Shelved Robots

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Shelved Robots
Number 3900
Broadcast Date NOVEMBER 3, 2020
Episode Length 29:38
Hosts Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Amos
Guests Nicole Lee

Voice assistants may learn when you are talking to them, Walmart foregoes robots…for now, and where are visual effects artists getting paid?

Guest

Quick Hits

Gboard users on Google's Pixel phones are starting to see an "enhanced voice typing" experience. It uses Google Assistant for better recognition and prediction including some efficient features like saying "clear" to delete whatever you just voice typed. You can also use auto punctuation and "faster voice typing" which doesn't use the cloud to process your voice.
Google Project Zero discovered a high-severity flaw in GitHub's Actions workflow commands and reported it to GitHub on July 21. GitHub issued an advisory October 1 and deprecated the vulnerable commands but argued the vulnerability should be classed as moderate. Project Zero proactively offered GitHub a 14-day grace period on the 90-day disclosure extending it to November 2. The day before the deadline GitHub asked for a 48-hour extension to notify customers and fix a hard date in the future. Project Zero declined and disclosed the bug Monday.
Some people who have ordered the Oculus Quest 2 Elite Strap with Battery and Carrying Case say they have received emails saying their orders have been delayed. The email says Oculus is "investigating some customer quality reports" and has paused shipping while it looks into the problem. Some people on Reddit have reported the strap breaking.
Bloomberg's sources said Apple and its overseas suppliers are producing three Macs with Apple processors: new 13-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and a new 13-inch MacBook Air. Foxconn is reportedly assembling the two smaller laptops, and Quanta Computer is building the larger MacBook Pro.
Twitch calls its logo Glitch. Which is important to know because Twitch just announced that TwitchCon which had been canceled is being replaced by an online event called GlitchCon, happening November 14. No other details were announced.

Top Stories

The Wall Street Journal reports Walmart is ending its contract to use Bossa Nova robotics robots to keep track of its inventory in 500 store locations. Five years ago, Walmart began using the six-foot-tall inventory-scanning machines. The Wall Street Journal says Walmart may have ended the partnership because increased online ordering meant more humans were going to the shelves to fulfill online orders and could be used to do inventory. Some in-store shoppers apparently weren't crazy about the robots either. Walmart said it "will continue testing new technologies." While Bossa Nova robotics has laid off 50 percent of its staff.
Scientists at Carnegie-Mellon university have trained a machine learning model to tell when you're talking to it just by the sound of your voice. It estimates the direction from which a voice was projected, not just the direction it arrives. Your voice may arrive from multiple directions after bouncing off walls and such. The system recognizes the sound directed straight at it is first and clearest, while other sounds that bounce around tend to be muffled and delayed. It also takes into account that human speech frequencies vary based on direction, with higher frequencies being more directional and more likely to be absorbed rather than reflected. The model can work on device without needing cloud processing. One use could be to let a smart speaker know when you're talking directly to it, eliminating the need to use a wake word. It also might be able to tell when a person is actually in the room with it. The code has been released publicly.
A couple of interesting news notes about messaging apps here. WhatsApp has updated its "Storage Usage" tool to add thumbnails of content to be deleted and adding the ability to group data by "forwarded many times" and "larger than 5 megabytes" along with previous ways of categorizing it. Meanwhile, peer-to-peer offline messaging app Bridgefy which uses Bluetooth and WiFi to directly route messages even when there is no internet service, has added end-to-end encryption using the Signal protocol. The app has been used to avoid censorship and outages in Hong Kong, the US, Thailand and Nigeria and most recently for communication in earthquake-hit areas of Turkey and Greece.

Discussion

Ant Group has pulled its stock listing from STAR market in Shanghai and the Hong Kong Stock exchange. Ant's stock was set to debut Thursday and raise $34 billion. It would have been the biggest stock debut in history beating last December's Saudi Aramco IPO. Reuters reports Ant's controlling shareholder, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and two other Ant executives met with four financial regulators Monday and were told Ant's online lending business faces government scrutiny. China's banking regulator released new rules on micro lending that same day which would impact Ant's consumer and business lending unit. Ant operates Alipay, the main payment system in China and sells insurance and mutual funds, managing China's largest money-market fund. But Ant Group bills itself as a technology firm and therefore avoids some of the capital requirements and other regulations that banks are subject to in China. And Ma may have irritated the Chinese government. At a fintech conference last month Ma compared traditional banks to pawn shops and appeared to flatly contradict China’s Vice President Wang Qishan. At the conference, the Vice President said China needed to safeguard its financial system from systemic risks. Ma, speaking later, said “There’s no systemic financial risks in China because there’s no financial system in China." After the meeting Monday, Ant Group said it "is committed to implementing the meeting opinions in depth and continuing our course based on the principles of: stable innovation; embrace of regulation; service to the real economy; and win-win cooperation.” Everyone from China's National Pension to Blackrock were buying in but early subscribers to the IPO will have their money returned.
The Wall Street Journal notes the trend of Hollywood visual effects artists going to work for Google, Facebook and Apple. Artists from ILM, Digital Domain, Weta and more have moved to tech companies for higher salaries, job security, hours and better benefits. Movie effects have seen falling prices and falling compensation as a result. Whereas tech companies are increasing spending on AR from $21 billion this year to an expected $121 billion by 2023 according to Accenture. Award-winning visual effects artist and head of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Paul Debevec, has been working for Google for 4 and a half years and has brought three colleagues over with him. Debevec helped design the Light Stage, a nine-foot diameter spherical device with 14,000 lights and more than 40 cameras that captures and recreates actors heads, like Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button. Debevec helped Google build its own version that can capture the entire body, not just the head, to help create convincing digital people for AR. Apple bought facial-tracking technology developed by Debevec's predecessor at USC, Hao Li, and used it in its Animoji. Some of Li's colleagues went to work for Apple shortly after the sale.

Kicker

Nintendo and Amazon are celebrating Mario's 35th anniversary by sending out some Amazon orders in Mario-themed boxes. Getting a box is random so you aren't guaranteed to get one but you might. Amazon has also launched a new Super Mario splash page featuring a timeline of the franchise.

Mailbag

I would very much like to thank you for not inserting your or anyone else's political opinions into the show. I personally tune in to hear about tech news not the show's guests' individual opinions and am extraordinarily grateful for their absence. Again thank you very much and please keep up the good work. :)
Sent by Gregory

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Links



Preceded by:
"Computer Catches COVID Cough" 		Shelved Robots
 Followed by:
"Baby, I Can Hack My Car"
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