Google is all set to release Android 12 soon. The OS has been under development for the past few months, and the Silicon Valley giant is now preparing to roll out the stable update for the users. One key feature of the Android 12 update is the Material You redesign. Apps in Android 12 will feature the same theme across the operating system. A report has now shown off how Google Assistant will look on Android 12 with Material You design language.
Google has been updating its apps to reflect Material You design changes. In the past week or so, the company has updated its Keep, Phone, Photos, Drive, Duo, Podcasts, and Messages apps with the Material You design. And the latest one to receive it is the Google Assistant app. XDA-Developers were able to get the Material You design of Google Assistant on version 12.37.19.29 of the Google app which was running on a Google Pixel 3 running Android 12 Beta 5.
A quick glance at the screenshot reveals that not a whole lot is different this time around. The design seems pretty tame compared to the redesigns of other Google apps. There are some changes like button shapes changing to round squares. We can also see Google Assistant taking color and accents from the wallpapers, but that’s about it.
If you want to try Google Assistant Material You redesign on your smartphone, make sure it’s running the latest Android 12 beta, and then download the latest Google Assistant app from the Play Store. Though, the report says Google is testing the redesign in an A/B testing way, so even if you’re on the latest beta, Material You redesign isn’t ensured.
Via: XDA-Developers
Sanuj Bhatia
An engineer by degree, news reporter by profession, and an avid sports lover. You’ll find me scrolling Football Twitter when I’m not writing about cutting-edge technology. Have a tip? Noted a mistake? You can reach out using the email given below.
Back in June, Microsoft officially announced the next generation of Windows, called Windows 11. Back then, Microsoft introduced Android applications that would run natively on the new Windows operating system. Today, the Amazon Appstore preview version was published on the Microsoft Store, but there’s a catch.
The application currently states “Amazon Confidential – For testing purposes”, and it’s not meant to be used or be accessible by the public, not even on the developer preview builds (via XDA-Developers). As it stands right now, you need to redeem a code to gain access to the application and the potential to unlock any functionality.
If you’re interested in how all of this will work, here’s a quick rundown. Android applications will use the Windows Subsystem for Android in order to work on Windows 11. You will be able to install any Android APKs, but keep in mind that this will likely be limited to the Amazon Appstore and Microsoft Store integration system. Once an app is downloaded, you will be redirected to the Amazon Appstore, where you’ll be able to get the application. It remains to be seen how this integration will work out at the end, and we have no in-depth explanation on how exactly all of this will work in practice just yet. We’ll have to wait a few more months until we can get our hands on the feature or find out more.
Today’s news is just proof that Microsoft and Amazon are hard at work to get the functionality ready for public beta testing, but as we reported earlier, the Android app compatibility will not arrive on day 1 when Windows 11 officially launches later this year, along with a number of other features. We have also written a more in-depth article about Android apps on Windows 11, in case you’re interested.
Roland Udvarlaki
Roland is a technology enthusiast and software engineer based in United Kingdom. He is also a content creator and writer, and is best known under the name “Techusiast”.
WhatsApp is continuously working to add more and more features to the instant messaging service. Earlier this week, a report claimed WhatsApp is testing message reactions and redesigned chat bubbles on iOS, and now, according to reliable tipster WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is testing another feature for its iPhone app.
The report details that WhatsApp is working on a new voice message transcription for its iOS app. The transcription will be done on-device, or locally, and your voice messages “won’t be sent to WhatsApp or Facebook server for getting the transcription.” Instead, the feature would rely on Apple’s “Speech Recognition” system. In addition, the publication notes that users may improve transcription of voice messages will “also help Apple to improve its speech recognition technology, but it won’t be directly linked to your identity.”
WABetaInfo shared a screenshot of how the transcription of a voice message to text works. When you opt-in to generate a text transcript for your voice message, a new “Transcript” section opens up. In this section, you can even see the timestamp of a particular part of the voice message and directly jump to it.
The report says that “when a message is transcripted for the first time, its transcription is saved locally in the WhatsApp database, so it won’t be needed to transcript it again if you want to see its transcription later.”
The feature is currently under development and will be available on WhatsApp Beta for iOS before rolling out to the public. Though WhatsApp usually brings the same set of features to Android and iOS, there’s no word on the availability of the feature on Android right now.
