year when Uber bought his self-driving trucking startup, Auto. Lewandowski faces a maximum of 10 years in prison, a 250,000 fine for each count of which there are 33, and additional restitution if he is convicted. Ouch. The BBC is making its own smart voice assistant for use in its website and apps for mobile and smart TVs. The voice assistant, called Bebe, will also be made available for manufacturers to include in devices like smart speakers. Bebe is planned for launch next year, Govna. Am I the only one who thinks of Justin Bieber every time I hear Bebe? That's what pop music has done to me. I'm sorry. That's all right. Interesting though that BBC is doing that. Nine to five Google notes that the original Chromecast seems to be stuck on firmware version 1.36.159268, while all other Chromecasts have the most recent 1.42 firmware. The preview program also shows the first-gen Chromecast getting 1.36 versions. Now Google did tell Nine to Five Google that it will continue to update it with bug and security fixes. But that's it. Yeah, just the basics. The Verge reports Facebook is developing a companion app for Instagram called Threads. For more intimate sharing between users and their closest friends, location speed and battery life info is shared along with photos and video messages. Battery life, I guess. I know. Weird. Well, so you know if you don't get responses. In May, Instagram stopped developing, stopped development of Direct, a standalone messaging app in the works since late 2017. Instagram employees who work on messaging were folded into the Facebook Messenger team earlier this year. Speed is another one in that app where I'm like, battery life. And what do I tell you? I'm on a bad connection and you can check and see if that's really true. Interesting. But okay, for your close friends, I guess those need to know more about that. Exactly. All right, let's talk a little bit more about some updates coming to the Yelp app. Yelp is offering new filters in its iPhone app to offer results based on things like dietary restrictions, your lifestyle, maybe accessibility needs or preferences you might have. Yelp will also ask users to pick from things like types of cuisine, types of dishes within cuisines, and then snacks and drinks to get a better overall sense of what you as the user like, and then use that data along with what's open and nearby to suggest the best spots that also might be dog friendly or be good for somebody in a wheelchair, for example. The new features are rolling out to 60% of iOS app users today. A full rollout is coming in the fall to iOS and Android gets a subset of these features. So it's not exactly the same rollout, but we'll get full features sometime next year. First question, why does Android not get the full, I mean, I'm sure there's a technical reason, but this seems like something it's so, I'm not a big Yelp user. I'm not a Yelp user at all. It's so obvious, like it's the kind of brilliant thing that when you hear about it, you start thinking, why wasn't it like that before already? Absolutely. I thought the exact same thing. And I am a not a frequent Yelp user. I probably open the app once or twice a month for some reason. I often am looking up like a restaurant's phone number or something, even if I don't actually plan to read a bunch of reviews at the time. But I thought the same thing for something like wheelchair accessibility, that's huge, obviously. Dog friendly is something that used to not be important to me, now actually is. I find myself calling restaurants to be like, yeah, the back patio or dog's cool. Is it in the shade? But also dietary restrictions. I don't have any currently, but yeah, I mean, if you're vegan, if you're gluten free, you got a peanut allergy, it's like, you don't even want to see results at places that could cause a concern for you. So these are filters that I'm sort of surprised weren't there either, but it does make Yelp a better service, at least for 60% of those iOS users. And 60% as well. Like if you want to test it out, usually you use a small percentage. 60% is like, only about half. You know what? Let's not make it half. Half is weird. Let's go just a little bit above half. That will be what we need. Yeah, that way we can say most of our users, but it's really just over half, very specifically. Fairphone announced the Fairphone 3, which has seven modules meant to make it easier to repair and constructed out of responsibly sourced conflict-free and recycled materials whenever possible. The Fairphone 2 earned it a 10 out of 10 repairability score from iFixit, but the company had to see support for 2013's Fairphone 1 in 2017 after spare parts became too expensive. Buyers will get incentives for recycling their previous phones when they buy the Fairphone 3 in certain countries, and the company says it's working to improve health, safety, and pay for its factory workers. The Fairphone 3 has a 5.7 inch full HD display, a 12 megapixel rear camera, and an 8 megapixel front-facing camera. Inside is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, so not the fastest and latest one, but still, 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage. The 3,000 mAh battery is removable. Availability starts September 3rd across Europe from select retailers, and pre-orders directly from Fairphone start today at 450 euros. So not the most expensive phone, but certainly not the same specs as flagship phones. So Fairphone is really hoping that consumers who are interested in sustainability and better working conditions and a more ethical use of materials that go into smartphones really like the ethos of the company, and that's why they would choose, and also certainly the fact that you could swap out a lot of the parts due to the modular build. That's also really cool, although Fairphone isn't the only company to be doing that. Patrick, I know that people love turn a blind eye to things like this. I do know that sustainability is the forefront of many sectors, not just the tech sector, but the tech sector. We hear more and more about it and companies creating new initiatives and maybe reversing certain policies that they've had that weren't in the best interests of people in the environment. But it's kind of tough when you've got phones, if you've got a finite amount of money that are nifty your phones based on what we have at the