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Alexa Users Gets Ad-supported Music Streaming for Free

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Though the rumours of Amazon rolling out an ad-supported streaming music service was making rounds till the last week, it was not final that when the company will launch the said service. Amazon, on Thursday, confirmed that all the company’s Echo products will now be streaming the ad-supported music service for free.

amazon music
Image Source: sonos.com

The Echo-devices will now be able to play music from the top playlists of Amazon Music Unlimited, and the user does not have to be an Amazon Prime or Amazon Music Unlimited member. Baing ad-supported, the music streaming service, from Amazon, will play smaller ads in between the songs in random time intervals.

Earlier, the users needed to subscribe for the Prime membership to use the music streaming service bundled to it, or they could buy a separate plan to use Amazon Music Unlimited, by paying a monthly $3.99 fee to use on an Echo device and $9.99 fee to use the service on a non-echo device.

Noticeably, the company has announced the news on the same day Google launched the ad-supported free YouTube Music streaming on Google Home smart devices. Also, Amazon has directly challenged its another rival, Spotify, that was the only music streaming service to provide free as well as paid service to its users.

Amazon, along with its ad-supported music streaming service has introduced referral deals to its subscribers, to get more users to buy its Alexa-powered family of Echo, other smart home devices, and its Prime membership. The music streaming service included in the free membership includes over 2 million songs in different languages, and the paid subscription plan of the same service has a library of over 50 million songs. Noticeably, last year, Amazon’s music streaming service alone had tens of millions of active subscribers, and the company sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices last year.

Having a music streaming service for free from the same company, as the smart speaker belongs to, is a better choice for every Echo speaker owner, as they do not have to pay extra money for a music streaming service from other company to play on those devices. Also, this is quite a move by the company to increase the sales of its smart speakers over smart speakers from its rival companies.

BBM Says Good Bye to its Users, will be Shutting Down on May 31

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blackberry messenger
Image Source: bbm.com

Almost a decade ago, having a BBM number was assumed to be a cool thing. People flaunted having an instant messaging app on their phones, and many would wonder what a BBM exactly was? Blackberry Messenger has been one of the pioneers in encrypted peer-to-peer communication service. But now with the arrival of many other messaging platforms, BBM has finally given up and has decided to shut down the service.

The company said in a blog post, “The technology industry is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms. Though we are sad to say goodbye, the time has come to sunset the BBM consumer service, and for us to move on.”

BBM was first launched in 2005 and became an instant hit. The platform was only available for the Blackberry cellphone users, and in 2013, the company made it available for iOS as well as Android users. By 2015, the company had raised to 190 million worldwide users.

At that time, BBM introduced features like video chat, sending and receiving multimedia and also allowed its users to use a few payment services.

In 2016, Emtek took over the operations for BBM and to bear with the tough competition started to work on new features. But it seems that the messenger is no more able to co-up with the competition since its rivals Whatsapp and WeChat have got their hold over the majority of the users worldwide.

However the enterprise version of the messenger, i.e. BBMe will continue to provide its services to the consumers, and the ones, who still want to use BBM, can go for BBMe paying a half-yearly fee of USD 2.49. BBMe includes features like end-to-end encryption and message editing/un-sending. The BBMe app will be available for free on both Apple Store and PlayStore, starting from Thursday.

For now, the last day for BBM has been decided to be 31st May. And, till then, the users can download the pictures, videos and documents they have shared on the app. As soon the app shut down, the company will delete all user data from its server within seven days but will keep some important data on the server due to the legal reasons.

Facebook to Soon Roll Out a New Voice Assistant for its AR/VR Products Lineup

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First Siri and then Alexa, followed by a few other voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby, have made their own space among people. Now in the same course, Facebook is also about to launch its own AI-based digital voice assistant. The company, too, has confirmed the news that it will be soon introducing a new voice assistant for its AR and VR lineup.

facebook voice assistant
Image Sourec: washingtonpost.com

“We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products.” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

According to a former Facebook employee, the company has been working on the voice assistant for its augmented reality and virtual reality division for a year now. The team of developers, for this new product, is led by Ira Snyder, director of AR/VR and Facebook Assistant, and the team is based out of Redmond, Washington.

It is expected that the voice assistant is especially being built for the AR, VR products including the Oculus headsets as well as the company’s Portal video chat device.

This is not the first time that the company is trying its hands in the field of voice assistant production. But, in 2015, Facebook had launched a voice assistant for its messenger named as ‘M’. The product could not sustain for long as despite offering the users smart suggestions, it required human help to run.

Even though the company has been working on its voice assistant for a year, it is still way behind the digital voice assistants by the other tech giants. But according to the company, its voice assistant will focus more on the products that can handle hands-free interactions. This way the genre of Facebook’s voice assistants may not be similar to Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.

Google Introduces New Signed Exchanges to Show the Original URL for the AMPs

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Google introduced AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in 2015, in order to speed up the load time for the mobile web pages. Since then, these have been used by almost every website. Those web pages are simpler and load super quickly. Google pre-loads the web page and produces its cached copy to provide lesser load time for the user.

