Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech. And this is the tech
news for Thursday May one, and we're gonna concentrate a
(00:27):
lot on Google for much of this episode. So, last year,
Google canceled its annual io event for developers because of
the pandemic. This year, the company held a virtual event
in which presenters appeared on camera in front of a
small audience of Googlers at the Google Plex in Mountain View, California.
(00:48):
So we're going to go over some of the announcements
from that event. And first up is Android twelve. There
were a lot of updates to Android's operating system that
we're announced and it is now public beta, but it
will launch for real zs this fall. Some of the
changes are to use your interface and they're largely cosmetic.
(01:08):
For example, the color palette of the operating system is
more customizable in Android twelve, and you can set the
OS so that it will choose a color palette sourced
from whatever image you choose as your background wallpaper. So
on my phone. I've got a picture of my doggie
Tibolt as my wallpaper, and presumably if I run Android
(01:30):
twelve on my phone, then my notifications and stuff will
have a color scheme that reflects the colors in that photo,
which is kind of neat. There are tons of other
updates besides the cosmetic, however. One is that there's a
new privacy dashboard and Android twelve, which lets you see
which apps are accessing your phone's various features and how
(01:52):
frequently they do so, so you can check to see
which apps are checking on the your location, you know,
really frequently, or making use of your camera or your
microphone or whatever. And you can also use the dashboard
to revoke access to those features should you wish. So
if you look and say, oh, this app is pinging
(02:14):
my location, you know, twenty times a day, you can
revoke access from that dashboard. It's Google's way to give
users more insight into how their phones are harvesting data
with these various apps. And don't get me wrong, Google
does this as much or more than anyone else, but
I do think this is a really nice feature. Other
(02:35):
updates to the OS include a feature in which the
clock on the screen saver screen will change size depending
upon how many notifications you have, so as you clear
out notifications, the clock gets bigger. That's a pretty handy
way to see if you've got messages waiting on you
on your phone. One of the cool technologies Google showed
off at the event was projects star Line, which is
(02:58):
a sort of three D video conferencing technology. In the
version we saw at the event, there were examples of
two people each sitting down in front of a large screen,
and there wasn't really any indication as to how far
apart these people were in real space. I mean, maybe
they were across the country from each other, or maybe
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they were in different parts of the same building, but
either way, the setup included depth sensing cameras that could
capture light fields and then send that data over to
the other screen while doing the same thing for the
other side. So the effect was that the image you
saw on screen appeared to have real depth to it,
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almost as if the person you're talking to on screen
is actually sitting right in front of you in person.
Which is pretty nifty stuff all by itself. But what
I found particularly fascinating is that Google developed a compression
algorithm that can handle this kind of application in the
first place. High definition camera with depth sensing capabilities is
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going to generate a lot of data and transmitting that
data in real time so that you can have a
video chat with no perceptible lag time. That's a big challenge.
Google says it developed a way to compress the data
stream down to a factor of one hundred, so one
hundred times smaller than the uncompressed size. The demonstration was cool.
(04:23):
It was also prerecorded, I should add, but there's no
word on whether Google is going to roll this out
on any sort of meaningful scale, or if this will
remain more as a demonstration of really neat technologies that
might find their way into other applications in the future.
Something that is rolling out is another collaborative work tool
(04:43):
called smart Canvas. Google's demo showed team members working on
a project together in real time on a Google platform
that incorporates stuff like Google Docs and Google Sheets. Also
allowed users to have a video chat going at the
same time, so that people can talk with one another
while collaborating in real time, and the tool incorporates some
(05:05):
of Google's AI features as well to to help communicate
clearly and avoid pitfalls. So the example they had in
their video was using the word chairman in part of
a presentation and the AI suggest changing it to chair
person to avoid using a gender specific noun. So that
(05:26):
was one example they gave. Google isn't a stranger to
creating collaborative tools. I still remember the old Google Wave product,
which was interesting but somewhat confusing way back in the day,
and that would allow multiple people to work in the
same virtual workspace simultaneously. At the time, it was kind
of hard to imagine use cases for Google Wave beyond
(05:48):
how I was using it, which was to build out
a rundown for live shows. But smart Canvas has a
more straightforward approach to collaboration that I think is pretty
easy to understand. I wasn't super impressed with the interface
when I saw it, but um, it was, you know,
kind of stripped down. It wasn't like flashy or anything,
(06:08):
so maybe simpler is better. I don't know. I'm also
notoriously bad about using collaborative tools, so maybe I'm not
the right one to comment on it. In addition, Google
showed off an AI app called lamb DA that was odd.