ready. I mean, I love that the option is there. As you said, it's kind of an important thing. And I think where it fails a little bit is that a lot of people say they want these kinds of things. But then when they're given the option, I doubt most people who actually say it would actually go out and buy that phone instead of another one. Another kind of black eye on the concept is the fact that the first one, which is after four years on the market, they had to see support because the spare parts were too expensive. So that kind of defeats the purpose. I think the concept is great. The idea, the intention is great. I'm still to be sold on the actual implementation. Yeah. Yeah. Although they are on their third gen. So yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's a great phone for many, many people. And if you have a choice and that's what you want, then maybe that's what you should get. Absolutely. Netflix announced that the Irishman, a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, perhaps you've heard of these small indie movie stars, will debut in theaters in the US on November 1st. That's not all. It's also going to UK theaters on November 8th and arrive on Netflix on November 27th. That happens to be Thanksgiving Day in the US. Now that is a 27 day theater exclusive, which means that it could be an Oscar contender. I think we looked it up before the show and it was seven days in a theater absolute minimum, if you want, to be in the running for an Oscar. Although major theater change require a 90 day exclusive. So you're not going to be able to see the Irishman at AMC theaters, Cineplex theaters, Regal theaters, or Cinemark theaters. So it's going to be a limited rollout, but this is new territory for Netflix. And I have to say, Patrick, I'm excited about the movie just because sounds like my kind of movie. But this seems like a great proof of concept. I mean, you have some of the world's biggest names, you're going to, it's gotten a lot of buzz. And I think it's, it's a great example of Netflix saying, let's see how many people will go to the theater before we release it on Netflix. And a lot of people are going to watch it on, you know, Thanksgiving weekend anyway, because they're just sitting around. Yeah, this is a big deal for Netflix. I think this is where that industry has been heading towards and now we're there. I mean, Scorsese, De Niro, it doesn't get any bigger than this, especially for a generation that might look down on, you know, service like Netflix. The fact that it's releasing in theaters, I think, is kind of unavoidable for these names. You have to, I don't think they would agree to still do a movie without the theater release. I suspect I don't know for sure. But I think it's a really big deal. Image wise, I wonder how big a deal it is financially. And I don't mean the budget they put into financing, producing the movie, but how much is going to bring in, you know, it's probably not, people are not going to subscribe to Netflix for this. Maybe they're going to stay for it. But I think it's more image than business. Yeah, Netflix is probably curious to see how many people who just don't have Netflix accounts and we're not going to grab them will go to the theater, you know, so we can, we can maybe figure out what that audience is and tap into it in the future. But yes, I think this is more of Netflix saying we, you know, we're a movie studio, you're going to see us on the big screen, you're going to see us at our living room. Swatting where the police are unleashed on an internet user's physical location as a prank often has violent or even deadly consequences. One example two years ago after a gamer attempted to send the police to another player's home, sent, sent them to the home of a total stranger who was fatally shot in the confusion. As of last October, the Seattle police department has maintained an anti-swatting registry that lets people who think they might be swatted at their concern to a profile associated with their address, with their address, if the police do get dispatched. The registry simply adapts an existing rave mobile safety product the police department already uses that connects to a 911 call to the profile of a specific address. Oh boy, this is, you actually brought this to our attention, Patrick. And this is a story written up and wired yesterday, swatting, you know, it, yeah, it's a prank, but it's, it's, the world's worst. It's just, just, just a terrible situation, but it's not going away. And I think that, you know, the Seattle police department, of course, is saying, you know, we've, we're, we're on the mend here, you know, now people who are worried about this can add themselves to a registry. That's a great start. One of the representatives from the police department in this article said, we also happen to have just a really high number of people working in the tech sector here. This is something that we feel might be more prevalent in our neck of the woods than some other major cities. And that there's probably some truth to that. It's not going to stop. So, you know, a concerned police officer or a group of, you know, swatting members from going to someone's house, but you're part of a registry that's, you have that much more of a sort of like, Hey, think twice before this gets out of control. It should, I don't want to say fix the issue, but I'm hoping that it will improve it greatly because if you know that the, how likely is it that the, you know, 0.001% of people who are concerned about getting swatted actually have a dangerous situation unfolding at their home. So they're still going to send the SWAT and the SWAT team, and they're still going to do what they need to, but at least they will be aware. And that's a great way of addressing the issue of sweating, which, you know, we could discuss on its own and is a horrible proof of the horribleness of some human beings, I guess. But another thing that was really interesting to me in that article is the fact that the surgeon who put that registry in place who got it started, Sean Whitcomb, is actually a gamer himself. And to me, it says it's also as much as anything else, a question of generation because he was contacted by a streamer that was concerned and he didn't turn him away or, you know, file the request in a cabinet because he knew what this was. And he was aware of