 Do you want a holiday card from DTNS? Become a patron and give us your address by November 15th and we'll send you a special DTNS holiday card. If you're a patron already, check if we've got your address by going to patreon.com slash pledges. Coming up on DTNS, NVIDIA wants to make NPCs for the metaverse. Commercial autonomous taxis set to launch in Las Vegas. And the next combatant against Google in the search engine wars is you.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 9th, 2021 in Los Angeles on John Merritt. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Sarah Lane will be back soon, folks. She's doing great. But we have Patrick Norton, host of AVXL with us today. How's it going, Patrick? I am endeavoring mightily to be worthy of being here when Sarah's not. And right you are. You are endeavoring and succeeding, may I say. We have a long version of a show where I have a very failed bit to talk about rolly luggage. A good day internet. That's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Big thanks to our patrons that make this possible, including top patrons like Dan Colbeck, Jeffrey Zilx, and Tony Glass. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft announced the 11.6 inch Surface Laptop SE meant for the classroom. It's $250 available to schools later this year. Hardware has the same solid keyboard as other Surface models. A 1366 by 768 display, so better than 1080. Everything is built for easy repairability, so your IT department at your school can fix it. Also runs Windows 11 SE. That is a modified version of Windows that's meant to be easy to deploy and manage remotely so you can deploy to all the students' laptops. Only IT admins can add and remove apps, for instance. 365 apps and OneDrive work offline, so if the student doesn't have a connection, they can keep using the laptop and it'll sync when a connection is available. Devices from non-Microsoft vendors that use Windows 11 SE are also on the way. It's fascinating. Take that, Carl. Take that! Friday on GTNS we mentioned that I fixed its confirmation that Face ID would stop working after a screen replacement unless you had access to Apple systems, one of its repair programs, or you did some micro soldering to move the micro controller from the old screen to the new one. Tuesday, Apple told The Verge it will release a software update that will not require you to do micro soldering to move the micro controller if you want to keep Face ID working after a screen replacement. Apple did not give it dates on when that software update would arise. Boo! Samsung announced a new bit of RAM for your mobile devices that works out 1.3 times faster and uses 20% less power than the desktop version. LPDDR5X RAM has a capacity of up to 16 gigabytes, package capacity of 64 gigabytes with data transfer speeds of 8.5 gigabits per second. Samsung says it attends to market it to automobile, edge server apps, augmented reality, and Patrick will be very upset if I don't mention that their press release mentioned the metaverse as well whenever that happens. And artificial intelligence. Oh right, AI, also blockchain, I guess. I don't know, it wasn't in the press release. Don't forget NFTs. What about NFTs? Yeah, please. Oh my goodness. Netflix announced its five mobile games will launch on iOS Wednesday morning at 10 AM Pacific. It launched them for Android last week. The games will appear listed in a game show in the iOS Netflix app. Like on the Android, the games download as separate apps you log in with your Netflix ID to play them at no additional charge. And Twitter's subscription service has expanded from Canada and Australia to New Zealand and the US as of Tuesday. The $2.99 a month service gives you an undo button for your tweets, a reader mode for tweet threads, bookmarks folder, some theme options. You can also join the labs program and try out Twitter features before they launch to all users. And with this expansion Twitter blue for every user that can get it added ad free articles would let you read some partner news stories without ads. They'll be labeled as such. There's also a top article section for the most shared links from people you follow on Twitter. And on the iOS version of the app, you'll be able to customize your navigation a little bit. All right, let's talk about autonomous cars. Aptive Hyundai's joint venture called emotional is teaming up with Lyft to launch autonomous taxi service in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2023. Last November, Nevada gave emotional approval to test autonomous vehicles without human safety drivers. That's the big advance here. There's all kinds of tests of the with with the safety drivers behind the wheel. They've got approval to do it without. So select passengers in Las Vegas will be able to book rides in motionals driverless Hyundai Ionix by the end of next year as a test. They'll be using this to collect rider feedback on things like the process and the interface and fine tuning how you get in and out of the car that sort of things. You won't be charged as part of that full scale offering and the