At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come -- that's what This Week in Tech History will do. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, a...
I’ve always been a proponent of new technology, but if you’ve read my previous pieces on bone-conduction headphones, you’ll know that I’m a skeptic. The technology has a long way to go before it can replace the airpods in your ear. The earphones I’ve tried before made great promises, but failed to deliver, with expensive price tags and an audio that clearly didn’t match up to the hype. Bone conduction earphones are messy, tinny (with a very higher-frequency-focused sound), and often don’t even align with the bones in front of our ears because they’re designed as regular headphones, when they should be designed completely differently from the bottom up.
That’s where Zungle sparked my interest. Adding bone-conducting headphones to eyewear seemed like an innovative strategy, because on paper, it made sense. Headphones come undone and slip out of place, but spectacles barely budge from their position. Spectacles are also a much more covert way to listen to your music without having everyone know, and besides, the wayfarer styling looks rather cool. People with prescription glasses can easily get their powered lenses fitted into Zungle’s bone-conducting musical spectacles.
With its cool-boy wayfarer styling, the Viper 2.0 from Zungle is a complete looker. As far as the aesthetics go, there’s little to complain about, with its reliable build quality, mercury-mirror lens coating, and impressively lightweight design. The sunglasses come with the bone-conducting earpieces that rest rather reliably against your sideburns, delivering audio to you through your temple-bones, allowing you to hear music as well as ambient sounds around you. Given the way the earpieces are integrated into spectacles, they A. seldom slip out of place, and B. don’t need a manual to teach you how to wear them (a problem most newbies face with bone-conducting earphones, oftentimes placing the earpieces INSIDE their ears instead of in front of them). The audio quality seems to be remarkably better than other earphones I’ve tried out, which can only be a good thing, although the low-end frequencies are still weak because of the technology’s constraints as well as the fact that you’re also listening to a lot of ambient noise around you.
While, like I said earlier, bone-conduction has a long way to go before it replaces those airpods people wear, Zungle’s Viper 2.0 is capable of functionally matching up to them. Right near the hinge you’ve got controls that let you toggle playback as well as volume, but Viper 2.0’s pièce de résistance is its Voice A.I. button that lets it trigger Siri or Google Now right in your spectacles, allowing you to use voice search from your sunglasses (#SiriInYourSunglasses), while an in-built microphone picks up your voice commands, seamlessly letting you talk to your phone’s native AI the way you would with your smart wireless earbuds. In-built Bluetooth 5.0 helps the sunglasses connect and communicate rather swiftly with your phone, so there’s absolutely no lag or any chance of your device getting disconnected.
The Viper 2.0 comes with proprietary chargers that fit on the ends of the sunglasses (they use rather classy contact-points rather than the plebeian MicroUSB solution) and boast of a battery life of 4 hours. A probably under-appreciated detail is the charging accessory that can attach to your spectacles rather comfortably even while you’re wearing them, sitting around the back of your head, obscured from view.
Aside from surreptitiously listening to music while traveling, or at the beach (the Viper 2.0 is sweat-resistant), the Viper with its Voice AI triggering switch quite easily replaces the need to wear your airpods (or android earbuds) and your sunglasses separately. The audio quality is well suited for mid and high-frequency audio, working rather well with human voices (simply perfect for podcasts and audiobooks), although one must solemnly swear to never walk into an exam wearing these! The Viper 2.0 also makes a great case for navigation, making it perfect for wearing while riding a two-wheeler and having audio navigation from your maps app narrated to you. The obvious pro there is that not only can you hear cars and other vehicles around you, but you also don’t have to look away from the road and down at a mobile display for guidance… and you can turn the Zungle Viper 2.0 into a makeshift boombox too, by simply placing its bone-conducting modules against materials like boxes or containers, allowing it to work like a rudimentary echo chamber. Let me know when your truly wireless earbuds (or your sunglasses) are capable of being this fashionable, functional, or multi-purpose!
The days of us communicating with our computers by using our fingers are nearing an end. Google announced on Thursday that it is releasing its language parsing neural network framework, SyntaxNet, as an open source system. The released code includes...
Last March, Google began allowing its users to link their Gmail account with their Yahoo! and Outlook accounts so that all of their emails could be accessed from a single screen. The company announced today that it is expanding the feature, called Gm...
