 Coming up on DTNs, Roomba has a vacuum guaranteed not to pick up Pet Poop. Amazon announces his house brand TVs and Facebook's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. Will they impress a Florida man? DTNs starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 9th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. In town for a high school reunion in Florida is Justin Robert Young, which got us all talking about high school and our memories of who's famous from high school, what our computer labs were like. You can get that wider conversation by getting our expanded show, Good Day Internet, become a member, at patreon.com slash dtns. And it's there you can join our top patrons like Brandon Brooks, Alexander Nasev, and Hector Bones. Sarlane has the day off, but we are going to start with a few tech things you should know. A while ago, we stopped reporting on each new deadline for tech companies sending their employees back into the office, but Microsoft just made an announcement kind of worth noting. Microsoft corporate vice president of modern work, Jared Spattaro, said, quote, given the uncertainty of COVID-19, we've decided against attempting to forecast a new date for a full reopening of our U.S. worksites in favor of opening U.S. worksites as soon as we're able to do so safely based on public health guidance. So in other words, no more dates. They just have to change them later anyway. So Microsoft's going to open when they open. They'll get back to you. Considering at the point of this recording, we are about an hour away from the president of the United States explaining that he has a new plan on COVID. I think that's a safe idea. A couple other Microsoft announcements about actual products. Microsoft Teams is getting support for intelligent cameras that you can do active speaker tracking, multiple video streams from one camera, and people recognition. Microsoft Teams is also coming to CarPlay so you can join audio only while driving using Siri. And Microsoft rolled out a firmware update Xbox controllers to its insider beta testers, adding Bluetooth low energy support for older controllers. This makes it easier to pair and switch a controller between an Xbox console, Windows, iOS, and Android devices. The update also adds dynamic latency input to reduce input latency on older controllers. Programming note. As we're recording this, Sony very inconsiderately, in my opinion, scheduled a big PS5 press conference. We expect it to be mostly games. They just announced a revamped Knights of the Old Republic coming to the PS5. But if there's any hardware news in there, we'll let you know. Chinese regulators have slowed down approvals of new online games. The process of approvals has already been slower than normal for about a month, but now they're on a hard pause. South China Morning Post source said new game approvals would be put on hold for a while because the priority was to cut the number of new games and reduce game addiction in China. China previously froze new game approvals for nine months back in 2018. I'm sure that fixed it. Have you admired that Sony HTA-7000 sound near but wished it was not $1,300? Sony just announced that the HTA-5000 for $900. The cheaper model still supports Dolby Atmos, but it's 5.12 system, not 7.12. You still get built-in support for Chromecast, Airplay 2, Spotify Connect, and Bluetooth audio, and one, not two, HDMI 2.1 password reports. Twitter began testing emoji tweet reactions in Turkey. The test adds four reactions aside from the existing heart. There's a thinking face, clapping hands, crying, laughing, and just regular crying. By the way, these were definitely not Gen Z approved. The test is available on iOS, Android, and the web, with Twitter saying it may add more reactions based on user feedback. Alright, let's talk about the big glasses news. Facebook announced it's smart glasses called Ray-Ban Stories. They come in three typical Ray-Ban styles, and each include two 5 megapixel cameras, one in each corner of the glasses, which if you know Ray-Bans, there's a nice little corner there. You can stick a camera lens in. There's also a built-in mic and in-frame speakers. They can be paired by Bluetooth with an Android or iOS phone, take photos and videos, listen to music, and answer phone calls. An LED light lights up next to the camera when you're taking a photo or video to indicate that it's recording. The glasses have a power button, a capture button for images, and a touchpad on the right arm, which you can swipe to adjust volume or answer a phone call. You can also use voice commands with the incredibly creative wake phrase, Hey Facebook! Without a connection to a phone, the glasses have enough storage on them. If you're not connected to your phone to handle a few hundred photos or a few dozen videos, and then there's an app called View, which requires a Facebook account. So if you don't like Facebook accounts, not going to work for you. But it does let you transfer media from the glasses to the phone over Bluetooth once you're back into connection. Facebook claims all day battery life about six hours under normal use. I don't know if I'd call that all day, but alright. Three hours for audio. Ray-Ban Stories come in a leather hard shell case that also charges the glasses. So kind of like earbuds. They give you, they say, like three days worth of charge in that hard shell case. That's pretty good. Since it's Facebook, you probably have questions about data collection. Nothing you do with Ray-Ban Stories is going to be used for advertising, but you do have to opt out if you don't want Facebook ever to use your data at all, even just to personalize