Author: Clinton

There is a nice behind-the-scenes update coming to Google Allo that brings a smart emoji feature and stickers for the new movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them stickers that you can share with friends.  The updates are rolling out now and it could take a day or two before everyone sees them.  The first update, smart emoji, is pretty slick.  As you start typing, you can tap the Smart Smiley in the keyboard and it will give you suggested emoji for your message.  Even if you haven’t started typing, it will suggest emoji based on the context of your conversation (thank you Google Assistant and Machine Learning!).  The idea, of course, is to save time by using emoji but also to get you the right emoji for the conversation.

Today’s Deal over at Amazon is on the powerful ASUS ZenFone Zoom.  This 5.5″ display device with a 13MP rear camera, 64GB of storage and unlocked phone is on sale today for $247.  That’s a savings of just over $150 from the normal $399 price.  For that price, this is a well spec’d phone.  It has an Intel 64-bit Quad-Core processoring running at 2.3GHz and coupled with 4GB of RAM.  Storage wise it has 64GB of storage built-in but can be expanded an additional 128GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

The ZenFone Zoom, as the name suggests, has a 13MP camera with a 3x optical zoom on the rear camera.  Optical zooms are not completely unique but they aren’t found often on phones.  Having an Optical zoom provides much crisper images over software zooming.  The front camera on the Zoom is a 5MP shooter.

Google Home has some impressive microphones built into it and can hear you for a good distance away depending on the ambient noise level of your home. Sometimes, however, it would be nice to get some sort of acknowledgement that Home actually heard your command.  Sure you have the swirling lights at the top but what if you aren’t looking at it or are even out of sight of your Home?  Fortunately there is an easy way around this and it all comes down to a setting inside the Home app.

In this How To I’ll show you how to set up your Google Home to give you an audible tone when you start or end a request.

Fitbit has begun rolling out an update to their app for Android and while it provides a few nice updates, the big news is the preview of the new dashboard in the app.  The preview is not enabled by default but there is a banner that will walk you through what’s new in the dashboard and will enable it for you.  It is awesome.  The new dashboard is a far cleaner design with a white background and dials to indicate your activities, steps and other wellness information.  If you are use to the dashboard on the Fitbit website, this is going to look very familiar to you and has the same ability to move things around on the dashboard, just like the website.

Google has made a big change behind the scenes with Google Translate that is going to dramatically increase the accuracy of translations within the app.  In September, Google announced they had developed their Neural Machine Translation and discussed it in a bit more detail at the October event.  Now they have begun rolling it out to Translate with support 8 of the 130 languages that can be translated with the app and service.  This is a first step but the implications are huge simply because of now Neural Machine Translation works.

Today, Google Translate chops up whatever you are trying to translate and converts that into the foreign language.  It is good – really good – but it could be better as it doesn’t necessarily know local idioms and other speech traits.  Neural Machine Translation essentially looks at the entire sentence, looking at context and then coming up with a translation that more closely matches human speech instead of a machine.  It means that when you use the app it will give you far more natural results.  Equally as important, the app will learn as it goes to provide more accurate and better translations as time goes on and more people use it.

The OnePlus 3T was announced today by OnePlus, the latest flagship device in their lineup.  The new 3T is essentially a OnePlus 3 with improved specifications in some key areas as well as a new 128GB storage option.  Available in a Gunmetal or Soft Gold color, the phone will start at $439 for the 64GB model and will be available for purchase starting November 22nd.

The big news on the 3T is the improved processor and RAM.  This new phone has the Snapdragon 821 Quad-Core processor and is coupled with 6GB of RAM.  It sports a 5.5″ Full HD IMOLED display that is protected by Gorilla Glass 4, comes with either 64GB or 128GB of storage and has dual-SIM support.  Camera wise, the main camera is a 16MP shooter while the selfie camera is also a 16MP shooter which makes this phone a real powerhouse camera wise.