Google wants to trick you into thinking machines are human. That’s a theme the tech titan pushed as it rolled out new features for its Google Assistant voice software at Google I/O, Google’s annual conference for developers. Google Assistant is in nearly every Android phone, the Google Home smart speaker and drives future smart displays, …

When Google revealed Gmail’s new look in April, it unveiled some new features too. There’s a new offline mode, a new tool for sending self-destructing messages, and Smart Replies. Going one step further than basic replies, Google announced a new Smart Compose feature at Google I/O last week. The feature was promised to launch in the coming days and weeks, but …

Facebook has suspended around 200 apps as part of its investigation into whether companies misused personal user data gathered from the social network. The company has evaluated thousands of apps to see if they had access to large amounts of data, and will now thoroughly investigate those it has identified as potentially misusing that data, it said in a blog …

President Donald Trump is doubling down on his defense of Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE.  Trump said on Twitter on Monday that ZTE, the fourth-largest smartphone maker in the US by market share, “buys a big percentage of individual parts from U.S. companies.” HE also said ZTE was “reflective of the larger trade deal we are negotiating with China and my …

It’s not easy finding a jury in Silicon Valley for a patent trial pitting Apple against Samsung. More than a half dozen times, US District Judge Lucy Koh excused potential jurors in the case because they owned Apple stock. As she tried to find eight jurors from among 74 candidates on Monday, three were excused because their spouses worked at …

Those smartphones we’re always carrying with us? The police have a simple way to turn them into a tracking device without our knowledge. On Thursday, The New York Times revealed that Securus Technologies, a service that monitors calls to prison inmates, has been used by a former Missouri sheriff to monitor people’s phones and track their location. The sheriff, who was …

Apple promised a revolution with the iPhone X when it was first announced on September 12, 2017. At the time, I was skeptical. What I mainly wanted was a perfect size, nothing too big. I wanted less bezel. I was also excited by the possibilities of not having a home button. And I wanted it to advance AR in some way. …

DVR manufacturer TiVo appears to have set up a placeholder app for Alexa last weekend, Dave Zatz reports.  TiVo announced at CES in January that it would be bringing Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to its boxes, old and new. Last March Amazon announced the skill programming interface (Google translation from Spanish) that would make it possible. The creation of the placeholder …

Like Facebook and Apple before it, Google has introduced a new user privacy policy to comply with a new European data privacy law  — General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — that goes into effect on May 25. Google’s updated privacy policy makes it easier to understand what information it collects about you. More importantly, Google has improved its privacy controls …

In case you don’t have your calendar circled already, I’m here to inform you that next Sunday, May 20, is indeed National Streaming Day.  I had no idea until I read Roku’s blog post, which announced a few noteworthy deals for the big day: Roku Streaming Stick for $40 ($10 off) Roku Streaming Stick Plus for $55 ($15 off) Roku …