its other Facebook services for you. Right now, Facebook says it's only going to collect minimal information, the stuff you need to function. They need to know the battery level so the app works right. They need to know your Facebook login, obviously, to log into the View app, and they need to know your Wi-Fi details so you can share the Wi-Fi with the glass. But they're saying they're not going to collect anything else besides that. You'll also need to opt out though if you don't want your voice command transcripts stored or used for quality assurance purposes. Glasses come in Ray-Ban's Wayfarer, Round and Meteor styles. They're available in five colors. Price is starting at $299. That'll get you clear lenses. And if you pay more, you can have them be sunglasses. You can put your prescription lenses in there. You can do transitional or polarized lenses. That all costs extra. They're available now in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, the UK and the US. I have decided, Justin, for science, order a pair of these in my prescription and I will not tell anyone. I'll just wear them on the show one day once they arrive and see if anybody notices. I'm excited for you to do that because I'm excited to see what the UI is on this and exactly how easy it was. When I first got Google Glass, which I have been a critic of from the moment that I actually got them on my head, the one thing that I said was ready for prime time was pictures and video. It was really, really cool to be able to at a fairly quick moments notice, record HD video, record very, very quick pictures. They are something that I think still is an untapped way that we can interact with each other. This is a step forward on it, but considering Google Glass was so long ago, I'm surprised that we're still at this evolutionary lily pad on what you would think is a slam dunk, considering that phones and tablets are sold on the idea of taking pictures. The fact that you can take pictures from your glasses would seem to be a thing, but I guess the price point and the technology still remains a tricky subject. Yeah, these are probably not going to be covered by your insurance. They might be up to a deductible, but they're kind of pricey, no matter how you look at it. You are also, well, I'm seeing anyway, we're all seeing reviews of these that say the video is pretty good because there's some artificial intelligence in there that does stabilization, et cetera, and that works really well. So I saw a few reviewers saying, man, you know, pushing my daughter on the swing got great video and didn't have to hold anything in my hands, right? That was awesome. The still photos on the other hand are kind of universally meh. Everybody's like, they're fine if you needed to take a picture with them. Also the audio quality, they're like, it's not as good as you're going to get from your earbuds, but it's okay. If you need to listen to something, you can listen to it. So it does feel like this is a somewhat mediocre entry level. Like here's what it can do and not look goofy like every other smart glass has looked before. Well, iRobot announced it's Roomba J7 robot vacuum that uses a built-in machine vision. The J7 has continuous learning. So if you move furniture around or leave a door open, it can adapt without having to be retold to learn its maps. It also has been trained on thousands of images of things that a vacuum should avoid, specifically cords and pet poop. In fact, iRobot has created the pet owner official promise, aka POOP, that it will replace a J7 within a year from purchase if it runs over any animal excrement. In addition to avoiding it, the Roomba will tell you if it's there, which is helpful. Sadly, this only works for solid waste. At this point, we'll have to wait for the Roomba J7 to indeed be number one. While that feature got the most headline attention, iRobot also updated the control software to include a quiet drive mode that stops the robot making sounds while traveling through a room that it doesn't intend to clean. A quote clean while I'm away function sets the Roomba to only clean when a paired phone is not detected nearby and the vacuum can be set to avoid rooms when it detects that you're in them. Let's say, for example, you're doing a fine internet show like Daily Tech News Show. It can also suggest room names based on detected furniture. The Roomba J7 is available in Canada and the US for $649 or the J7 Plus, which has a more compact base station for $849. They're also available in Europe and coming to more markets next year. Man, every time they announce a new Roomba, I think, didn't they already have that clean while I'm away? Didn't they already have that be quiet when you're not actually vacuuming? But incrementally, they add these features and they get a little better every time. I will say it's too bad Sarah had a conflict today and couldn't be on the show because she has direct experience not only with the Roomba, she did a live with it. You can find that on our Patreon a few months back. But also, unfortunately, direct experience with the problem of pet poop that this Roomba is attempting to solve. And apparently, this is not just a problem of it getting gunked up into your Roomba or maybe even smearing it on your carpet. I got the sense from Sarah explaining this to us that we are in an almost aerosol situation when the very fast poop brushes decided to disturb that particular obstacle. So, good idea. Obviously, look, we can joke around because poop is funny. But this is a real issue that these kind of robot vacuums have to solve. That being said, I'm going to go back to your initial point, Tom. When we talk about