It’s been a couple of years since Amazon first showed off Astro, its Alexa-equipped home robot with an extendable camera. Now the company is announcing Astro for Business which will let small and medium-size businesses use Astro as a security guard. Amazon thinks it’s here they’ll get the most use from the platform, keeping watch over business sites no larger than 5,000 square feet.
It’s $2,350 for a unit, and the buying company will get four months free access to both Ring Protect Pro ($20 a month) and Astro Security ($60 a month). The former lets you hook up to an existing Ring setup, while the latter lets you set up specific patrol routes and alerts. Users that pay for both will also get the chance to upgrade to Virtual Security Guard for $99, which routes the feed to a local monitoring company when it detects something is awry.
Astro has been kinda/sorta available to consumers for a while now, but only part as a limited, invite-only system. Amazon has been testing it in business contexts for the better part of a year and this is likely the first time it’ll be available to buy without any sort of barriers to entry. Although even if you had missed out so far, the prohibitive pricing might dissuade you from taking advantage.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-dinky-astro-robot-is-now-available-as-a-security-guard-143027983.html?src=rss
In the US, Apple’s iMessage is so popular that the fact it shows texts from non-iOS handsets in a different color is a big deal. This status anxiety is so great, the Android world has begged regulators to force Apple to… change the color of a text bubble. Now, Nothing is taking matters into its own hands, partnering with unified messaging platform Sunbird to hide that shame. Sunbird uses your Apple ID to route comms between your Nothing phone and your friends’ iPhones through a server farm of Mac Minis. If it works as well as promised, it means your friends won’t know you own an Android handset… until the next time you see them in person.
Of course, none of this is happening with Apple’s blessing, so it needs a workaround. You need to hand over your credentials to a third party and risk the fallout should Apple decide to intervene. Nothing CEO Carl Pei believes Apple can’t risk the bad PR if it shuts Sunbird down, but that’s not a bet I’d like to take. It’s worth saying this is almost unique to the US — most of the world just uses third-party platforms like WhatsApp. Not to mention if your friends give you grief because of the phone you own, they aren’t your friends.
— Dan Cooper
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Opal makes ultra-premium webcams in surprisingly small bodies. Its latest, the Tadpole, is absolutely for laptop users. James Trew put the dinky device through its paces, and he thinks it might be a winner. Picture quality is pretty good, but the directional audio helps screen out enough unwanted audio that it deserved extra praise.
It’s to prevent drivers being blamed for things out of their control.
Uber says it wants to make the platform better for riders and drivers alike and will now clamp down on users who give bad reviews just to score a refund. The company is targeting those negative nellies and will discard or downrank their complaints to protect the ratings of otherwise good drivers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-imessage-comes-to-nothings-android-phones-for-now-121541024.html?src=rss
In the history of modern gaming handhelds, Sony was there in the fairly early days with the PSP and Vita. Both were well regarded, if flawed, living and dying long before the age of the Switch and the Steam Deck. So it would be reasonable to expect the new PlayStation Portal, which marks Sony’s return to handhelds, would be a triumph. Yeah. About that.
Portal is a $200 handheld that can only stream from your own PlayStation 5, either at home or when you’re on the go. There are no local titles, or any bells and whistles for that matter, it’s just a way to play on your own PS5 when the TV isn’t available. Devindra Hardawar has been testing one for a while and the obvious flaws remain obvious.
If your internet connection isn’t rock-solid, then the Portal isn’t very useful, especially when you can pick up a mobile handheld dock for a lot less cash. It doesn’t help that Sony’s not the best at perfectly integrating its hardware and software, so things you might expect to be seamless are anything but. Click to read Devindra’s full review, but if you’re a Sony diehard, it might be best to hide behind your hands while you do so.
— Dan Cooper
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It’s common knowledge that Google pays Apple a king’s ransom to be the default search engine on Safari. What is less well known is Google also hands over a 36 percent commission on the revenue generated by those searches. The news accidentally let slip during a recent hearing, despite both companies’ insistence the figure remain strictly confidential. Oops.
Volvo’s first fully electric minivan, the EM90, which it describes as a “living room on the move,” has been announced for the Chinese market. Based on the Zeekr 009, it includes plush reclining chairs, air suspension and external noise cancellation. The range is no slouch, either, with a promised 450 miles on a single charge, if you can believe those sorts of promises.
There are plenty of words a respectable newsletter writer can’t use when describing how people behave online. You’ll just have to imagine how I’d like to describe the operators and members of an AI marketplace encouraging its users to create the most realistic-looking deepfakes of real people. It’s not just creepy requests for celebrities, which would be bad enough, either, since reporters also found requests for fakes of private citizens.
Unlike many of my peers, I prefer desktops to laptops, so I’m always excited when a new iMac rolls off the production line. I’ve had my eye on one for a while, especially now it’s packing an M3 chip with all the power that promises. Sadly for me and other desktop lovers, while Nathan Ingraham’s got plenty of compliments for the new iMac, it’s not all great.
On one hand, he praises the power of the M3, the elegant and clutter-free design and the ease of portability. But that’s paired with the feeling the base model has been hobbled to force users into spending more than they expected. Apple’s always stingy with RAM, but that feeling of being nickel-and-dimed extends to paying more for TouchID, gigabit ethernet and more USB ports.