Via: WABetaInfo
Sanuj Bhatia
An engineer by degree, news reporter by profession, and an avid sports lover. You’ll find me scrolling Football Twitter when I’m not writing about cutting-edge technology. Have a tip? Noted a mistake? You can reach out using the email given below.
WhatsApp has been receiving essential features with some of its latest updates. However, the latest information shows us that the app’s developers are still looking for ways to improve. It seems that they’re headed in the right direction, as the new WhatsApp beta for Android 2.21.19.3 reveals a new feature called Delete Chat may be o the way.
Delete Chat is the name of the latest feature that will arrive in future versions of WhatsApp. This feature is still under development, meaning that we may have to wait a bit longer to see it in action. But to sum it up, Delete Chat will be helpful for those users who take advantage of multi-device support added earlier this summer. It will help you to delete a chat across all of your devices. This will solve the current issue that only allows users to delete a chat from the device they are using. In the meantime, users will still have to enter every one of their linked devices to delete their chats manually. Or at least until WhatsApp gets through with the testing period of this new feature that would allow sync chat deletion across devices.
“As you can see in this screenshot, this feature will work if you’re using the most updated WhatsApp versions. So, when the feature will be rolled out for beta testers, and you’re using the latest update, deleted chats from a device will be automatically deleted from WhatsApp Web/Desktop as well (and vice versa).”
WhatsApp has also been working on redesigning chat bubbles and message reactions, and you can check them out here. However, the best information so far suggests that the instant messaging app is also working to allow users to set custom privacy settings. These changes would let you choose who can see your Last Seen, Profile Photo, and About info, which will be useful for those who want the ability to exclude specific contacts from viewing your stuff.
Source WaBetaInfo
Samuel Martinez
A former bilingual teacher that left the classrooms to join the team of Pocketnow as a news editor and content creator for the Spanish audience. An artist by nature who enjoys video games, guitars, action figures, cooking, painting, drawing and good music.
WhatsApp has been working hard behind the scenes. Yesterday, we got to learn about the new message reactions and redesigned chat bubbles coming to the instant messaging app. Ever-so-reliable WABetaInfo has now reported that even more features are coming to WhatsApp, and the first one is custom privacy settings.
Currently, you can only set custom privacy settings for WhatsApp Status. Under the Privacy settings of the WhatsApp app, you can choose to share Status with with ‘Contacts Except.’ However, those settings are not available for Last Seen, Profile Photo, and About. According to the WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is testing the ability to exclude specific contacts in these settings as well.
The feature is not available in the stable, or even beta, version of the app yet. If, and when, this feature makes through, you’ll be able to hide your ‘Last Seen’ time from a handful of people without disabling it altogether. Currently, there is an option to hide your ‘Last Seen’ but if you enable it, it hides the time stamp from all of the users. The same is coming to Profile Photo and About settings as well.
The instant messaging service seems to be catching up with Telegram, who’s had this feature for quite a while now. Anyway, new features incoming means good for the end-user. What are your thoughts on WhatsApp bringing new privacy features? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
Source: WABetaInfo
Sanuj Bhatia
An engineer by degree, news reporter by profession, and an avid sports lover. You’ll find me scrolling Football Twitter when I’m not writing about cutting-edge technology. Have a tip? Noted a mistake? You can reach out using the email given below.
The alarm clock is one of the most important and basic features (not even a ‘feature’ in my opinion) of a phone, not even a smartphone. However, if your alarm didn’t go off recently, and if you’re thinking you didn’t hear the alarm or missed it by any chance, you’re not the one to be blamed. According to many one-star reviews on Google Play Store and threads on Reddit, the Google Clock app has a bug that is causing many users to miss pre-set alarms.
According to many replies on a thread on Reddit, scheduled alarms not pushing notifications, playing sounds, or going off at all. Interestingly, the bug isn’t confined to a smartphone from a particular Android OEM, like OnePlus or OPPO, but the reports of Google Clock app alarm bug are coming from owners of Google’s own Pixel as well.