right to charge for autonomous taxi rides is expected to come in 2023. Emotional is also planning to test on public roads in Los Angeles soon. And of course, they're not the only one. Waymo already offers limited commercial service in Phoenix, Arizona. They've been doing that since 2018 GM's cruise launched autonomous taxi service in San Francisco for its employees and some select public passengers and has applied there for permission to offer its ride hailing services for a charge. So creeping, creeping slowly towards actual commercial services, Patrick slouching towards autonomous vehicular activity. So famously wrote, yeah. No, I gotta say, I blurted it out mid read, but I admire anybody that's willing to, you know, launch autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas followed up by Los Angeles. Now all I need to do is like get lower Manhattan in there, right? Yeah, midtown Manhattan and the upper peninsula of Michigan just to, you know, have a snow test, right? Oh, that would be good. Yeah. I like that idea. No, I'm curious to see how it goes. I hope it goes well for them. I hope someday to see autonomous vehicles that are actually autonomous. Yeah. I mean, to me, the big debate out there is, you know, when will we get human free autonomous taxi service? Will it be soon or will it be, you know, oh, that's 2070. That's 50 years down the road. And nobody really knows, but this is at least one more, you know, on the pile to say we think we can do it soon. We'll see if they actually hit their date. For me, like I don't want any taxi drivers. I don't want anybody, you know, Lyft or Uber drivers to lose the opportunity to make money. Really, I just want this stuff to actually be proven so that I can buy a truck and like have it do the boring 800 miles or so that I can read a book and, you know, look at the amazing things out in Utah until it's time to get on the dirt and get, you know, busy. Yeah. No, absolutely. There are times and maybe there's, maybe there will be an artisanal taxi service that's driven by humans as a perk in the future. There are times when I enjoy talking to the taxi driver. I absolutely do. There are other times when I'm like, you know what, I'm not in the mood. I don't want to talk to anybody and I'll want that autonomous car that doesn't have anybody else in it. So yeah. In September, Qualcomm closed its acquisition of AR developer toolmaker, Wikitude. And as of Tuesday, Qualcomm has announced a platform called Snap Dragon Spaces, taking advantage of some of the talent they got when they acquired Wikitude to help developers create apps for augmented reality. The idea is to make it easier to make software to pair a phone with glasses or a headset. So both the apps that'll work on that, but also, you know, the communication that happens. The kit includes support for Unreal Engine 4, Unity, OpenXR, Niantic's just announced light ship platform and Unity's AR Foundation. There's also object recognition, tracking, scene recognition, spatial mapping, a lot of stuff you'd expect. Gesture and hand tracking tools are coming along with their recently acquired HINZ subsidiary Clay Air. Snap Dragon Spaces is also available to partners or starting only available to partners. Trip, Scope AR, Felix and Paul Studios, Lenovo, Oppo, Xiaomi, T-Mobile and NTT, DoComo all have access. Wider availability for everybody, though, is expected next year to kind of open it up, get more developers on the platform. Lenovo will be the first to launch a product built with spaces called the Think Reality A3 glasses with one of their Motorola phones. They haven't said which. The upshot is Qualcomm is trying to make it easier to develop software that runs on headsets connected to Android phones that run on Qualcomm chips. So, you might, because of this, see a lot more AR headsets and apps next year. Maybe it's CES even. While you're riding in your driverless taxi, I'm in. Yeah, because you'll be able to pop those AR glasses on because the taxi's driving itself. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are waiting for AR devices that are worth getting. You know, like on the one end, we've got the Wayfarer glasses that Meta is working with Rayban to make. What are they called? The stories. The Rayban stories. Those aren't really AR though. Those are just a fancy camera put in glasses that look normal. On the other end, you've got like the HoloLens and that just hasn't turned into anything but an enterprise level device. So, I'm kind of waiting for that middle device to finally get there. And I guess Qualcomm's trying to help make that happen. I feel like I've literally was having the same AR demo for like 15 years where it was some sort of single or double lens. And essentially, I was looking at airplane manuals because Boeing was the test case for everybody, right? Because you're climbing up into a plane and it's, you know, the manuals are way over there. And if we put the manuals on the mechanic's face, it's easier or the, you know, the technician's face. And then it was, you know, and then finally Microsoft did some interesting