It’s indicative of the iMac’s price and how it’s positioned that Nathan’s conclusion is to buy a Mac Mini and external display instead. You might lose the clutter-free environment on your desk, but you’ll get significantly more computer for the same amount of cash.
— Dan Cooper
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In 1910, Washington State dammed the Elwha River, stopping 40 miles of river reaching the open ocean. It caused massive disruption to the local ecosystem, blocking native salmon from making their annual spawning trek and causing countless second-order effects. A successful years-long battle to take down the dam offered researchers the chance to see what happens when we leave nature to recover. And, oh boy, did it recover.
If you buy a Cybertruck, you won’t be able to move it on to a third party for a year after your purchase. That’s down to a freshly added clause in the purchase agreement, with Tesla saying you can’t sell the vehicle unless you get the automaker’s prior permission. Failure to do so might see the car company suing you for $50,000 — which might discourage resellers.
The following article contains spoilers for Lower Decks, Season Four, Episode Ten.
Four seasons in, and you more or less know what you’ll get from a Star Trek: Lower Decks season finale. A hefty dose of in-jokes and references that conclude the season arc by pulling the Cerritos crew together. There’s a focus on teamwork over individual valor, and a belief that Starfleet’s mission is the right one. Add in a gag or two about how Star Trek is better when it’s slow and cerebral, add in a cliffhanger that threatens the show’s status quo, and you’re done.
Just because “Old Friends, New Planets” sticks to this formula, it doesn’t mean it isn’t good, and you’ll laugh plenty of times in the half hour. The show’s ability to wheel out a staggeringly left field comic premise like Twaining is one of its biggest strengths. But the episode is full of solid gags that work on a second or third re-watch, including the lampshading about who Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) does or does not look like.
Judged on its merits as an episode of Star Trek, and you’ll find it similarly-winning with great writing and direction. I can’t help but single out Chris Westlake’s score, whose work this season has been just as great as the last. It was wonderful, too, to see Shannon Fill and Wil Wheaton recruited for their cameos in Mariner’s flashback. Who else but a true devotee would make such an effort, and the show’s creative team led by Mike McMahan has an infectious love for Trek’s golden era.
It’s just that there’s also a sense of diminishing returns, or that the show needs to find a higher gear to operate in. The limits of a sitcom’s premise means you can’t do too much to up-end the status quo, but you can feel this desire for evolution. It’s the old trap: You can’t joke that the USS Cerritos isn’t important, and keep putting them in these high-stakes scenarios. Can you go back to fixing a warp manifold if your lead character just toppled a planet-threatening tyrant?
And now, an intervention.
Sadly, one thing bothered me about “Old Friends, New Planets,” which requires me to bring up Star Trek: Picard’s dreadful third season. I’m not relitigating matters here, but I am asking why two Trek series opted to do The Wrath of Khan homages in the same year. Isn’t spotting duplication like this and preventing it at the pre-production stage part of Franchise Overseer Alex Kurtzman’s job? Sure, he can’t be in every meeting, but surely this is why he’s credited as an executive producer on every Trek series currently running, right?
It was nice, however, that both series honored the late CGI artist Fabio Passaro.
It doesn’t help that back-to-back Wrath of Khan homages mere months apart look less like a show of admiration and more like a cry for help. When Star Trek’s creative well runs dry, it’s to Nicholas Meyer’s 1982 classic that they run to for inspiration. As I wrote back in February, the path to Khan is so well-worn I’m not sure there isn’t a single element that hasn’t been strip-mined to oblivion.
And while creatives pillage that film’s iconography, the person behind it has often been persona non grata in Trek circles. Meyer’s still around, and doing good work, but his Trek pitches haven’t had a look-in for a long while. I don’t know if it’s ageism, or if he’s awful in real life, but the fact his work is so popular yet he can’t get a look in feels unjust. And we still haven’t heard anything more about Ceti Alpha V, the Khan midquel podcast that was announced more than a year ago.
I think it’s time that we staged an intervention, and said that Star Trek is no longer allowed, even in jest, to pull anything from The Wrath of Khan. In fact, let’s make that broader, and say that we need to leave those toys in the box for a decade or more. And instead, let’s focus on telling new stories that people will be desperate to honor three or four decades in the future.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/star-trek-lower-decks-season-finale-delivers-exactly-what-it-promises-130051733.html?src=rss
If you ask Psync Labs, it’ll tell you the problem with smart security cameras is that they don’t know what they’re seeing. Those motion pings you get with other products? Defined by how light shifts in front of its sensor, treating an approaching figure or low-flying bird with equal alarm. So, Psync’s focus is to improve machine vision, but to also go one step further and pair this vision with GPT-enabled generative AI to help it, and you, understand what it can see. Its first product, the Genie S, is a security camera that’ll send you a written description of what (it thinks) is going on.
