The island’s wireless and broadband communications networks were devastated after Hurricane Maria made landfall last month.

This month, the US Federal Communications Commission approved Alphabet’s application to provide emergency cellular service to Puerto Rico using up to 30 balloons. The company said Friday it does not expect to use that many since each balloon can provide internet service to an area of roughly 5,000 square kilometers, or 1,930 square miles. Puerto Rico’s area is 3,515 square miles.

The company has a handful of balloons in the area and more are on the way, spokeswoman Libby Leahy said.

Since Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico has struggled to regain communications services. As of Friday, 68 per cent of cell sites remained out of service, the FCC said.

Alphabet, which announced its Project Loon in 2013 to use solar-powered, high-altitude balloons to provide internet service in remote regions, said in an FCC filing it was working to support carriers as they restored “limited communications capability” in Puerto Rico.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said this month he was forming a Hurricane Recovery Task Force focused on communications problems in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Alphabet said this was “the first time we have used our new machine learning powered algorithms to keep balloons clustered over Puerto Rico, so we’re still learning how best to do this. As we get more familiar with the constantly shifting winds in this region, we hope to keep the balloons over areas where connectivity is needed for as long as possible.”

Alphabet said it will continue the project as long as it can usefully do so. “Project Loon is still an experimental technology and we’re not quite sure how well it will work.”

In 2016, Project Loon delivered service to tens of thousands of people in flood-damaged parts of Peru in partnership with the Peruvian government and Telefonica.

Alphabet, which launched the balloons in Nevada, said Project Loon is already providing service in Puerto Rico. It is part of an innovation lab within Alphabet that the company calls X, previously known as Google X.

Reuters

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The new search bar in Google Assistant replaces the previous scrolling through (feature) a list in the app to try to find the right integration.

Upon tapping the top right blue icon to bring up that list, the search bar appears and can be used to type in to find several first and third-party integrations that are available.

The same search bar also now appears in the official Google Home app for the smart speaker.

The update to Google standalone assistant is likely to be rolled out to all supported devices soon.

Earlier this year, Google said its voice-powered digital assistant is available on more than 100 million devices.

IANS

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The link opens “Overdrive” or other service that user’s library uses to manage ebooks and an edit location button allows to set preference and show other libraries.

The feature is currently available on both mobile and desktop to users in the US.

Earlier this month, Google Search on iOS rolled out a feature called “What’s New” that shows users searches that are trending and also provide answers to queries.

IANS

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The company will also launch new add-ins for Outlook such as Wrike, JIRA, MeisterTask, Gfycat and MojiLala across web, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android platforms.

“Wrike, JIRA and MeisterTask are software made for teams which make responding to work emails faster and easier on the go,” the report added.

Gfycat and MojiLala will allow users to add reaction GIFs and stickers in their emails.

Users can go to Outlook Settings, then click Add-ins and tap the plus sign next to the apps to enable them.

IANS

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The move is aimed at increasing the security and integrity of Virginia’s voting systems ahead of the November election, the Department of Elections said in a statement.

The Department of Elections had requested a security assessment by the Virginia Information Technology Agency of various paperless voting systems in use in Virginia and determined that decertification was necessary to safeguard against unauthorised access to the machines.

Additionally, the direct-recording electronic voting equipment in use in Virginia does not have a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, which is an important security feature provided by the paper systems, the statement added.

”The security of the election process is always of paramount importance. The Department is continually vigilant on matters related to security of voting equipment used in Virginia,” said Edgardo Cortes, Virginia’s Commissioner of Elections.

In India, allegations by some parties of large-scale tampering of electronic voting machines (EVMs) over the results of assembly elections to five states held in February-March and the Delhi civic polls led the Election Commission of India to host an EVM challenge in June to prove the reliability of the equipment.

No political party, however, took up the challenge.
IANS

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To optimise its learning, the algorithm divided the human face into 68 key points that it monitored throughout each Skype conversation, the research that Facebook would present at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Vancouver, Canada, from September 24-28.

The system learned to do acts like naturally producing nods, blinks and various mouth movements to show they are engaged with the person they are talking to.

The bot later learned speaking like humans and choose in real time what the most appropriate facial response would be.

”The Facebook team then tested the system with panels of people who watched animations that included both the bot reacting to a human, and a human reacting to a human. The volunteers judged the bot and the human to be equally natural and realistic,” the results said.

In July, Facebook shut down one of its AI systems after chatbots started speaking in their own language defying the codes provided. The social media giant had to pull the plug on the AI system that its researchers were working on “because things got out of hand”.

The AI did not start shutting down computers worldwide or something of the sort, but it stopped using English and started using a language that it created.