stuff where they one of the first times they ever got to do a really impressive architectural walk through with the AR glasses. But it's also, you know, this is one of those things that, you know, it gets a little closer. It gets a little closer. You know, I don't think magically helped out a lot of people with their sort of super hype and then collapse. So I'm kind of curious to see what ends up being the actual real world use for it, or what breaks it loose for the most people. I actually take heart from a big major platform like this because Qualcomm doesn't do this unless they think this increases the number of chips it'll sell. And they don't think it'll significantly increase the number of chips it's going to sell unless they think some viable products will come out of it. So hopefully there will be. Slouching towards. Slouching towards everything. How about slouching towards a search engine competition? More than one of you has written into us at one point or another asking why nobody has launched a competing search engine to Google. Some of you probably assumed that's because Google is a monopoly and Bing has showed us it cannot be competed with and Duck Duck Go just has people like me using it exclusively on mobile, but hasn't increased its market share. Well, get ready for another test case folks. A former chief scientist from Salesforce named Richard Socher is part of a team that founded you.com you.com a search engine that is now out of public beta or I'm sorry it's now out in public beta. The design is card based. You don't have a row. You don't have that Google Alta Vista, you know, time memorial list. You've got little little widgets, little cards and the cards are collected in relevant categories. So I did a search for Korean fried chicken early today. I got a Wikipedia article at the top, followed by a row of recipes under that two rows of web results. I kept scrolling and I had a row for Reddit and a row for quick facts. Other searches will get you results from different things. Patrick did Korean fried chicken near me and got Yelp at the top. You might also get medium or something like that. Users can customize what rows show up if you create an account and log in. You can make some more important or choose not to use certain sources at all if you're like I never want to see from that source. Also has sections for web images, video news and map. Although the map just kicks you out to Google Maps. Video searches let you play the videos without having to open a new tab. You can just click on it and it'll play right on the page you're on. Searches for code let you see the code snippets and copy them without leaving the page. They say they really are trying to target developers with that feature. It has a private mode that includes hiding your IP address and the company promises it will never sell your data to third parties. There is no monetization yet. Those soldiers told TechCrunch there will probably be ads at some point, but he reiterated those will only be related to the query you're making at the time. They don't plan to do ad targeting. You search for Korean fried chicken. They might show you ads for Korean fried chicken places, but that's it. I don't know what to make of this. We were chatting about this on Good Day Internet. Patrick, I don't know if it's good, but it's certainly fascinating the different approach here. It's such a bizarre business to go into. Oh, I'm going to climb Everest. This is such a huge windmill to tilt out. I also thought it was really funny because when you look at DuckDuckGo, it's a very old school experience in the sense that you have a bunch of links. And if you want to see the majority of the information, you click on that link and it launches in a new web page. It has been fascinating for me to think about how much Google has inserted itself in there. I click on a link, but it's not actually the page. It's Google presenting me the page with a link to a Google link instead of a link to the web page that I want to share with my friend. You is a little closer to that Google model than it is to the DuckDuckGo model. I have a classic animal I search for and it's fun to look at something that is so non-... The information on most animals doesn't change a whole lot over time and it makes it a really interesting way for me to preview how a website approaches things. And u.com is definitely doing that Google thing where they suck up a whole lot of information from pages and present it to you so that you never have to leave your search engine. You never leave. I also like that in certain cases. I want to be able to do it. And to your point, if I click on any of the Korean fried chicken recipes, I get the link to the recipe. I don't get that weird Google link that I have to click through to get the actual link. So they're not totally down that Google road. Also, I have questions if this were to scale. Okay, but who gets to partner with you? Because I see archive.org, ARXIV, not the library. I see Yelp. Okay, that's probably fine. I see news. Well, what's news? Music. Who's your music provider? I see