evolutionary lily pads, the Roomba has been something that's been a popular commercial product for over 10 years now. Oh, yeah. No, more than 10 years because we got one as a wedding present first gen in 2003. So, talking to like 18 years. We're talking only a few years after I graduated high school and I'm now at my high school 20 year reunion. So, this has been something that's been around for a while and we've had the machine learning experience. I almost would have expected two things are surprising to me. Number one, that iRobot and the Roomba product are still the Cadillac of the genre. It's not like we have seen another gigantic force in this. And two, that we're still kind of hitting the same problems that we hit back in 2003, which is the Roomba hitting things it's not supposed to hit. Yeah. And they must feel very confident about the pet poop thing to not only offer the guarantee, which it's only a year, right? And you have to probably jump through a few hoops to get it. But to be able to say, and they've said this in a couple of interviews, we don't expect to see these viral videos anymore. Of the Roomba smearing your floor with excrement? Yes, with excrement. That will tell the tale. There is public accountability on this point that they will be held to. We will see. BMW showed off two e-bike concepts, the iVision Ambi and the Motor Rad Vision Ambi. Yes, they are concepts, but there's a point to them beyond just marketing. The iVision would be a pedal assisted bike with a 2000 watt hour fast charging battery and a 300 kilometer range. The Motor Rad has a throttle and foot rests, making it more like a motorcycle. And both offer three speeds, 25 kilometers per hour for bike paths, 45 kilometers per hour for city roads, and 60 kilometers per hour on multi-lane roads outside cities. They would also come with proximity radar that issues visual and acoustic warnings if it detects a vehicle approaching you from the rear, something that's important when you're riding a bike. Now, one issue with these kinds of bikes, they're known as speed pedalex or S-pedalex in Europe, class three e-bikes in the U.S., is that many cities and many U.S. states forbid their use on bike paths because of the high speeds they can obtain. They're like, you can't drive a motorcycle on a bike path. You can't take one of these electric bikes on a bike path either because they can get up to 65 kilometers per hour. Cities like Amsterdam require S-pedalex to ride on the road next to cars, no matter how fast you're operating them, which obviously is not as safe as being on a bike path, especially those bike paths that are separated, right? So BMW would like to include geofencing in e-bikes that would restrict the bikes from going faster than is allowed when within a city. It would detect, oh, you're in a city. We're not going to let you go 65 or 60 kilometers per hour because BMW already operates geofencing for its hybrid electric cars to put them in all electric mode in low emission zones across 80 European cities. So they can tell when your car is in a city, they can easily turn on geofencing for the e-bikes. No cities yet have laws that grant exceptions to any e-bike, even if it does have geofencing though, hence BMW putting out these concepts so they can try to get legislation in place before they start making and selling these kinds of bikes. Or they also just want the press. I mean, they also want the press. Let's not deny that. But there is also a practical value of like, hey, we'd like to put this in front of state legislatures, city legislatures, and make it legal, make it make the advantage something worth having. Indeed, they can and should do that. And if I were their lobbyist, I would suggest they do that before they bring it to a public because politicians very much love to be treated like special creatures. That being said, it's so funny that we've had all product conversation on the show today because to me, these are three different fields that I feel are in very different places in terms of their evolution. And if you would have told me back in, you know, when I, let's pin this back to when I graduated high school in 2001, that you have glasses with cameras in it, robot vacuums, and electric bicycles that would assist your pedaling and making go further and faster. I don't know that I would have picked e-bikes as being the furthest along because I think that what we're seeing from BMW, even on a conceptual bike level, is not really all that far from where we would see it in its kind of final form. I think e-bikes have very much a broken. They're really the only thing that's left now is a e-bike that kind of hits the price point that makes it we must have gift for a Christmas or something like that. Yeah. It is an all product day. And that's a really interesting point that we're sort of seeing the evolution of what is new. What is new and worth covering? Not just new laptops, you know, with a fancy hinge or anything. Some of the stuff like the Roomba still feeling new 18 years later. Yeah. Anyway, I'm being told by G.A. Thrawn in our chat room that Multirad is German for motorcycle. I just thought it was more fun to pronounce it motorad, but that's because I speak English. Motorad. That's your price for e-bikes. Hey, folks, you need just the headlines. Check out our related show, Daily Tech Headlines, all the essential tech news and just about five minutes helps you keep up. Go check it out. Daily Tech headlines dot com Amazon did it. It released its own house brand TVs running the Fire OS smart TV system. Here they are. The Fire TV Omni series, including always available voice control through a far field microwave. Even