the whole situation. This is also happening in Wichita, I believe. There are a couple of cities now doing this. And I think it won't fix the people idiotic enough to do something like this, but at least it will avoid probably the large majority if not all of the dire consequences. So this is a great, great initiative. Yeah. And hopefully we'll shine more light on who might have made a call, right? If you get a little red flag like, oh, wait a second, this could be a swatting situation. You know, there's less confusion about who might be in trouble. And you might investigate further. You might be, wait, who are you? Where are you? Like want more detail? And at that point, the person might, you know, because they might be, I don't know, young kids who don't know better and go like, huh, and we'll hang up. Right. I don't know. But yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a step in the right direction anyway. Microsoft send out evites. They weren't evites. They were real invites, although they kind of did come to evite form in certain cases to an event October 2nd in New York City a year after the company's last major surface hardware launch featuring the Surface Pro 6 hybrid and the Surface Studio 2. The Verge notes that Microsoft has been building a dual screen device code named Centaurus, which it demonstrated an internal meeting back in June. So polling the group. We excited about what might be Centaurus, dual screen device. Patrick, what do you think they're going to announce? Do you remember the courier concept device that they had a few years ago and that was killed after the entire world? And by that I mean the internet got super excited about it. I do. Do you feel like the courier is rising from the ashes here? It seems so. I hope it will be better than what the courier was because it's a bit old. But yeah, I think that's the one thing that everyone's excited about. If it is not coming, I feel Microsoft will need to put out a messaging about the fact that it's not coming to tamper expectations. Otherwise people are going to go nuts and they're going to be very disappointed because there is an appetite for a dual screen device. We don't know why, we don't know how we will use it, but we want it. So they better give it to us or tell us in advance that they won't. Is this something that you want, you personally want, a dual screen device? Because I'm kind of with you where I go, yeah, it sort of looks like a book, stylus support. I like it. Not totally sure why I need it, but it seems like a great form factor, more than something foldable, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, in a sense it is foldable, because it's like two screens and you fold them together. I think, again, there are potential users and coolness out of it, but I still, we're in that uncharted territory. It's, again, similar to what foldables are. We don't quite know exactly what we would use them for in practice, beyond the wow factor. What productivity or usability advantages does it have? We can all imagine some, but it remains to be seen if they are actually beneficial to everyday use. Yeah. Well, on October 2nd, we will learn more and hopefully Microsoft won't say in advance, don't wait for a dual screen device because then we'll see one. Yeah, I guess instead of foldable, I meant more of that sort of roll up technology that we've been, we've seen dangled in front of our eyes at CESs and the like. Hey, folks, to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, let's talk about voice assistance. Boy, we haven't done that in a while. This is an interesting story though, because we're going to focus on the fact that voice assistance have some limitations. They've also been criticized for limitations that speak to gender and racial bias. In April of this year, there have been many studies about what the issues might be, what the limitations might be, but a study by New York University's AI Now Institute found that a lack of diverse representation at major tech companies, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, among others, does cause AI to cater more readily to white men, often in Western areas of the world. The report highlighted that only 15% of Facebook's AI staff were women. That goes down to 10% for Google's female AI staff. So you say, all right, we'll look at the numbers. This makes some sense. Mozilla says it wants to solve this problem, created something called Common Voice back in 2017. It's a tool that crowdsources voices, actual human voices as a data set to help diversify artificial intelligence and represent more of a global population. It offers its data set, which is growing publicly. Any company can use it for their own research to build and train their own voice enabled apps. There's more than 2,400 hours of voice data, which is not that much, but again, this is something that can be added to by any of us. 29 languages represented as well, English, French, German, Mandarin, Chinese, Welsh, Cabal. I hope I'm saying that right. Cabal. Yeah, I know they speak in Algeria, Northern Africa. And yeah, anybody can help diversify the vocal recognition. In this project, you just go to Common Voice, you can record yourself reading. Maybe you have an accent that you're like, you know, there, I was getting this wrong. I want to contribute to this project. And you can also listen to other people's recordings and verify if they're accurate. Patrick, this sounds like a great idea, especially since we're all sort of frequent travelers. We have friends and colleagues from all over the world and that does matter. These are all data points that are really important when building AI projects. Well, listen, as a white man in my 40s living in the Western world, I really don't see what the problem is. I speak English and I use my voice assistants in English and it works fine. I mean, as much as it can. So yes, obviously, this is a great initiative again. And it's kind of, you know, as much as some people don't want, don't like to admit it, sometimes capitalism and the company's incentives only go so far. And it's great that we have some other types of structures that can, you know, do what needs to be done to at least try and fix, you know, fill the holes that are left by those issues. I, you know, I would love to see this being more, I do wonder a little bit if this isn't not really