But with the good side of the AMPs, there has been a flaw that has been annoying the publishers of the content on those web pages, over the past years. The URL which shows up for the web page is usually in the format “http://www.google.com/abc” instead of the real URL of that particular web page.

google amp
Image Source: edenstudios.com

This way, it has prevented the publishers from displaying their content under their unique URLs. But now, Google has launched a fix for this problem, such that the URL that will display on cached AMP results will be the same as the publisher’s link. This new fix is called the Signed Exchanges.

Google is now using the new Web Packaging standard in order to make the browser trust the document belonging to the original publisher with the help of digital signatures and the signed exchanges.

Originally, the browser is programmed to reject the scripts that do not belong to the original publisher and try to access the data in the web page. But from now, the publishers will have to use the signed exchange in order to make a portable copy of their content and to achieve faster content delivery, easy content sharing between different users and better offline experience. With the signed exchange, the publishers will have to publish two different versions of their content, i.e. signed and unsigned.

AMPs have been great at providing the users with the content instantly, and also, bringing the desired traffic to their eCommerce websites. So it had become essential for Google to provide a better fix for the problem, and for that, the company had been working since the past one year. In fact, Google had announced last January that it is working on fixing the URL of the AMPs such that the real URL of the AMP will be displayed instead of the Google URL. The company had also provided a developers preview for the solution last year in November.

The new fix is expected to be a great move for driving the traffic from the AMP version of the web pages to its original domain as well as reduce the bounce rate for it.

Sony Introduces New Ride-hailing Service in Tokyo, Launches S.Ride App Powered by AI

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The conglomerate company Sony has been a leader in various fields of technological product manufacturing. From video games to smartphones, and from television to home appliances, the company has marked its name in all those fields. But now with its new S.Ride app, the company is stepping into the business of taxi-hailing service.

sony s.ride
Image Source: trendingonlinenow.in

The company has launched a taxi-hailing service in Japan, along with an app, i.e. S.Ride app, through which the users will be able to hire a taxi for them. Though the service is a similar car-rental service to Uber and other car-rental services, the app is the main attraction of this service.

According to the advertisement, the company has produced for the service, the S in the S.Ride does not stand for Sony, but it refers to “simple”, “smart” and “speedy”. The app is based on AI technology, and the UI of the app works on the sliding gesture. According to Sony, the app with the help of artificial intelligence is able to figure out the area with the most demand for the taxis, and this way the driver can be sent to that very location.

Though the ride-sharing service is banned in Japan, and Uber is one of the leading taxi-hailing services of the country, Sony is likely to become popular in the field really soon, as it has partnered with five other leading taxi-hailing services of Japan. The app is officially launched by Minna no Taxi, a joint venture launched by Sony Corporation, Sony Payment Services and several Japanese taxi companies, last year.

Currently, Sony’s taxi-hailing service will be available only in Tokoyo, with over 10,000 taxis available for hire. The company has provided the S.Ride users with various payment option, including through cash, credit/debit card and digital wallets.

Sony had made an announcement about starting the car-hailing service, last year in the month of February. The company has never been in providing services but is a leader in the hardware manufacturing and supply. After Sony’s new CEO, Kenichiro Yoshida, took his position in the company last April, the company has been trying its hands in selling content and the services to its users.

YouTube Working Towards Bringing Transparency to the News Section for its Indian Users

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For the past two years, the internet has become more accessible for the Indians, due to high connectivity and low-cost plans. This has led to increased screen time for Indian smartphone users. According to a report from YouTube, the Indian users have become more active on this video streaming platform, tripling the number of users in the past two years, especially on the news channels.

youtube news
Image Source: business-standard.com

Keeping this in mind, YouTube is now focusing on the news section on the platform and is working towards promoting authoritative news and bringing transparency for the users on YouTube. The company is launching three new features in support for the sources that provide authoritative news and to provide transparency to its viewers, i.e. Top News, Breaking News, and Fact-Checker labels.

As the name suggests, Top News feature will display a shelf of news on the platform, where the latest and important news from the trustworthy news sources will flash frequently. The Breaking News again will show the breaking news from reliable sources, and the news will reflect directly on the homepage of YouTube. And, the Fact-Checker Labels, will help the users with the context and sources from where the news has been produced.

The company has also introduced the information panel for its users, such that the users can easily look for the context fo a specific content, event or even a publisher and make their own decision, i.e. to believe or not to believe on that very content.

The information panel, as well as the fact checker, will include the information both in Hindi and English languages, and along with India, those features have been launched in thirty other countries too. The fact-checker works on the open source Schema.org ClaimReview markup process.

The information panel will also label the government-funded news channels on the platform with “funded in whole or in part” as well as “public broadcast service”, such that the users will be able to judge the authenticity of the news sources. The information panel will also include a link to Wikipedia or other authorised informational sources of the news channel.

YouTube has mentioned making an investment worth $25 million for the news section on its platform and will work towards building a better online presence for the news channels.