when the TV is off, you can talk to, you know, Al 4K Ultra HD, HDR10, HLG and Dolby Digital Plus in 4350 and 55 inch models that range between $410 and $560. These are not bank busters. You also have 65 and 75 inch models that include all those features plus Dolby Vision. Those run at $830 and $1,100 respectively. All the Omni models include picture and picture for your smart home cameras as well. So you can check in on them while you're watching something. Your Ring doorbell video with your Ring owned by Amazon can automatically show up when someone presses it. A smart home dashboard is promised to come to these TVs later this year and existing Amazon Echo speakers can be linked to the TV to work as additional speakers. Give you a little 5.1 kind of effect. What can't these new Omni TVs do? Well, support HDMI 2.1 or 4K at 120 Hertz, but otherwise they're pretty functional. Now, as the Omnis are still a little too rich for your wallet and you want to save like 40 bucks, you can get the Fire TV 4 series. That's the budget series. The voice control there is in the remote, not in the TV. That's the big difference and they're available in 4350 and 55 inch models ranging from $370 to $520. So just a little cheaper. All these TV models, the Omnis and the 4 series are set to ship in October and available not just at Amazon, but also at Best Buy. In fact, you can order on Amazon, pick it up at Best Buy, but that's not all. Non-Amazon branded Fire TVs are on the way to two new models from Pioneer coming later this month and Toshiba models with Farfield Micro Rays coming next year. So Amazon's not stopping other people from making Fire TVs. And if you're happy with the TV you have, there's the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. The names just keep getting longer. That one has Dolby Atmos, Wi-Fi 6 and Energy Star Certification. Pretty power efficient. Only $55 available for order now shipping October 7th. And if you're like, I just don't want any new hardware. I use Fire TV already. I love it. Fire TV is getting some new features. TikTok is bringing its Fire TV app to Canada in the US. Some European countries had it already. Now it's coming to Canada. And later this year you'll be able to access Netflix's Play Something feature or get movie and TV show recommendations by voice. That's being added to the voice control. But the big story here, Justin, is Amazon's house brand TVs. Amazon's really, really trying to get everybody to say it's making TVs. Our best guess is TCL is making these TVs because they look like TCL TVs when you look at the ports. But Amazon would like you to believe that they're all Amazon top to bottom. Wow. Sure. Right. I mean, look, and they are as much as anybody who's going to put together these kinds of components would be. The fact that Amazon's doing this is not shocking. The fact that they are at that feature level and that price level is not shocking. In fact, one might say it's probably the exact sweet spot that somebody who knew the sale of thousands and thousands of televisions every single day would know. It does feel like a precise average price, doesn't it? Yeah. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Now it is not shockingly less than what other televisions are. I think because Amazon still needs to understand, all right, we can't just blow other televisions out of the water because they have this very tricky balancing act between being the store and being the product line. That being said, I can tell you this for a fact. We now know what the cheapest televisions will be on every Prime Day and likely throughout every Christmas buying season because whether or not it is listed at a super door buster price is listed at a competitive price, but not the cheapest price. Boy, for those flash sales, now that Amazon has the ability to blow them out of the water, I guarantee you they will. Oh, yeah. I'm seeing a $199 Amazon Omni ad in my head right now, as you say that. I'm not sure if it's the 43 of the 55 inch. My crystal ball is not that clear yet, but I can absolutely believe that. It's absolutely going to be one of them. But you know, look, I think they're good TVs. They look decent. They're decent TVs. Like you said, they're like perfectly middle position televisions. It's almost as if they know everything. Exactly where they need to be. All right. Tell us about Amazon's game announcements. Well, Tom, Amazon's game streaming service Luna announced a few things, including availability on Chromebook. There's also Luna couch, which lets you invite friends to play multiplayer titles, even if they don't have a Luna subscription. A new offering called Luna family made up entirely of 35 E for everyone games is now available for $3 a month. And until September 15th, Amazon Prime members can log into Luna and play four games at no additional charge. Resident Evil 7, Metro Exodus, Katamari, Domise, reroll and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom. After September 15th, they'll be part of a $6 a month Luna plus tier and your progress will be saved if you decide to subscribe right now. I almost got really excited about allowing Prime members to play a limited number of games until I saw that September 15th deadline. I thought, Oh, this is perfect. They'll have a rotating series of games. Prime members will always have a game or two they can play for free. But a certain point, it'll be cut off and that'll kind of move people to subscribe because they'll want to keep playing that game, which is kind of what they're doing, but they're not saying it's going to continue. If after September 15th, there's new games, then this is genius because you want to