Technical Doctorz

During an oversight hearing of the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday afternoon, FCC chairman Ajit Pai responded to a tweet from the president saying the commission’s call for a hearing over Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media was “disgraceful.” Pai said he “stands by” his decision but did not address the president’s tweet directly. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) was the first member to interrogate the commissioners on whether they agreed with the president’s tweet. Pallone claimed that the merger would pose serious anti-competitive concerns and hurt consumers in tweets responding to the president this afternoon. On Tuesday evening, President Trump tweeted out his disappointment in the FCC disapproving of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media, calling it “so sad and unfair.” In it, the president points out the deal between Comcast and NBCUniversal that the commission, which was Democrat-led at the time, app

Amazon first introduced Echo Spatial Perception (ESP) to its first-party Echo devices nearly two years ago . ESP makes sure that only the Echo device closest to you in your home will respond, and it’s ideal if you have multiple Echo devices. While Amazon has been trying to expand this feature to third-party devices, most Alexa-enabled devices don’t support ESP. Amazon is changing that today, and moving ESP to the cloud . The change means that every Alexa-enabled device can now support ESP without any software changes. Cloud-based ESP will also include improved accuracy for noisy environments, making Alexa more accurate at understanding commands and questions. The biggest benefit is that all Alexa-enabled devices will now work together more intelligently in a multi-device environment. While Amazon has solved this particular limitation for third-party Alexa devices, the company still has limits on how multiple devices work together. Alarms, timers, and reminders are still limited to e

Google Drive, the company’s flagship file storage service, is in its sixth year running, and now, according to the company, Drive is about to be used by 1 billion people worldwide. The announcement came from the Google Cloud Next conference in San Fransisco, according to TechCrunch , though Google wouldn’t get into the details about exactly when its billionth user will officially log on, only saying that it’ll happen “later this week.” This will officially be Google’s eighth product to reach more than a billion users; the other services include Gmail, Chrome, and Google Maps. Last year, Android reached 2 billion active users, making it the biggest mobile operating system in the world . Since Drive launched back in 2012 , it’s stored trillions of files and has more than 800 million daily users , according to stats given at last year’s Google I/O Conference. Recently, Google launched some new features with a focus toward its business-minded customers, including Team Drives and a File

Google is rolling out the final preview version of Android P today ahead of its public release sometime next month. Android VP Dave Burke notes that this beta 4 (developer preview 5) build includes “final system behaviors.” So Google’s new gesture-based navigation for Android P should be locked in and finalized as of this release. There’s always the potential for more improvements and changes in future updates, of course, but whatever’s here is what will ship in Android 9.0. Like the previous beta, this one should, theoretically, be stable enough to install and test out on your main phone; Google doesn’t mention any major known issues or bugs in beta 4. If there are any significant changes, I’ll update this post to include them. As just one, Google has removed the microphone icon from the search bar at the bottom of the Android P home screen. Android P contains a number of visual and functional changes across the operating system. Multitasking now shows a preview of each app’s en

It’s time to say goodbye to Kuri — a home robot that was essentially an Echo on wheels. Mayfield Robotics, which designed the bot, announced today that it’s pausing production and will refund customers who placed preorders. The company seems to be putting most of the blame on Bosch, which supported the company through its Startup Platform program. Mayfield says the company couldn’t find a “business fit” within Bosch to “support and scale” the business. It goes on to say that it doesn’t know what “the coming months will bring.” It sounds like Kuri itself might not be happening, but Mayfield as a whole still exists. When I first tested Kuri at CES in 2017, the robot didn’t have much functionality. It could drive around and be controlled like a remote control car, but at the time, it wasn’t able to respond to voice commands or react. It acted more or less like a moving Bluetooth speaker. Still, it’s always a bummer to see a product fail. It was obvious that a lot of work went into Kur