dictionary. Who's the dictionary provider? I see Walmart. What's your deal with Walmart? You have a special deal. You're going to prioritize their results. Lots of questions when you start categorizing how you determine your categories. I'm not saying it's bad to categorize, but you know, proofs in the pudding there. Maybe you'll be able to choose your preferred provider of dictionary services. Yeah, that would be nice. If you could customize all that stuff, that'd be really cool. Folks, if you have a thought about you.com or anything else, give us an email. Oh, you don't know our email address. Well, it's feedback at daily tech news show.com. And if you forget, just email me and I'll tell you. Music. NVIDIA announced lots of WoW tech at their GPU technology conference. Let's take a look at some of the big announcements. What fun would a potential metaverse be without fully autonomous, interactive AI avatars? In other words, the NPCs of the metaverse enter NVIDIA Omniverse, launching out of beta into general availability. Omniverse is a collaboration tool for graphic designers and engineers to create realistic simulated people. Particularly notable is the NVIDIA Omniverse avatar capability, which combines speech synthesis, computer vision, natural language understanding, recommendation engines, and similar tech. And yeah, computer vision means this thing can look you in the eye. Let's say you're doing a restaurant kiosk. It can look at you because it knows where you are. Let's you create ray traced 3D characters that you can have a conversation with. They can be used to do things like take orders at a restaurant or banking transactions, book your dental appointment, stuff like that. They do have a two second lag time right now, which is a little annoying. Integration with CloudXR lets you stream to augmented reality and virtual reality devices. And if you're not a developer, NVIDIA has opened the Omniverse showroom in open beta that lets you just go in and play with a few demos. You can talk to some avatars. You know, I mean, it's a cool demo, Patrick, right? Is it anything but that? Artemy was having recently read, having recently read Ready Player 2, it was amusing to sort of see this read this announcement and be like, this, this is where it starts. And I'm kind of curious, I'm kind of curious, you know, which way, you know, will the metaverse evolve to be a whole bunch of people, you know, donning gear, or will they be able to create bots that are fast enough and efficient enough to actually, is that two second lag time is just not going to make it a joyful experience? Yeah, I mean, their demo, the demo of the restaurant made the most sense to me, but also I was like, I don't really want a thing talking to me, especially with a two second lag, I just want to pick my menu items. Like, but I think there are other situations where, I don't know, maybe I'm going into information kiosk and having a pretend friendly face that can understand what I say and react to it could be useful. I don't know. Hi, Tom, are you suffering from extreme dental pain, moderate pain, or are you just here for a cleaning? No, I just want to know where gate 35 is. Why did I get the dental guy suddenly? We'll be sending cleaners to gate 35, Tom. That's probably how it'll work. Another one, Reva Custom Voices, a toolkit in NVIDIA's Reva conversational AI development kit that can create custom human like voices. This one feels like it's immediately practical. You only need 30 minutes of recorded speech data. Businesses and brands can use that then to develop virtual assistants and particularly call center phone trees. So you don't have to go back and rerecord every time you change your phone tree. You just need 30 minutes of recorded speech data. You can customize on the fly. System would save on time and expensive recording of all those words uses supervised semi supervised learning, meaning it needs just a small amount of labeled data to mark correlational points and then it can make up its own new labels. That saves you time. Reva Custom Voices will launch in open beta at no cost and early next year they'll launch Reva Enterprise, a fully managed version. Reva Custom Voices will compete with Google's WaveNet, Microsoft's custom neural voices, and Amazon's brand voice. They're not the only ones doing it, but seems like a good one. Obviously a lot of people are going to do it, but NVIDIA is good at this sort of stuff. I was kind of shocked at how many people were actually doing that. Yeah. I think it's a thing where a lot of companies are like, man, recording, you know, you wonder, like, why don't they update their phone tree? Or why does it always say they've updated it? And it doesn't sound like they've updated it. NVIDIA launched the Jetson AGX Oran Robot Brain, a follow-up to the AGX Xavier. Their Oran has six times the processing power in the same palm-sized form factor built on the ampere architecture, includes deep learning and vision accelerators that can run multiple AI apps locally. Don't need the cloud. Oran purchasers get access to the Isaac Sim Robot Sim