Google Now, Android’s personal assistant app, has added 9 new voice commands to make is easier for all users to do everyday tasks. Read all about them in this new feature.
Google Now, Android’s answer to iOS’ Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, keeps growing and getting better with the addition of a few new voice commands that will help users get the best from their phones. Some of the new commands let the users send texts using only their voice, or calling their contacts, which is pretty sweet if you’re driving. The message can be written using only the user’s voice, which works pretty well at that. On the other hand, another new command allows users to activate music playback with their voice by just saying “Play [Name of the song]” (which needs to be in Google Play).
There’s more: a new command allows users to turn WiFi on or off, or set an alarm, although you can’t pick the sound or repetitions just yet. All the user has to do is say turn [on / off] [Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Flashlight], or in the case of the alarm, “set alarm for…”. Of course, before inputting any command, it’s necessary to say “Ok Google Now”, just like it always was, so the phone doesn’t do anything weird by accident.
There are a lot of other cool functions this assistant can perform – for example, you could open any particular website by saying “go to [name of web]” or open apps by saying “open [name of app]”, or even do stuff like turn on the lantern, set the screen brightness or volume through commands like “lower brightness”, “silence phone”, and so on. The only problem is you can’t really measure how much louder or quieter it will go, or how much brighter or dim the screen will get – these commands are all amazing and useful, but Google still have to iron out a few kinks..
The time where voice commands seemed like a thing of the future are now long gone, and thanks to Google, Apple and Microsoft it is something we can actually do with our phones. Google in particular keeps revising and improving their services to give users the best possible performance. Google Now so is slowly becoming the perfect tool to finally break free from tactile screens and control everything via voice commands, so your phone can truly work for you without you having to worry about it. Who knows, in a couple of years we might not need secretaries any more.
Google Now, Android’s personal assistant app, has added 9 new voice commands to make is easier for all users to do everyday tasks. Read all about them in this new feature.
Google Now, Android’s answer to iOS’ Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, keeps growing and getting better with the addition of a few new voice commands that will help users get the best from their phones. Some of the new commands let the users send texts using only their voice, or calling their contacts, which is pretty sweet if you’re driving. The message can be written using only the user’s voice, which works pretty well at that. On the other hand, another new command allows users to activate music playback with their voice by just saying “Play [Name of the song]” (which needs to be in Google Play).
There’s more: a new command allows users to turn WiFi on or off, or set an alarm, although you can’t pick the sound or repetitions just yet. All the user has to do is say turn [on / off] [Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Flashlight], or in the case of the alarm, “set alarm for…”. Of course, before inputting any command, it’s necessary to say “Ok Google Now”, just like it always was, so the phone doesn’t do anything weird by accident.
There are a lot of other cool functions this assistant can perform – for example, you could open any particular website by saying “go to [name of web]” or open apps by saying “open [name of app]”, or even do stuff like turn on the lantern, set the screen brightness or volume through commands like “lower brightness”, “silence phone”, and so on. The only problem is you can’t really measure how much louder or quieter it will go, or how much brighter or dim the screen will get – these commands are all amazing and useful, but Google still have to iron out a few kinks..
The time where voice commands seemed like a thing of the future are now long gone, and thanks to Google, Apple and Microsoft it is something we can actually do with our phones. Google in particular keeps revising and improving their services to give users the best possible performance. Google Now so is slowly becoming the perfect tool to finally break free from tactile screens and control everything via voice commands, so your phone can truly work for you without you having to worry about it. Who knows, in a couple of years we might not need secretaries any more.
Less than two weeks after Microsoft introduced its hands-free AI helper, Cortana, to Android mobile devices, the company has yanked the feature from the US market. Users used to be able to say "Hey, Cortana" and then issue a command, just like "OK, G...
There are several phone unlocking mechanisms, even in the most basic devices: from patterns to eyes, faces, pins and fingerprints. Yet, Google is working on a new one: identification via voice.
The question that comes up is “are all voices unique?. We know faces or retinas are, same with fingerprints, but voices are, sometimes, kind of similar: is it viable to unlock phones via voice, without having any issues?
Google thinks so, and according to their research, it’s almost impossible for two people to speak the same way, use the same mannerisms, and say the same things. That is why they are working on this new technology to unlock stuff via voice, and that could even be used to authorize transactions.
