Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

Google Assistant will now be nicer if you say “Please” and “Thank you”

Is barking orders at our AI-powered voice assistants turning us into jerks? Are our kids growing accustomed to commanding the Google Homes and Siris of the world to turn on the lights without the politeness of a “please”?

Perhaps. With that in mind, from here on out, Google Assistant will be a bit more cheery if you take the time to say “please” or “thank you”.

If, for example, you say “Hey Google, please set a timer for 10 minutes”, Google Assistant will respond “Thanks for asking so nicely! 10 minutes, starting now.”

To be clear: it’s totally optional. Prefer to be curt? That’s okay — Assistant won’t chastise you. But if these are habits you’re trying to instill in a little one or polish up yourself, Assistant will respond in kind.

Google first mentioned that they’d be adding this feature, which they call “Pretty Please”, at I/O in May. Amazon rolled an almost identical feature into Alexa back in April of this year.

Google Assistant is picking up a few other new tricks this morning:

  • You can say “Hey Google, Call Santa” to have a chat with ol’ Saint Nick himself. That’s been around a while, but they’ve added a new storyline (and visuals, if you have an Assistant device with a display.)
  • They’ve added a bunch of Christmas stories to Assistant’s story time feature, so you can say things like “Hey Google, read me ‘Twas the night before Christmas'”, or ‘Hey Google, tell me a Christmas story’ to kick things off.
  • You can now add things to a specific list, such as your wish list or Christmas dinner shopping list, via Assistant. Say “Hey Google, add ‘Kindle for mom’ to my gift list” and it’ll know what you mean. You can also create new lists via Assistant, and Google notes that they’ll soon support third party services Any.do, Bring!, and Todoist.
  • If you have a Assistant device with a display built-in, it can now double as a lil’ Karaoke machine — ask it to play a song via Google Play Music, and the lyrics should now appear in sync.
  • If you have an Assistant device with a display built-in and a Nest doorbell, you can now chat with whoever’s at the door thanks to a new two way talk button.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio
Post a Comment
Read more

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line
Post a Comment
Read more

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem
Post a Comment
Read more