app. Clara for imaging and genomics. Drive for autonomous vehicles. Obviously, you don't need all three, but depending on your industry, you can pick one of those. Xavier cost you $1,100. We don't know the price for Oran yet, but if you put Oran in a car, you compare it with the NVIDIA Drive concierge and Drive chauffeur. Let's start with the concierge. It combines voice assistance, driver monitoring, and autonomous parking. Every passenger can have their own instance of it. They'll recognize your voice. It can do things you'd expect, like place a phone call, book a reservation. It can also watch for things like if you left your phone in the seat and let you know as you're getting out of the car. It can encourage you to take a break if it looks like you're getting sleepy while you're driving. And it can park itself. You get out of the car, say, go to the parking space, like the Tesla. It can go park itself. It can supposedly do parallel angled and perpendicular parking and come meet you when you summon it. If you were like, okay, what about chauffeur? A chauffeur is just the autonomous driving system. It can now go address to address autonomously in urban or highway situations. And all of that is part of Drive Hyperion 8, the autonomous platform that NVIDIA is marketing to automakers, which is now ready for production vehicles. No announcements on anyone who had adopted it as of yet though. They've worked in the past with Volvo and I think BMW, but yeah, they didn't use those names today, did they? Interestingly. But yeah, I mean, this, this is, I don't know, this seems impressive, but it's also we're getting to be evolutionary, not revolutionary with this sort of thing, aren't we? At the risk of sounding like me, I want to see it actually in a product where I can go to a dealership. And I don't mean this in the sort of pandemic sense of we can't get chips for cars, but in the normal sense of I want to actually see it in action. Yeah, you go to the dealership and drive one. I feel fairly positive that NVIDIA has good, good software that will be used, but you're right, it would be better if we had heard the partnership. Yeah, and I meant no slight against NVIDIA or any of the other autonomous vehicle partnerships that have been mentioned elsewhere in the show, which is literally it's one of those things where we're so close and we're so close and we're so close. And I've been reading about Waymo and I've been reading about the local drivers in Arizona dealing with Waymo and I've been insane in the wee small hours of the morning when the cruise engineers were running around with those and I'm just, you know, there's ex Tesla employees talking about the quality or the actual stage of the autonomous. I just want to see some of this stuff actually, you know. And I think the other thing to note when you look at these NVIDIA announcements is this is NVIDIA pointing to its future, right? These aren't meant to be, our product is out today. This is meant to be, here's what we're capable of doing if you're worried that someday, you know, GPUs will be, you know, come out from under us and we won't have anything left. We have all this AI stuff that we're doing too. And very much in, you know, and very, it seems like very successfully and very, you know, this they're not playing catch up, they're definitely laying a lot of groundwork in a lot of directions. Just waiting to see some of it. Yeah, specifically in the autonomous driving thing. I'm curious. A couple other quick announcements here. Audio to face is a product from NVIDIA that can match facial animations to audio files, keeping the mouth and lips in sync with the words no mo cap required. The quality depends on the audio file and it's not meant to do facial emotions yet. So it's just one step towards that. But it's available for download in an open beta if you want to mess around with it. NVIDIA is also partnering with Lockheed Martin, the US Forest Service in the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control to build tools to better fight fires. Lockheed is providing the real time sensing software and NVIDIA provides the hardware and use of its Omniverse platform to do the forecasting. Basically it can simulate fire spread under differing conditions, wind, weather, rain, you know, heat, whatever. The data can be visualized on a regular screen, just a 2D screen, but they'll also work in AR and VR, if you want to do it that way. The tests have been fairly accurate. They didn't give any hard numbers though, and they emphasize that they are continuing to refine this and they want to gain the trust of the firefighting community. They don't want to try to foist this on them. They want to work with the firefighting community to make this work for them. And then once they've got that, they want to make it widely available to everybody. Cool. Yeah. I liked that. I liked that very much that they didn't come out saying like, come on everybody, use our revolutionary thing and fires are gone. They're like, no, no, we're working with the people who know on the ground that this is harder than it