take Prime members and turn them into people who pay a little extra for games. That would be a way to do it. The other way to do it is what they are doing Luna couch. I think that is genius where you say like, I want to play with my friends. My friends don't have Luna. Okay, no problem. Send them the link. They can play with you for the course of that game. You know, maybe they'll get hooked and want to have their own Luna subscription too. That is against the conventional wisdom of if you want to play with your friends, convince them to sign up. This is much more consumer friendly than that. You, as part of your Prime subscription, you are giving the gift of being able to gift your friends a game, right? And that is something that is kind of against the idea of no, a paywall means a paywall. You pay the troll told to get in no matter what. Like if they want to be a part of the cool kids club, they got to pay the fee. This is something that I think is smart. Now that being said, I think the other side of it, like you mentioned before, is a bit of a bummer. And it brings me back to this general idea of I video games are a very demanding audience that is very, very well catered to by the companies that do it best, right? Even the ones that are reviled for how they behave. I don't know how much of a side hustle video games can be. And that's where we're seeing problems with some of the other cloud services who are looking at this as here's a way we can utilize a lot of these servers that we have. All right. Scientists at Stanford University's computational imaging lab have demonstrated a non line of sight imaging technique that uses a single laser through a small opening in a room about keyhole size to track moving objects in the room. A single photon Avalanche photo detector measures the return timing of photons because they go into the room through the keyhole and they bounce around for a while. And some of them come back out through the keyhole. It's able to measure that and have resulting images that aren't great quality. It's not like you can get like TV quality video of what's happening in the room through the keyhole, but paired with a properly trained image recognition algorithm, it could be used to determine if there is somebody in the room moving around. You might be able to tell that much of like, okay, that's vaguely person shaped and they're moving around in there or that's a dog or something like that. And it's obviously a step towards, you know, if as they improve it, you could potentially be able to capture video. I know immediately there's like a good 30% of our audience is like, this is horrible security in violating. It's going to spy on you. But there's some decent uses for this too, which is, you know, monitoring for security of yourself. It's like, there shouldn't be anybody moving around in my room because I'm not home, et cetera, that kind of thing. Is it going to spy on me? Yes. The next thing on the flowchart is what are we also going to do it? Yeah, what else can we, what else can we do with it as some good science coming out of Stanford there today? All right, let's check out the mailbag. Yeah, gosh darn right, Tom. Gerbin writes, hi all. To your question of quote, if you have solved this, we just proposed a solution to have your web browser manage cookie consent requests and responses for you. See dataprotectioncontrol.org. It could work pretty much like Nate described or how websites ask for camera permission. You could just answer quote, reject and never ask again, end quote, and your browser will respond this for you during subsequent visits to the site or to any website, if you like, or something in between. Browsers may offer more options. ADPC currently at a proof of concept status meant to be starting point for a larger debate on browser signals under article 215 of the GDPR. This is great. This is a great start to like, Hey, here would be a way you could codify this and make it work for everybody. So thank you, Gerbin, for sending that along. It's nice to know there's there's at least a proof of concept out there attempting to do that very thing. Keep those emails coming feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And thanks to our brand new boss, Paul Stanwick, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, man. Paul was smart. Paul timed it right. He was like, I'm gonna get all the thanks to myself. I'm gonna be on Thursday show. So I don't know, there might not be anybody on tomorrow's show yet. Could be you, patreon.com. Better get in. Thank you, Justin, Robert Young for being with us today, man. Always a pleasure. Uh, you want to know what it is always a delight to be on the show. And I very much am happy to be here. I want to remind everybody that politics politics politics is available for you. We got a great interview tomorrow with our favorite money man, Dave Levinthal, who is going to tell us all about the Federal Elections Commission, in which I make the argument that while politics and pro wrestling are not always the same, they are exactly alike in that they benefit from having incompetent reps. Oh man. I discovered Dave Levinthal through listening to PX3. Uh, he's one of my favorite Twitter followers or Twitter follows like people that I follow on Twitter and he's great on your show as well. So, uh, folks, definitely. He is he is a capital J journalist, capital J exactly. Just the facts journalist. Hey folks, don't forget we are live Monday through Friday at four 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Shannon Morse joining us from Colorado and Len Peralta illustrating the show. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.