putting the cart before the horse, but it feels like the voice assistants aren't good enough yet that they would require the, how can I put this? I don't personally, I don't use them a lot. So I don't, I don't see them as useful enough that they would, we would need to bring them to everyone because it's kind of a tech divide issue, right? Everyone should be able to use websites because they're so essential to our lives that I think it's important to think about accessibility there. Voice assistants, I think myself as more like kind of superfluous gadgets, but this is not about the voice assistants of today, it's about the research that allows those things to work better in the future. So now is the time to get these things going and improve the voice recognition for everyone two, three, four, five, 10 years down the line. Absolutely. And, you know, Mozilla is not the only company who cares about making AI smarter in, in their devices. Back in 2017, Amazon introduced an Indian English accent for its voice assistant that allowed it to pronounce Indian words and understand some Indian nuances a little bit better. Google in a little over a year ago added Hindi support for its voice assistant feature was initially quite limited to just a few queries, has expanded quite a bit since then. Black in AI is another project creating ways to increase representation of people of color in AI launched by some folks who used to work at Google back in 2017. So it's not as if to say Mozilla saying well no one else except us care. What I like about Common Voice, which is, which is the name of this, this project by Mozilla is that anybody who's like, yeah, this is this is something that I care about. Again, kind of going back to it almost it's like the sustainability conversation we were having a few minutes ago. This is something that that does affect a lot of people. This is going to be a hindrance if it isn't addressed sooner than later because smart assistants are on the rise. They're becoming more and more a part of people's lives and coming in at really low price points depending on the manufacturer. So this is it's cool. This is something that I want to participate in. I want to be able to say yeah, I gave I gave some input here and I helped it become smarter. This is definitely the face recognition strikes me as something even more important. I wonder if there is something in that area as well. I guess maybe I should research it a little bit, but I don't know why the voice thing doesn't strike me as important. Maybe it's just my use case that doesn't fit that. Well, you're just not very often misunderstood. Again, as a white man who speaks English, I don't see what the problem is. Yeah, keep living in your bubble there, Patrick. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. We're all kind of a bubble together, but we're a happy one. You could submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Also join our Facebook group if you haven't already. Good conversations happen there. Facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show. In the mail back today, Kevin wrote in and he was giving us a little bit of insight because we were talking yesterday about the idea of Chromebooks for the enterprise and you know is something that is a hybrid versus more of that standard laptop, something that is a worker might be asking for more often. Kevin says, I currently work IT for K-8 and the majority of student and teacher devices are latitude two and ones. Theoretically, they're being used in tablet modes, but at least in our environment, 99% of the time, they're not. To make matters worse, two and ones are also more likely to have mechanical failures because those two and one hinges are inherently weaker than traditional clamshell hinges. So what's the lesson here that we should use laptops or that we should use tablets? Well, it sounds like Kevin's saying the two and ones are more of a headache when the hinges go bad, right? Right, because everyone is using them as laptops essentially. So laptops are still the way to go when you want to be doing serious work and you're, you know, in school. You know, I was having a, not an argument, a discussion with a friend who was talking, I never use laptop anymore because I have my iPad and I was like, yeah, well, what if you want to type and he goes, well, I have the keyboard and I'm like, okay, but what you're doing is mimicking a laptop. So I mean, unless you're like for sure not using the keyboard a lot of the time that's, you know, you've replicated your laptop in several pieces, which is great. You know, listen, that that we should, I think we should save it for a conversation next week when I come back and we'll have a whole, like we can make the whole show out of this and follow ups as well because people will write angry emails about that. So true. So true. All right. Fine. We'll say we'll, we'll, we'll show this topic for one week, but thank you to you, Patrick Beja, for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up, what you're going to do the rest of the week. Well, I'm always doing my shows, some in French, some in English. Le Rendez-vous Tech is a French tech news show that you might enjoy if you speak the language. So that's Le Rendez-vous Tech. You will know how to write it if you speak French. Or if you enjoy gaming and speak English, you might be interested in pixels. Again, it's very easy. You just go to your podcast app and search for pixels. And we covered a bunch of Gamescom news last week. So go check that out. It's really fun. All right. Thanks also to our patrons. If you aren't a patron, considering becoming a patron, now is the time you get all sorts of great goodies. Become a DTNS member and get an ad-free RSS feed, something you might like. Special episodes from the group. Tom's got his editor's desk. Now that he's back from vacation, that's ramping up again. Roger Redd's weekly newsletter. We do bonus episodes. It is a fun time to be a patron and you can join now at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you've got feedback for us, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you'd like to join us live, we are live Monday through Friday, 4.30pm, 20.30, UTC. Buy now more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Come on, we've got Scott Johnson on the show. I'm Scooter Lane. Thanks for watching.