This came after a news regarding spat between two tech honchos—Founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg—where Musk said the latter’s understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) was “limited”.
IANS

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She said “the incident happened in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers”.

Her claims follow a story regarding Google’s “abuse of power” that was published in the New York Times on Wednesday which explained how Google—unhappy with a scholar’s statement who hailed European antitrust regulators’ decision to fine the company $2.7 billion in late June—fired nearly 10 scholars of the team from the tech giant-funded think tank The New America Foundation.

After this story, Hill wrote that when she was working for Forbes she was pressurised to withdraw a story.

At the time, in addition to writing and reporting, Hill helped Forbes run social media, and therefore, she attended a meeting with Google salespeople about Google Plus.

“The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s ‘+1’ social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook ‘Like’ button and the ‘Reddit’ share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers,” Hill recounted.

“I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes,” she noted.

After the meeting, Hill approached Google’s public relations team and the press office confirmed that the Plus button would influence the ranking, saying: “If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google.”

The reporter later published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers”, that included bits of conversation from the meeting.

“Google promptly flipped out and never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between Google and Forbes,” she said.

Reportedly, Google also pressurised the higher-ups at Forbes by saying the article was problematic and had to come down.

Soon after the report was unpublished, search results stopped showing the original story at all.

“Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet,” she wrote, adding that she does not have any proof supporting her claim.

Meanwhile, Google on Saturday responded to Hill’s claims saying they had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache.

Google’s Vice President of Global Communications Rob Shilkin, said that like Google’s other client meetings that discuss new features, the meeting with Forbes at that time was held under a non-disclosure agreement.

“Our sales team called their fellow attendees of the meeting from Forbes to express surprise that the article was based on a meeting held under NDA. I understand that one of our PR reps raised this concern to you, and then your editor. I understand that our PR rep asked that the piece come down from Forbes’ website, as it was reporting on a confidential business meeting,” Shilkin said.

“As for the Google cache, it’s trivial for a website owner to request its cache to be cleared. I assume this is what happened because we had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache,” he added.

The executive said that Google wouldn’t engage in this type of behaviour—never have, never will.

IANS

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The “Multi-Dot Enclosure”, which is useful for multi-operator deployments, combines multiple ‘Radio Dots’ in a single enclosure providing a cost-saving option in buildings that charge per box deployed.

“With ‘Multi-Operator Dot’ and ‘Multi-Dot Enclosure’, our customers can enhance the in-building user experience with excellent connectivity for both smartphones and IoT (Internet of Things) devices,” Nishant Batra, Head of Product Area Network Infrastructure, Ericsson, said in a statement.

The “Strand-Mount Unit” for outdoor micro radios makes it easier to install the radios on the existing grid, hung on aerial coax, fibre or electricity cables. It can support up to four micro radios, enabling multiple operators to utilise the same mount for cost-efficient deployments.

”The ‘Strand-Mount Unit’ for outdoor micro radios facilitates the dense deployments that will be required for 5G,” Batra added.

The company’s new small cell solutions will be on display at the inaugural “Mobile World Congress Americas” from September 12 to 14 this year and commercially available in 2018.

IANS

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The Knowledge Panel contains information on what depression is, what its symptoms are and the possible treatments.

“The update adds the option to tap on ‘check if you’re clinically depressed’ and take a clinically validated screening questionnaire called PHQ-9. The self-assessment is private and is meant to help steer people who might be depressed toward in-person evaluations,” the report noted.

According to Google spokesperson Susan Cadrecha, the feature is being rolled out on mobile in the US soon and it is not meant to subvert a medical evaluation.

“The results of the PHQ-9 can help you have a more informed conversation with your doctor,” according to National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which partnered with Google on the questionnaire.

According to NAMI, clinical depression is fairly common condition with almost one in five Americans experiencing an episode in their lifetime. But only about 50 per cent of people who have depression get treated for it.

IANS

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In order to perform a voice-based search, users will need to set their language in the “Voice” settings menu in Google app, the company said in a statement.

The new language support will also enhance voice typing on Gboard, helping users to respond to emails on the go and send texts within messaging apps.

To enable “Voice Typing”, users can install Gboard from the Play Store and choose their language from the “Settings”. Then all it takes is tapping the microphone to start speaking.

Voice search in these new languages will be available in Google Search on iOS as well.

These new languages will also be made available in the “Cloud Speech API” and will soon be extended to other Google apps and products, including the “Translate” app.

Earlier this year, Google had launched a set of new products and features to help create more language content and better serve the needs of new users coming online.

Google’s speech recognition now supports 119 languages in Gboard on Android, Voice Search and more.

IANS

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