So this AI uses things like voice recognition, and natural
(06:29):
language processing to interpret language. Then it generates responses and
makes it very conversational, and moreover, it can generate responses
as if it were something else, as opposed to you know,
the Google Assistant, which is just this kind of ephemeral
AI assistant. In the demos that Google showed off, they
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had Lambda answering questions as if Lambda were a paper
airplane or the dwarf planet Pluto. And this makes me
wonder if you had Lamb a pose as a chicken,
would it finally explain why it crossed the road, Because
a lot of people have been asking about that. It
really was interesting to think of an app that could
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presumably put itself in the role of different things and
then answer questions about it, including bits in which the
AI would make the equivalent of small talk only as
if the AI were you know, the dwarf planet Pluto
or whatever it was neat and it really shows how
far we've come with natural language processing and the ability
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to create AI programs that can seemingly converse fairly well.
Though Google does say that this is far from perfect,
it's still a pretty early build. It feels like another
big step forward from the demo we saw a couple
of years ago in which a Google assistant program made
reservations on the behalf of a user, and it seemed
(07:56):
to be an actual assistant, like it called up a
restaurant to make reservations, and it was impossible to tell
that it was an automated program. It sounded like it
was a person, which is pretty nifty. Google also had
some announcements about where os that's w E A R.
Now it's just known as where, and didn't really talk
(08:17):
about the Pixel Watch. In fact, Google also didn't talk
about pixel phones. Really. There was a distinct lack of
talk about hardware at all. They didn't mention anything about
the rumored Google design chips that are codenamed Whitechapel. You know,
like Apple, Google is apparently moving toward developing its own
processors rather than relying on stuff that's made by other companies.
(08:41):
None of that was brought up in the IO event,
at least not as of the recording of this episode.
Other stuff Google showed off included phone apps that are
better at working with different skin tones for stuff like
white balance that has traditionally been one of the big
problems with Google photo apps. They simply didn't work as
well for people of color, which is one of the
(09:01):
many ways tech can turn out to have a bias
against certain groups. And Google demonstrated a cool technology that
could create an animation from two different photos of the
same scene. So let's say you take a picture of
someone who's standing in a particular pose and they're standing
in front of like a landmark of some sort, and
then they make a different pose and you take a
(09:23):
second photo. With this new feature, Google could create interpretative
frames between those two photos and create a short animation
moving from one pose to the other. It's kind of
creepy in a way because Google is literally creating new
images based off the input of the two reference frames
and then joining them together. So it's creepy and cool
(09:46):
at the same time, kinda like most of my friends.
And Google showed off updates two maps which will now
include more relevant information as you move through areas. For example,
the new maps will show you restaurants that happened to
be open as you pass through town, so you're not
getting a notification about, you know, Billy Bob's Best b
b Q when Billy Bob's happens to be closed. That
(10:09):
wouldn't do you much good, and maps will alert you
when areas are getting busy and help you plan routes better.
Maybe it's best to stay at the office for another
twenty minutes and that will end up saving you forty
five minutes of sitting in traffic, for example. And there
are some cool a R features in Google Maps that
they showed off, like virtual signs that can pop up
in your view that tell you where certain landmarks are
(10:31):
in relation to where you are. Oh and they will
also help drivers pick the most eco friendly routes, routes
that will have fewer stops and starts to them, or
fewer locations where you know you might have to break
suddenly or drive up a steep hill, which is kind
of a neat feature. So it may not be the
fastest route to your destination, but it would be at least,
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in theory, a route that would generate fewer carbon emissions
because of the nature of the drive, which sounds kind
of chill to me. Oh and if you have a
BM double you you might be able to unlock and
start your car using your phone as a digital key.
Android twelve will support digital key operations over u w
B and NFC protocols. But so far, BMW is the
(11:15):
only automaker confirmed to offer compatible car models with this technology.
It is another example of how smart devices are replacing
various other things we typically use, from payments to car keys.
But in non Google news, the cryptocurrency world has seen
a dramatic drop in value over the last two weeks.
