This story is part of Father’s Day Gift Guide, featuring our top picks for dads who love tech. If your dad is hard to buy for, then it’s hard to go wrong with the gift of audio. From Bluetooth speakers to turntables to AV receivers, there’s bound to be something he’ll like. These are the …
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Voice-activated digital assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa make trivial tasks like playing your favorite song as simple as saying a few words. But for people like Giovanni Caggioni, who has Down syndrome and congenital cataracts, which makes him blind and unable to speak, these tools are inaccessible without some of sort of augmented hack. Caggioni, 21, loves music …
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Google’s security key has a bug. On Wednesday, Google issued a warning about its Titan Security Key, specifically the Bluetooth edition of the device. The key has a security bug in how it pairs with a device over Bluetooth, and how that pairing is authenticated. A nearby attacker could rename any Bluetooth device with the Titan Security Key’s name and …
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Google Assistant will finally come to the Sonos One smart speaker and Sonos Beam sound bar, which already support Amazon Alexa, making the company the first to support multiple assistants on one device. Sonos demonstrated the voice assistant on its One speaker at CES 2019 , and is in the process of rolling out firmware enabling Google’s voice system on its smart speakers in the United States …
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The Samsung Galaxy Fold isn’t the only flexible screen in town. Briefly demoed by computer giant Lenovo, the ThinkPad X1 folding prototype shows what happens when you apply those same design ideas to a bigger screen and more powerful hardware. In this case, it’s a 13-inch 4:3 OLED 2K display. When fully open, it looks like a large Windows slate …
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Dolby’s Atmos home theater audio standard debuted back in 2014, and brought with the biggest change since the creation of surround sound itself: height. Dedicated drivers fire toward the ceiling, creating an even more immersive feel for TV shows and movies. You can find Atmos soundtracks on Blu-ray discs and streaming services like Netflix and iTunes via more devices than ever, including …
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Your next pair of earbuds may be a lot smarter — and cheaper — thanks to efforts by Qualcomm and Google. Qualcomm on Thursday said it has created a smart headset platform that works with the Google Assistant and Google Fast Pair. The company’s reference design, which uses Qualcomm’s low-power Bluetooth audio chips, is meant to make it fast and …
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Two years in to the life cycle of the latest version of the Intuos Pro, a mainstay professional graphics tablet, Wacom has decided to bring out a small size. That means the entry price for the 8,192-levels-of-pressure Intuos Pro drops to $250 — and going small isn’t as much of a sacrifice as you might think. As a tablet, it seems …
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While the Sonos One is great for people who want a kitchen speaker, there are plenty of higher-end options for people looking to replace a stereo or AV system. Naim’s Mu-so was a beautifully designed and loud(!) all-in-one speaker, and it’s been completely redesigned to be even better. Though it may look like the old model, Naim says 95 per …
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Google is using advances in AI and voice recognition to design new products and apps intended to make life easier for people with disabilities. It highlighted some of that work Tuesday at its annual I/O developer conference. During his keynote address, Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the new Live Caption feature, enabled by Android Q, which transcribes in real time …
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