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February 24, 2020

The Tech Landscape #141 🌋

This is issue 141 of The Tech Landscape, a weekly collection of news about consumer digital technology. Stories are selected by me, Peter Gasston, with a little insight and opinion where appropriate.

The publication Ethnologue says the world’s 7,111 living languages can be grouped into 141 language families (groups which share common linguistic ancestors). The Niger-Congo family contains over a fifth of the global total.

Top Story

Google revealed the first Developer Preview of Android 11. Key features include 5G tools, support for more screen types, new conversational features such as ‘chat bubbles’, and improved privacy with one-time app permissions for location, camera, and mic. As the release name suggests, this is aimed at developers and so lacks a lot of the user-facing features that we can expect to see fully announced at I/O in a few months.
android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/02/Android-11-developer-preview.html

XR

HTC announced some new products in its Vive VR range: the entry-level Cosmos Play, the high-end Cosmos Elite, and the Cosmos XR with pass-through cameras for augmented reality. Interestingly, the headsets are modular so you can add or swap functionality between them. Seems that HTC at least still sees a future for consumer VR.
inputmag.com/tech/htcs-launching-two-new-vive-cosmos-headsets-teases-lightweight-proton-vr-goggles

Snapchat released a couple of new Lenses to show off a new AR feature, Ground Segmentation, which enables a new category of effect such as appearing as if the floor has flooded. It’s not generally available to developers yet.
digitaltrends.com/news/snapchat-ground-segmentation-ar-lenses/

Assistants & Voice

146.9 million smart speakers were shipped globally last year, 70% more than in 2018. The last financial quarter of 2019 saw a record 55.7 million units shipped. Amazon and Google’s devices are still selling well, but lost market share to Chinese manufacturers.
news.strategyanalytics.com/press-release/intelligent-home/strategy-analytics-new-record-smart-speakers-global-sales-reached-146

130 million people in the US use voice assistants in their cars, with 84 million active monthly. This is 45% higher than the number of smart speaker owners.
voicebot.ai/2020/02/20/u-s-in-car-voice-assistant-users-rise-13-7-to-nearly-130-million-have-significantly-higher-consumer-reach-than-smart-speakers/

Cerence, the voice-in-auto company set up last year, has announced its first product, Cognitive Arbitrator. It works by understanding user commands and routing them to the most relevant voice assistant; for example, a user might say “open the garage door” and Cognitive Arbitrator would decide that Alexa was the best assistant to handle the command.
cerence.com/news/posts/cerence-cognitive-arbitrator

Facebook will offer rewards in its Viewpoints app to people who record their voice to help train the Portal voice assistant. This is likely in response to the recent negative media reports on the use of voice training data for other digital assistants.
theverge.com/2020/2/20/21145584/facebook-pay-record-voice-speech-recognition-viewpoints-proununciations-app

Everything Else

TikTok launched Family Safety Mode, giving parents control over the content and duration of their child’s app usage. The feature will also launch with Screen Time Management in Feed, a way for top creators to provide in-feed prompts for encouraging healthy use.
newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/family-safety-mode-and-screentime-management-in-feed

Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service is coming to more phones, notably Samsung’s S8, S9, S10, and S20 devices. Stadia was previously exclusive to Pixels, so this increases the market by quite a lot.
community.stadia.com/t5/Stadia-Community-Blog/This-Week-on-Stadia-Play-games-on-tens-of-millions-of-new-phones/ba-p/15326

Google is changing the jurisdiction for handling data of UK users out of Ireland—and thus under EU law—and into the US. It’s prompted by Brexit (of course) and the possibility (or likelihood) that the UK will not remain fully compliant with GDPR. It means people in the UK will have less stringent privacy regulation protecting their data.
reuters.com/article/us-google-privacy-eu-exclusive/exclusive-google-users-in-uk-to-lose-eu-data-protection-sources-idUSKBN20D2M3

Google is winding down its participation in Station, the service that provided free WiFi in 400 train stations across India, as mobile data has become cheaper and more accessible. Train operator RailTel will keep the service running.
techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/google-ends-its-free-wi-fi-program-station/

The Hangzhou province of China is experimenting with a QR-code based health system to combat the spread of Covid-19. The system runs through a mini-program in the Alipay app, and is set to launch nationwide shortly.
abacusnews.com/tech/chinas-qr-health-code-system-brings-relief-some-and-new-problems/article/3051020

A candidate in an Indian election campaign used synthetic media technology to reach 15m voters on WhatsApp. Manoj Tiwari used lip-sync ‘deepfaking’ to send a video in English and the Haryanvi dialect, as well as an original in Hindi.
vice.com/en_in/article/jgedjb/the-first-use-of-deepfakes-in-indian-election-by-bjp

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