On paper, the Genie S has a similar feature set to plenty of other affordable home security units I could mention. There’s a powered pan-tilt base, five megapixel camera (outputting 2K Video), four LEDs, a microphone and speaker. But there are differences, like the fact it’s in the shape of a cube that, when it’s not activated, points the lens toward the base. Psync says it’s the most compact camera in its class, but probably not by as big a margin as the company hopes. Setup is easy enough — put it on a table, or use the screw mount to place it somewhere more esoteric, plug in the six foot long USB-C cable, and you’re on your way.
Psync says that a smarter camera will be better-equipped to capture what’s going on at home, but that’s not its best use case. VP of marketing Echo Wong says that the hardware is able to record those “memorable moments that fly by quicker than we can pull out our phones.” But I don’t think you would want to buy this on the off-chance it catches junior’s first word or steps. The more prosaic sales line, the one that probably wouldn’t fly as well, is that it’s a security camera with the added promise of not bugging you with needless pings because of the promise of AI smarts.
Buy one of these, and you’ll get the choice of a unit with 32GB built-in storage for $35 or 64GB for $40. I mention this up-front because we’re very much in “you get what you pay for” territory in terms of the picture and sound quality. It shoots vertically-oriented 2K video but the clips are pretty fuzzy, even if you can zoom in to get some halfway useful detail if required. It doesn’t like too much light, so if it’s pointed at a window (and/or anything reflective) then chunks of the image will get blown out. Similarly, the sound quality is something of a throwback to an earlier age of crunchy, over-compressed streams. You’ll get similarly crunchy audio using the talk feature, which has similarly “walkie-talkie” vibes that you won’t find on pricier hardware.
Psync Labs
Of course, that’s not what anyone is here for, but to see what this new company — of which little is known — has cooked up with AI. ViewSay is Psync's transcription tool which uses GPT, a form of generative AI, to essentially let the camera describe in text what it's seeing. ViewSay, which currently costs 99 cents a month, promises to identify objects, sort events that triggered the recording in a visual timeline, let you search through the clips with text and, of course, the aforementioned written pings. Pay, your fee, set this up, and your phone will ping when it spots something interesting, and give you the best description of what is going on that it can manage. Users can also set specific categories, like "Person," "Vehicle," "Pet" and will eventually be able to craft tailored alerts, like "a dog jumps on the couch."
Oh, but there is a catch — because that fairly reasonable 99 cents a month is just a limited-time trial, before leaping up to $7 a month. Which, we can all agree, is more than a little bit too much to spend on a product like this, especially in this economic climate.
ViewSay is currently in beta, and while the app splash to get you to sign up promises plenty, the company is keen to keep expectations low. My impression so far is that while Psync has the bones of a workable idea here in theory, the nitty-gritty of practice isn’t. I pointed the camera at a neutral corner in my office and play-acted in front of it to see what it would do. My fake phone-call, where I learned that my (fictional) wife had discovered the secret to perpetual motion, went unremarked upon and undocumented. Well, kinda – the camera pinged my phone to say that “A man is sitting in a chair in a room, looking at his reflection in a mirror.”
Actually, I’m being unfair – since the system can also make fairly accurate guesses at other times. Like, while I was setting the hardware up late one evening, the app told me “a man is sitting on the floor, holding a cell phone in his hand.” A few days later, I placed the camera facing my TV and Echo Show before turning back to use my laptop, which was only really visible in the reflection on the TV's screen. Not long after, the app pinged to say it could see a “A man is sitting in front of a laptop, looking at the screen, and possibly using it for work or entertainment purposes.” Now, this was either a massively-lucky guess, a false positive or a sign of how accurate this will be in future.
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget.
When it detects something going on in this manner, the system records a 12-second clip to its local storage. These clips are retained for at least 14 days, and when you’ve looked at them in the app, you’re also able to save them to your phone. I understand you’ll also be able to take longer clips when motion is detected but that feature doesn’t yet appear to be available. You’ll also be able to share a live feed of your camera, using WebRTC, to up to four viewers — through a browser — for up to 30 minutes at a time. You might be wondering about how secure all of this is, and what exactly is happening to your data. Psync told me that its AI model is based on an AWS instance, and the footage is protected using 256-bit AES encryption. The footage recorded will be stored on the device locally, but the initial frame of the video is sent to the cloud for further analysis.
As something of an AI skeptic, and someone who isn’t thrilled at wiring up every corner of my home with a camera, I’m by default hostile to Psync’s plan here. But I can at least see where Psync is looking to add value to the standard security camera proposition. If you’re out and about, and you get a ping saying there’s a person in your living room, when there shouldn’t be, then that’s pretty helpful. Especially if you can then just tune into the live feed and see for yourself what’s going on and if you need to do something about it. As much as the macro story is scary, I can understand the logic someone would apply to buy one or two of these.
But it’s worth saying too that what I just described isn’t yet what Psync is selling, only what it is gesturing toward. The system will require more training, and plenty more data from a broader user base, until it can start offering you more concrete descriptions. Now, I’m sure that in a year or two that will be the case, but until then, you’re essentially buying into an ecosystem where you’re paying for the privilege of being a beta tester. And that $7 monthly subscription charge? Ouch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/psyncs-genie-s-security-camera-uses-gpt-to-describe-what-it-sees-130043520.html?src=rss