Google Phone Gets a Beta Program, and New Spam Call Filter in First Update TheGoogle Phoneapp introduced a basic spam call alert back in 2016 which warned users of a suspected spam caller by turning the screen bright red and labeling the call as“Suspected spam caller”.However, the call still went through and the user had to decide whether to accept or reject the call. Now, according to a recentreportfrom9to5Google, Google plans to improve on the feature in the next update....

Orkut Founder’s ‘hello’ Social Media App Arrives in India At a time when most major social media platforms, likeFacebook, are under the scanner for data privacy violations, founder of yesteryear’s favorite social networking website Orkut has launched a new social media app in India called ‘hello’. The app was available in Brazil previously. According to a recentreportfromIANS, Orkut Buyukkokten, former Google employee and founder of the eponymous social network, has launched ‘Hello’ after months of beta testing in the country....

Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform Will Power Smart Cameras, IoT Devices After dominating the Android smartphone market, chip manufacturerQualcommhas set its eyes on IoT devices and has launched its newVision Intelligence Platform. According to a recentreportfromTechCrunch, the Vision Intelligence Platform introduces two new chips for IoT devices – the QCS605 and the QCS603, which make use of a multi-core ARM processor combined with Qualcomm’s AI engine and an image signal processor.Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform Reference Design VR Camera...

Uber Releases Updated App for Drivers With Surge Zone Displays, Earnings Tracker At the recentspecial driver event, Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took the stage to announce his first product launch – an updated app for driver partners. Khosrowshahi was quite upfront about the company’s treatment of its driver partners over the years and said,“You’re the heart of the Uber experience…but somewhere along the line as we grew as a company we lost sight of that....

App Store, Google Play Store Saw Record-Breaking Growth in Q1 2018: App Annie The app market is exploding and every year the growth is many times what Google and Apple saw in the previous one. According to a recentreportfrom app market data and insights company App Annie, Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store saw record breaking growth in Q1 2018 as well. During the time period iOS andAndroiddownloads recorded a growth of over 10 percent year-over-year, reaching 27....

Google Releases Largest Overhaul for Cloud Speech-to-Text Engine Late last month, Google released itsCloud Text-to-speechengine to developers worldwide which featured 32 different voices spanning across 12 languages and variants. Now, the company has released a major update for another product from its Cloud AI speech lineup- the Cloud Speech-to-text engine (formerly known as the Cloud Speech API). The Cloud Speech-to-text engine, which was released back in 2016, has been available to developers for almost a year now....

Google Releases VR180 Video Format Tools for Developers, Camera Makers Google introduced a new video format dubbedVR180last year, which allowed users to capture or create engaging immersive videos using unique VR180 cameras. Now, according to an officialblog post, the company has rolled out the video format for developers and OEMs, effectively allowing anyone with video know-how to create VR180 video. In the blog post, Changchang Wu, Software Engineer at Google, wrote:...