Google has added sound events to its Live Transcribe app, which it said will help the hearing impaired become more immersed in the audio world. Live Transcribe will now transcribe not only speech, but also sounds like dogs barking, door-knocks, applause, laughter, music, whistling and passing cars, thanks to an update of Google’s machine learning …

Facebook has added data from surveys to better predict what pages users want at the top of their News Feed. Posts from family and friends, and news articles or videos from pages followed, will now be ranked at the very top of the page, Facebook said Thursday. The changes focus on quality of user experience over quantity of time spent …

Instagram is bringing three new updates to its Explore feature, including a new navigation bar for shopping and IGTV. The changes will make it easier to find the people, creators, communities and brands that users most want to see, the social network said. The first change is a fresh design of the navigation bar, including shortcuts to IGTV, shopping, food, …

An executive order from President Donald Trump that effectively bans Huawei will leave the US “lagging behind in 5G deployment,” the Chinese networking giant reportedly said. The response, reported by Reuters, came after Trump signed an executive order that declares foreign adversary threats to communications networks, technology and services a national emergency. Trump’s order, called Securing the Information and Communications …

Amazon is reportedly considering investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Deliveroo, a global food delivery service based in the UK. Deliveroo would be better able to compete with rivals such as Uber Eats and DoorDash thanks to the funding injection, a Thursday report from Sky News pointed out. The deal will help make up the $575 million in funding …

Apple is working on designing its own 5G iPhone chips — but those efforts may take awhile. According to a report by The Information, Apple may not have a homegrown 5G modem ready for its iPhones for about six years. The company, which is expected to lag Android device makers when it comes to integrating superfast 5G connectivity into phones, has …

Google has announced Translatotron, an “experimental new system” that it says will translate speech directly into speech, removing the need for any text. “Translatotron is the first end-to-end model that can directly translate speech from one language into speech in another language,” a Google AI blog post on Wednesday said. Google said there are three stages of today’s translation systems: …

One of a fleet of helicopters being used as part of Blade’s ride-sharing service was been forced to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York on Wednesday Blade called the landing “safe,” with the helicopter coming down on floats near the heliport.  “There were no passengers on board. The pilot was not injured and immediately exited …

Google has agreed to a settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by owners of its original Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. “Google’s total financial commitment under this agreement shall be $7,250,000,” the settlement says. The affected phones were manufactured prior to Jan. 4, 2017, with the owners suing Google in February 2018 after alleging they were intentionally sold faulty phones. …