Google Duo is using AI technology from DeepMind to enhance call quality to fill gaps in transmission losses. In the US, Tesla’s engineers are using car parts to build ventilators for COVID-19 patients.
Beware of COVID-19 malwares that will affect your PC and rewrite your master boot record (MBR).
YouTube is building a short-video sharing product to rival TikTok. And finally, parents and kids are using productivity apps to complete office and school tasks.
Google’s Duo uses DeepMind’s technology to improve audio quality
Ever faced a transmission problem while making a call on Duo? You might have missed hearing a few words from the other end, or if it was a video call, the image might have frozen during the call.
To transmit a call over the Internet, speech data is cut into small chunks called packets. Those parts travel through the Internet, and are then rearranged at the receiver’s end.
An efficient audio call over the Internet depends on the pieces rearranging perfectly, so the receiver gets the complete message.
But most often, these chunks either arrive in the wrong order, time or simply get lost during transmission, causing ‘jitter’ in communication. This is a pervasive problem in both audio and video calls.
About 99% of Google Duo calls have to deal with pack losses, excessive jitter or network delays, according to Google AI blog post.
Of those calls, 20% lose more than 3% of the total audio duration due to network issues, and 10% of calls lose more than 8%, it said.
To solve this issue in Duo, Google is using DeepMind’s WaveNetEQ technology.
WaveNetEQ is a self-learning progamme that is trained with a large corpus of speech data. It uses that information to fill in the missing places to give a coherent call.
And as calls on Duo are end-to-end encrypted, the processing happens on the phone.
Google claims that the programme is fast enough to run on a phone, while still providing state-of-art audio quality than other systems currently in use.
Tesla reveals its ventilator powered by Model 3
In March, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that his company was willing to make the much-need ventilators to help COVID-19 affected patients.
The next day, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio responded to the tweet, saying the US is facing a drastic shortage of ventilators, and that “We could use your help!”
On Sunday, Tesla shared an update on the progress in a new video post in the company’s YouTube channel. In it, the engineers showed prototypes of ventilators that were made using Tesla car parts.
In the video, a Tesla engineer explains, using a flowchart diagram, how the ventilator works, while highlighting car parts (coloured in orange) used to build it.
Then, another engineer, reveals a prototype built by the company, followed by the back-end data analysis on how the machine captures patient’s pressure, heart-rate, and other health metric.
“But there is still a lot of work to do,” said on Tesla employee.
“We’re giving our best effort to help people out there.”
Apart from Tesla, Ford and General Motors are working on building ventilators. Ford is working with General Electric’s health care division to make a simplified version of its current ventilator.
GM has partnered with Ventec life Systems to push up the production of the life-saving machine.
YouTube is developing a rival to TikTok
Google-owned YouTube is a planning to develop a short video feature that will allow users to create and upload their own videos, according to The Information .
The new feature, which will be part of the YouTube app, will be launched by the end of 2020, the report said, citing two unnamed sources.
YouTube’s answer to TikTok is called ‘Shorts,’ and it will allow users to pick music from the video streaming company’s catalog of licensed music.
The songs from YouTube app can be used as soundtrack for videos created by users, the report said.
YouTube has declined to comment on the new feature.
According to recent interview with NBC News , YouTube’s chief executive Susan Wojcicki acknowledged that the company was exploring the shorter-form video features.
"We actually have introduced stories on YouTube and we've actually seen our creators really engage with the stories," she said in an interview to Byers Market Podcast that will be aired later this month.
"That would be an example of really short-form content. So, we will definitely continue to innovate in all the different format sizes, including really short-form video.”
TikTok’s rise has been closely watched by social media giants in the Silicon Valley.
TikTok has come under increased scrutiny in the US after lawmakers argued that the China-based social media platform could pose a national security threat.
But that hasn’t deterred the growth of the platform. It was the most-downloaded app last year with over 700 million downloads.
The short-video sharing app recently set up its new content advisory council, saying the panel of security and tech experts will help shape policies for the platform.
A COVID-19 malware can wipe your PC
At least five malware strains have been identified by the infosec community, ZDNet reported.
These have the potential to destroy infected systems by removing files from the PC or rewriting the computer’s master boot record (MBR).
Some of these malwares are out in the wild, while others seem to have been created for fun or test.
All of these are driven to destroy, and have coronavirus themes. They don’t appear have any financial interest.
One of the malwares uses the COVID-19.exe name. It infects the computer in two stages.
First, it shows a window that can’t be closed as the malware has disabled the Windows Task Manager.
And as the user attempts to close the window, the malware rewrites the MBR in background.
After rewriting MBR, the malware restarts the computer with a new MBR. The new record blocks the user and sends them back to pre-boot screen.
The only way users can gain access to their PCs is with the help of apps that can recover and rebuild MBR to a working state.
Parents and kids are using productivity apps during coronavirus home-schooling
As most schools are shut globally to reduce the spread of COVID-19, some parents are using productivity software to make their children complete learning tasks while they are at home, MIT Technology Review reported.
Apps such as Trello and Asana, which were confined to workplaces are now adopted for home task planning, and children are also linked added to the users list.
Trello is a planning tool that helps organising tasks so you can free yourself from remembering every detail in your project. The app has a template for parents and caregivers on how they can create tasks for their wards.
In it, there is an ‘ideas’ list under which subjects for learning can be added. Alongside, activities for each day can be created. And at the end of each day parents and children can discuss how they went about with their tasks.
Asana works best along with Google suite. The app is similar to Trello and has over a million installs on Play Store with a 4.5 review average from over 29,000 users.
One of the best practices in making planning apps work for both parents and kids is to formulate tasks together. This way children feel that they own the task and take responsibility to complete it.
Russel Benaroya, a Seattle-based parent based said to MIT Technology Review : “Introducing software, whether it’s in a business setting or a personal setting, can feel jarring unless people are ready for that software to solve a problem that they’re all experiencing.”
“We want the conversation to be about feeling autonomous and empowered to go about your time and getting things done.”