looks and we want to make it right. So good for them. Absolutely. Google. Now, I hope you have a picture of your cat or dog or reptile or bird or fish or rabbit or horse ready because Google's Arts and Culture app has added a feature that lets you upload a picture of a dog, cat, fish, bird, reptile, horse or rabbit. And it will look through pictures of art, you know, paintings, great works of art to find similar pets in works of art. And then it, once you find them, you can tap on the art and learn more about the art. It's a great way to, you know, educate people about art. You can also share these on social media and even create a slideshow of the results if you've got several good ones. My dog Ray, a German Shepherd was very unimaginatively associated with Rin Tin Tin, which I'm like, okay, sure. Yeah, I guess most shepherds kind of look like Rin Tin Tin. But then I thought there was a really good one from my border collie, Sawyer, who got paired up with what looks like a border collie in a picture by Sir Edwin Lancere from the mid 1800s. So that one worked for me. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Did you do lupin? You know, I had trouble with lupin because all of my recent lupin pictures have been involved lupin in a cone. And it's very sensitive about that. There might be some great works of art with dogs and cones out there. We have a new kitten, a small black kitten, and it came up with Jester Leonardo DiCattrio in the Art Pop Street Gallery and the pet from the National Academy of Design, John Thomas Peel painting, which actually is, you know, outside of the fact that I am bold and bearded and there's a sherubic child and a loose shift holding a black and white cat with a ribbon is certainly very parallel. And then the accuracy just falls. Yeah, yeah, it falls off a cliff. I don't know, but it's fun and it promotes art education. So I was into it. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Got an email from James C Smith, one of our top supporters. We've been talking about how to explain the difference between Facebook and Meta and Google and Alphabet. It's two different things going on there. And James is like, comparing those two isn't much help. A useful comparison would be Xbox and Microsoft. So we're talking about Andrew's question of like, why did you say Meta stopped Facebook's facial recognition? Why didn't you say Facebook did it because it was the product stopping it? And James said this works Xbox and Microsoft because Xbox and Facebook are both more than just a product. They're each a brand with many associated products and platforms, but it's clear you shouldn't say or wouldn't say Xbox removed Kinect support from the Xbox Series X. It was Microsoft who removed it and Facebook didn't remove the facial recognition, Meta removed it. So maybe that will help in future discussions. I thought this was a good good comparison. It was a decent equivalency of Facebook is now just a product, a really big successful product that makes up a large amount of Meta's income. But like Xbox is a big successful product that doesn't make up a large percentage of Microsoft's income, but a nice big chunk. Yeah, I think those are, I think those are somewhat equivalent. I struggle. We were talking to the internet about this and I struggle a little bit because I still think that the eventual goal is to change the name of Facebook to Meta, but I also have a small. I don't. I don't think so. I think they're going to leave Facebook as Facebook forever. And what they want to do is make you not think of Facebook when you think of the Quest or any other products like the way like the Ray-Ban stories, they just they want to be like Facebook. Yeah, that's that thing we do, but nothing else is related to it. Come on. That's a thing you used to do, but now you do Meta. Right. She's bigger. Yeah. You know, like, like Microsoft with Clippy. We were all feedback. Just feedback at daily tech news show.com. How come everybody talks about Clippy and no one talks about Microsoft Bob? Bob was just because Bob was worse. That was worse. Yeah. Thank you. Exactly. Feedback at daily tech news show.com. Special thanks to Jeff Wilkes, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Jeff, we love thanking our long time supporters who support us at a top level. But if you're not supporting us and haven't supported us or haven't supported us in a while, if you go to Patreon and join right now, you get a name in the show tomorrow. Thank you, Patrick Norton, for being with us today. Before we get out of here, what do you got going on to tell folks about? Oh my goodness. Looking at some products for AVXL, Home Theater and Audio, a weekly podcast with Robert Herron. And if you have a question about screens or home theater gear or headphones or speakers or all that good stuff for music streaming, just email ask at AVXL.com. Excellent. We are live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20, 30 UTC. Is that still correct with the daylight saving time stream? Find out more. The other tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.