One review on the Google Play Store claims that the app just vibrates the phone once. One user even reported that he “lost my teaching job because I missed two-morning class schedules.” The one-star reviews and the Reddit posts claim that the normal app troubleshooting methods, such as uninstalling and reinstalling the app, clearing its cache, clearing data, and changing settings, don’t seem to be working.
One report from PiunikaWeb on the matter claims that the issue occurs when the DND mode is enabled. However, we were not able to replicate the issue on our Android phone. We tested the issue on a OnePlus 5, OnePlus 6, OnePlus Nord, and a Google Pixel 4a, but the stock Google alarm clock app seems to be working just fine on all of the phones.
Google has officially recognized the issue, and interestingly the company claims the issue is due to the Spotify integration in the Google Clock app. An executive from Google says “Spotify has acknowledged the issue and is rolling out a fix.”
If you’re facing the issue right now, please refrain from using the Spotify music alarm on your Android phone. In case you still face the issue, there’s nothing you can do right now. Our advice would be to use some other alarm clock app from the Play Store, or you can even wait for a fix from Google. Are you facing this issue? Let us know in the comments section below!
Sanuj Bhatia
An engineer by degree, news reporter by profession, and an avid sports lover. You’ll find me scrolling Football Twitter when I’m not writing about cutting-edge technology. Have a tip? Noted a mistake? You can reach out using the email given below.
Twitter is looking to establish a strong foothold in the social audio rooms market as it continues to add more and more features to Spaces. The company was recently seen to be experimenting with a dedicated Spaces tab on Android and iOS. And now, Twitter has announced that Spaces can have up to two co-hosts to manage and moderate social audio rooms.
The company announced the new co-host feature for Twitter Spaces, well… via a tweet. A host can now invite up to two speakers to be the co-host. Once invited, co-hosts have the same privilege as the host: they can invite others to speak, pin tweets, kick people from the room, and more.
With the addition of the co-host feature, a Twitter Space can now have up to thirteen speakers: one host, two co-hosts, and ten speakers. There are a few limitations as well: a co-host can not boot the primary host from the room, nor can a co-host invite a speaker as another co-host. Moreover, co-hosts do not take over the room in case the host leaves an ongoing Space. And yes, only the primary host can still end a Space.
Despite these limitations, the feature makes sense as more and more people join the social audio rooms hype train. Spaces was pretty bad at launch, hogging people’s smartphone’s battery, ending abruptly, and there were audio quality issues as well. But, Twitter’s been working hard over the past few weeks and months to make the platform more interactive and usable.
As more and more people join Spaces, it becomes hard for a single host to manage rooms — especially now that Spaces have a chat section. What are your thoughts on the Twitter Spaces co-host feature? Will it make it easier for you to moderate your social audio room? Let us know in the comments section below!
Many people and researchers have tried guessing and finding out how the TikTok algorithm is so good, but some of the results that have been revealed in the past have left some people and media disturbed and amazed at the time.
A former Google engineer who worked on YouTube’s algorithm has revealed that the platform uses a very similar, essentially the same method, although it’s not as extreme as TikTok’s (via 9to5Mac). TikTok uses four signals to determine what you watch, share, like, and follow. A recent analysis revealed that having one of these is already more than enough to get to know a user’s favorite topic and main interests, but having the three others provide even more help narrowing down and making the algorithm better.
The Wall Street Journal created a 13-minute long video to share its findings, but we’ve collected some of the important and interesting bits here.
“We found out that TikTok only needs one of these to figure you out: How long you linger over a piece of content.
Every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you. Through this one powerful signal, TikTok learns your most hidden interests and emotions, and drives you deep into rabbit holes of content that are hard to escape.
The TikTok experience starts the same way for everyone. Open the app and you’ll immediately see an endless string of videos in your For You feed. TikTok starts by serving the account a selection of very popular videos vetted by app moderators.”
The WSJ has created 100 bot accounts with an age, location, and a few interest points to conduct these tests. What’s interesting is that the interests were never entered directly into the app, it simply picked videos and watched them based on the hashtags and content identified. The bot was programmed to search for hashtags that the AI would associate with the interest set for that particular bot. When the bot found a video that matched its interests, it stopped scrolling and watched the content. Sometimes, it rewatched the video multiple times to ensure the algorithm knows the bot enjoyed it.
The research found that all of the videos and view counts were contracted and tightly focused on the user’s interests.
