Facebook today announced it had begun using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify people on its platform who may be at risk of committing suicide, offering them the option of speaking with a crisis helpline through its Messenger application.
Facebook's AI algorithm works by spotting warning signs in users' posts and the comments their friends leave in response. The new tool is being tested only in the US at present.
Revered smartphone leakster Evan Blass yesterday leaked out what appears to be a genuine press shot depicting Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S8 flagship.
Not only does the image give us a better look at the device's extra button, said to summon Samsung's new Bixby digital assistant, it's a preview of sorts of the kind of form factor we're expecting from Apple's iPhone 8 when it launches in September.
Apple on Tuesday held its annual shareholder meeting at its Cupertino headquarters. The gathering is standard affair—company executives and board members meet with stockholders to discuss a wide range of topics, including performance and proposals.
The most interesting part of today's meeting, however, was Tim Cook's informal Q&A session. The casual section allows attending shareholders to offer up their questions and comments to the CEO and other members of the company's senior leadership team.
Will iPhone 8 knock our socks off with revolutionary virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities? I'm not sold yet, but that's not stopping some people from making far-fetched speculations based solely on wishful thinking and little evidence. And what evidence has been presented thus far is very flimsy.
In January, blogger Robert Scoble ran a scoop claiming Apple had partnered with German lens specialists Carl Zeiss on a pair of digital glasses that would connect wirelessly to the next iPhone and display images and other information to the wearer.
Following today's research from UBS's Steve Milunovich saying Apple has 1,000 engineers working on a top secret project that would give the next iPhone 3D mapping capability using stereoscopic vision, Scoble told MacRumors that Apple is “readying a three-ounce pair of glasses that pair with iPhone 8 for mixed reality.”
Reminiscent of Apple's legendary "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC” commercials, the latest iPad Pro ad campaign based on real tweets from real people continues with a new 16-second video posted to the company's YouTube channel Tuesday.
Titled “No More Printing,” the video is based on a 2013 tweet which reads: “When you're printing personal things at work and you have to run to the printer to get your stuff before anyone else does.”
The commercial shows off iPad Pro's ability to sign digital documents right on the device with Apple Pencil. “You wouldn’t have to print anymore, if your computer was an iPad Pro,” Apple wrote in the video's description.
According to analyst Steven Milunovich and his team at UBS, augmented reality (AR) will likely be Apple's next major product innovation.
In a research note seen by Business Insider, Milunovich writes that the Cupertino firm may have well over a thousand engineers working on a project in Israel that could be related to augmented reality.
UBS expects Apple to implement augmented reality in iPhone 8, which could include “moderate 3D mapping using stereoscopic vision” based on a technology called Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) as well as a software development kit for app makers to take advantage of the handset's rumored AR features.
Apple has been granted yet another patent for a fingerprint reader embedded underneath the display itself, a feature widely expected to debut on iPhone 8.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this morning awarded the iPhone maker a patent for an “electronic device including finger biometric sensor carried by a touch display and related methods”. The company first applied for this patent on January 27, 2015.
Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox browser, has acquired the read-later service Pocket for an undisclosed sum. The deal files as Mozilla's first acquisition and was confirmed by both Mozilla and Pocket.
I've been a longtime Pocket user because their elegantly designed cross-platform apps let me easily save stripped down versions of articles from online publications for reading later, even without an Internet connection.
Pocket will continue on as a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary of Mozilla. Pocket has native apps on App Store and Mac App Store, plus a browser extension.
Amazon's Echo will soon get some real competition as Google gears up to launch its Home smart connected speaker in the United Kingdom this spring. According to Rick Osterloh, Google's Vice President of Hardware, Home's “artificial intelligence skills and vast data” will give it the edge over Amazon's voice-activated wireless speaker.
Google's mobile YouTube app takes advantage of iOS's deep linking capability to automatically launch itself when a user taps a video URL in their browser. That useful feature doesn't always work as intended, however, prompting Google to push an update to YouTube for iPhone and iPad to rectify this. If clicking a YouTube link in Safari or Chrome doesn't launch the app and iOS doesn't display the “Open this page in YouTube?” pop-up, be sure to update your copy of YouTube for iOS to version 12.07.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that iPhone will feature a flexible screen based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology and supplant Lightning with USB-C.
The story corroborates KGI Securities analyst Ming Chi-Kuo's claims that Apple will release three new phones this year in the form of the brand new OLED-based iPhone 8 model with refreshed industrial design and the more iterative LCD-based iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus updates.
Apple today seeded fourth betas of iOS 10.3, macOS Sierra 10.12.4 and watchOS 3.2 to members of the Apple Developer Program. iOS 10.3 beta 4 (build number 14E5260b), macOS Sierra 10.12.4 beta 4 (build number 16E175b) and watchOS 3.2 are now all available as over-the-air downloads through the Software Update mechanism on devices with an appropriate configuration profile. We'll update the article if we find new features or important under-the-hood changes in the new betas.