A few new lines of code appeared in Google Now’s latest update, all referencing these new features, and it seems to have come quite a way, judging from it, so it might be ready rather sooner than later: apparently, we’ll only be required to say a specific phrase, and then the phone will unlock for us.
This new upgrade also revamped some voice commands, so now we can make calls or send texts using the nicknames bestowed upon our own contacts.
Airbnb, Lyft and other 38 apps are getting their own cards in Google Now, so that Android users have all the info they need, exactly when they need it. This is particularly useful for owners of Android Wear smartwatches.
Third-party apps as Google Now cards are really not a surprise, as the Mountain View company has been planning to add this feature for quite some time now. What is a surprise, however, is the impact this new update has the Android Wear platform, where the Google Now cards represent an essential element of the UI. Think of it this way: the latest Google Now update makes Android Wear smartwatches even smarter, and that’s not something you get to see everyday. After all, the wearables already have all the hardware they need for performing well for years to come (after all, you’re planning to play FPS games on your smartwatch, are you?) so it’s now the duty of app developers to make these devices better.
The 40 3rd-party apps that are getting support for Google Now (which you can see in the above and below pictures), have been cherry-picked, to ensure that Android Wear users (as well as the ones of the smartphone variety) are getting a lot of added value. Everything seems to be covered, from fitness tracking and language learning to online shopping, traveling and even flight searching.
Until now, Google Now has been keeping things fairly tidy, with its minimalistic design and relatively small number of cards. In this context, some fear that the app could get a little bit too crowded, but chances are that people use only a few of these 40 apps at a given time. Besides, even if you’re using all of them, you can choose which cards should be displayed. One thing I’m certain of is that this is only the beginning, and more 3rd-party apps will get their own cards.
Cortana will soon join the Personal Assistant fight, and by the looks of it, Siri will end up on the third place. S-Voice and other PA apps made by smartphone manufacturers in an attempt to put an original touch on their own devices didn’t have a chance to begin with, so the real battle is between the three giants. Considering how often Google Now is getting useful updates, it will be impossible for the other two to dethrone it.
The search giant doesn’t only want to expand Google Now functionality to its other apps, now it also wants other developers to be able to include in-app search based on the ‘OK, Google’ phrase.
With mobile devices, it’s much easier to do a voice search instead of typing all the details of your query. By enabling app developers to include their voice search in their Android apps, Google does not act like an uninvited guest at a party, but it actually makes the other apps easier to use.
According to a post written by Jarek Wilkiewicz, Developer Advocate, Google Search, on the Android Developers Blog, the changes that need to be made are minimal: “How many lines of code will it take to let your users say Ok Google, and search for something in your app? Hardly any. Starting today, all you need is a small addition to your AndroidManifest.xml in order to connect the Google Now SEARCH_ACTION with your searchable activity.”
Basically, the entire code that needs to be added to that file is this:
There is a great number of ways the new in-app search could make our lives easier, and Google provided a couple of examples: “At Google, we always look for innovative ways to help you improve mobile search and drive user engagement back to your app. For example, users can now say to the Google app: ‘Ok Google, search pizza on Eat24′ or ‘Ok Google, search for hotels in Maui on TripAdvisor.’”
That’s right, ‘OK, Google’ will be available for in-app searches, but Android users will also be able to search within an app using Google Now, without having to launch the third-party app. I would say that this makes the whole experience even smoother.
Wilkiewicz also explained that there are some “system requirements,” in order for the ‘OK, Google’ in-app search to work on your Android smartphone or tablet: “This feature is available on English locale Android devices running Jelly Bean and above with the Google app v3.5 or greater. Last but not least, users can enable the Ok Google hot-word detection from any screen, which offers them the fastest route between their search command and your app!”
At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come -- that's what This Week in Tech History will do. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, a...
The days of us communicating with our computers by using our fingers are nearing an end. Google announced on Thursday that it is releasing its language parsing neural network framework, SyntaxNet, as an open source system. The released code includes...
Last March, Google began allowing its users to link their Gmail account with their Yahoo! and Outlook accounts so that all of their emails could be accessed from a single screen. The company announced today that it is expanding the feature, called Gm...
Less than two weeks after Microsoft introduced its hands-free AI helper, Cortana, to Android mobile devices, the company has yanked the feature from the US market. Users used to be able to say "Hey, Cortana" and then issue a command, just like "OK, G...