“The results were analysed by data scientist and algorithm expert Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer who worked on YouTube’s algorithm.
He’s now an advocate for algorithm transparency. He says TikTok is different from other social media platforms.
“The algorithm on TikTok can get much more powerful and it can be able to learn your vulnerabilities much faster.”
In fact, TikTok fully learned many of our accounts’ interests in less than two hours. Some it figured out in less than 40 minutes.”
WSJ programmed another bot to have sadness and depression interests.
“Less than three minutes into using TikTok, at its 15th video, [bot] kentucky_96 pauses on this [sad video about losing people from your life]. Kentucky_96 watches the 35-second video twice. Here TikTok gets its first inkling that perhaps the new user is feeling down lately.
The information contained in this single video provided the app with important clues. The author of the video, the audio track, the video description, the hashtags. After kentucky_96’s first sad video, TikTok serves another one 23 videos later – or after about four more minutes of watching.
This one is a breakup video with the hashtag #sad. TikTok’s still trying to suss out this new user, with more high view count videos [but] at video 57, kentucky_96 keeps watching a video about heartbreak and hurt feelings. And then at video 60, watches one about emotional pain.
Based on the videos we watched so far, TikTok thinks that maybe this user wants to see more about love, breakups, and dating. So at about 80 videos and 15 minutes in, the app starts serving more about relationships. But kentucky_96 isn’t interested. The user instead pauses on one about mental health, then quickly swipes past videos about missing an ex, advice about moving on, and how to hold a lover’s interest. But kentucky_96 lingers over this video containing the hashtag #depression, and these videos are about suffering from anxiety.
After 224 videos into the bot’s overall journey or about 36 minutes of total watch time, TikTok’s understanding of kentucky_96 takes shape. Videos about depression and mental health struggles outnumber those about relationships and breakups. From here on, kentucky_96’s feed is a deluge of depressive content. 93% of videos shown to the account are about sadness or depression.“
The following is proof that the algorithm can easily be manipulated by watching a topic or interest for a certain amount of time. Once the algorithm finds these interests, it’ll automatically adjust and include only videos in the feed that matches the user’s interests.
This method works great for funny and uplifting content, but much less so for those who are suffering from depression and sadness, as it can make them feel worse. 9to5Mac points out that conspiracy theorists could end up with the impression that such views are mainstream and widely accepted, even though some of the things are not fact-checked and proven to be true at all.
TikTok prioritizes engagement over mental health, and Chaslot says that YouTube does something similar with its recommendation algorithm, but it’s much less extreme.
What are your thoughts about the new findings of how TikTok works? Did the algorithm figure out your favorite interests and hobbies? Let us know in the comments!
Roland Udvarlaki
Roland is a technology enthusiast and software engineer based in United Kingdom. He is also a content creator and writer, and is best known under the name “Techusiast”.
Apple’s own M1 silicon was first launched eight months ago for Mac devices and it has completely changed the way we think about our devices from the software giant. Adobe has also recently added support for several of its own apps, making them run up to 80 percent faster.
Spotify is now finally joining to support the new M1 chipset. According to the company, the new Mac app is still under development – hence why it’s only available in beta – and that the app might not work and perform as expected.
“We have been working hard backstage on this and are happy to announce that we now have a Beta version of our app available. It features many compatibility improvements and optimizations for the new Apple architecture. Please note that as a Beta, some unexpected behavior might still occur. We’ll use all the feedback and info we get from you to tweak and improve your Spotify experience. And if everything works great we’d love to hear that too!”, said Spotify in a blog post (via 9to5Mac).
The beta app already features compatibility, a number of enhancements and improvements for the M1 chip, running on Apple devices. In recent months, a lot of users have been asking Spotify to include M1 support since November last year, it seems that Spotify is listening to user feedback and is now finally bringing what everyone has asked for. Hopefully the app will publicly roll out sometime soon in the near future, sadly Spotify didn’t mention when that can be expected.
If you are looking to give the Beta app a try, you can download it from here, just keep in mind that it might not work as you would expect, this is usual with software that’s in the Beta program. Installation of the app is the same as for any other applications.
Roland Udvarlaki
Roland is a technology enthusiast and software engineer based in United Kingdom.
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