(11:35):
Since May twelve, the overall market, which includes cryptocurrencies like
Bitcoin and ethereum, as well as doge coin, the joke
that really got out of hand, and numerous others, the
market has dropped in value to the tune around eight
hundred billion dollars as I record this. Many cryptocurrencies are
experiencing a brief climate value as I record this episode,
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So it could be that we just saw ma of
drop and now the market is recovering. Or it could
be that what I'm seeing is just a blip and
we're going to have a bear market in which valuation
will continue to drop further. No one is really sure,
and the big part of that is that the value
of many of these currencies largely depends on whether people
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are buying into them or selling them off. Buying cryptocurrencies
decreases the supply, at least for most cryptocurrencies, which in turn,
you know, drives up the value of the remaining cryptocurrencies
that are in circulation. Selling off cryptocurrencies to convert them
into cash, that increases the supply and thus the value decreases.
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Now it's a bit more complicated than that, but those
are the basics. So does this mean you should rush
in and buy up cryptocurrencies while they are still relatively
low or at least, you know, lower than they were
two weeks ago. I have no idea. We might see
the market plunge again. Heck, this could be the big
getting of a relatively long bear market where values dropped
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week after week before they recover. Or we might already
be in another upswing. It's really hard to tell, and
chances are anyone who is giving you hard and firm
advice has a vested interest in the outcome. So if
someone you know is stressing that, hey, now is the
time to buy, a good follow up question for that
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person is how much money do you have wrapped up
in cryptocurrency? Because it could be that the person telling
you to buy is desperate to see those values go
up so that they can recapture some of the wealth
they had been accumulating prior to the market downturn. Just
be careful, is all I'm saying. I mentioned in the
(13:45):
Google Stories about how Google's photo app is getting tweaks
to address negative biases and the app has with regard
to people of color. Twitter is doing something similar. Twitter
had been using a tool to auto crop photos, using
I to identify the subject of a photograph and then
to crop the image so that it would better fit
within Twitter feeds, particularly on mobile devices. But in use
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it was shown to work best with pictures of white people,
and it would crop those images fairly effectively, but it
worked much less well for people who weren't white. Not great,
So now Twitter is abandoning the auto crop feature. The
company tested the algorithm for gender and race biases and
concluded that in fact, the algorithm does have problems. Now
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Twitter's mobile app will show full images in the Twitter
feed and will only crop photos if the pictures are
just too tall or too wide to fit on screen,
and then only doing that in a pretty standard way
as opposed to trying to auto identify the subject of
the photo. Once again we see how bias can work
its way into code, even unintentionally, and I think Twitter
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made the right move here. Perhaps in the future the
company will have an improved auto cropping tool that won't
show the same tendencies towards bias, But in the meantime,
it's better to have nothing than to have a tool
that works really well for one demographic and not so
well for all the others. Finally, byte Dance, the parent
company that owns TikTok, has announced a change in leadership
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that I find interesting and fairly refreshing. Co founder jeng
Yi Ming says he will step down as CEO to
take on some other role in the company. So in
a message to employees, he explained that he felt his
strengths were in areas outside of managing people, including ideation
and data analysis and that kind of thing. He also
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said he's not a very social person and that he
felt that byte Dance needed a leader who would be
able to take the company to new places. So, in
other words, he was saying, I might have been the
right person to get things moving to where they are,
but I'm not the right person to evolve the company
from here. Co founder Liang Rubo will take over as
ce oh, and I've seen this sort of thing happen
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with a few companies here in the States. There are
some entrepreneurs who absolutely love the experience of launching a
new company and then having it grow to a certain point,
but beyond that they tend to lose interest. Their strengths
lie in those early phases of getting a company off
the ground and establishing a presence. But once these companies
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reach a certain scale, the entrepreneurs find it less interesting
or outside of their wheelhouse of skills, and so they
look for ways to move into other roles. And I
think that's a healthy thing. Not everyone is made to
grow into these leadership positions while the company itself is
also scaling up, and a transparent transition of leadership tends
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to be a sign of a healthy company as opposed
to some of the revolving door situations we've seen with
companies in the past. Analysts don't expect this change in
leadership to have massive consequences for daily operations of either
Byte Dance or TikTok. And that's it. That's the tech
news for Thursday, May one. I hope all of you
(17:08):
are well. If you have any suggestions for topics I
should cover in tech stuff, reach out to me on Twitter.
The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
(17:30):
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