Google made another exciting announcement today which is great for its Spanish-speaking users. By taking a step above other smart devices, Google Home has now activated its support for Spanish. This isn’t only an attempt to accommodate the more diverse users in the US. The Spanish Google Home is now ready to hit the international market, gaining a powerful advantage over Amazon.

The Spanish Google Home is perfect for the US market

To everyone’s excitement, Google has just introduced its Spanish Google Home that can listen and answer commands in Spanish. This is the first smart device that can understand a different language than English, putting the company at the top on the smart speaker market. This might bring the device outside US, as it will soon be available in Spanish-speaking countries.

Google isn’t the top company in terms of smart speaker sale yet. However, it might have found the perfect strategy to win the US market. Today, there is a huge number of people in the US who speak Spanish as their first language. Google thought it might be easier for them to use a smart device in their native tongue, so it brought the Spanish Google Home.

Google wants to teach its smart assistant more languages

Amazon is the top smart speaker in the US and has support for several languages. Apart from English, it can also understand German, and the latest addition is Japanese. However, it cannot speak Spanish, so Google really performed a smart move. In fact, it also came with a great promise.

Google wants to turn its smart assistant into a polyglot, so it promised it would add 30 more languages to its portfolio. Apart from the newly added Spanish, it also had support for German, Italian, French, and Japanese. With this expansion, Google plans to also expand its sales on a broader market. On top of that, Google also wants to let speakers switch between languages while talking to the smart assistant.

The Spanish Google Home is definitely a great marketing move for the company on the US market. If this multilingual attempt is successful, Google might soon surpass Amazon and become the best-selling smart device in the industry.

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Two months have passed since Rare has released the exciting Sea of Thieves game, but this anniversary couldn’t go uncelebrated. Players have been impatiently waiting for Hungering Deep, an exclusive content update. Rare prepared a special surprise for them and has just announced the release of the DLC. This will take place on May 29^th within the Inside Xbox event that happens every month.

Sea of Thieves gets its first DLC in a series of six

The Hungering Deep DLC is the first major update that Sea of Thieves will receive, but it’s definitely not going to be the last. All fans must have been thrilled by the news, but Rare didn’t want to satisfy their curiosity. There aren’t many details on the update, so we’ll have to wait until the release to find out more.

When asked about it, the devs said they wanted to keep updates as secretive as possible. This way, fans will be more engaged in the game and in discovering all the new elements as they are playing it. However, they still offered a few hints.

Rare wants to keep secret the best things of the DLC

The biggest hint is offered by the title itself, which suggest pirates should fear a mysterious creature lurking from the depths. There’s also a trailer and some images released, but they aren’t too generous. People could agree they could see teeth below the water, but it’s still not clear what is hidden there.

As mentioned above, Sea of Thieves will get even more DLCs throughout 2018. Rare has announced the release of six updates, and Hungering Deep is the first in the series. It also revealed the name of the next two that are planned for summer. These are Cursed Sails and Forsaken Shores. Also, the first DLC will bring out a series of events for Sea of Thieves that will be out every week.

One last thing worth mentioning about Hungering Deep is the AI threats. From now on, each DLC will feature them, meaning that players will face dangerous encounters that should generate wholly new experiences and gameplay elements.

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If you’re waiting for a cheap smartphone from Xiaomi, you will probably have to wait even more. There are no signs the company is planning to bring them to the US, but they have something else instead. It will bring a series of accessories on the American market, together with an exclusive smart home device with support for the Google Assistant app.

Xiaomi will integrate Google support in its smart assistants

Xiaomi seems to be improving its relationship with Google, as it announced a pairing between its smart devices and the Google smart apps. All the Xiaomi smart assistants will soon feature support for the Google Assistant service. This means that you can either control it via a smartphone app or pair it with a Google Home device.

Therefore, if you want a cheaper product that can assist you perfectly, you can get ready for its arrival. However, this isn’t the only surprise Xiaomi has prepared for the American audience. It will come with a few other items as well.

The company has some other special items for the US market

These exclusive products include three other accessories that will make your life easier. One of them is the Mi Bedside Lamp that offers you about 16 million choices of color. Given all the options, you can personalize it however you want. The second item is a Mi LED Smart Bulb that comes with the same color pattern as the lamp.

In the end, the third item is the Mi Smart Plug. If you want to connect any other devices to a network, this is the device for you. Of course, all these three objects have Google Assistant support, so you can control them by voice just like any other smart assistant.

However, you’ll have to wait for a bit before getting these devices. Xiaomi didn’t reveal any official release date for any of them. The bedside lamp should be the first to get here, but we only know this should happen this month. For all the other, the company is to make further announcements.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

If you have run out of games to play on your smartphone, Nintendo has a surprise for you. The video game company has just announced a new collaboration with a well-known gaming studio, Cygames. Together, they will be developing an exclusive RPG that will be available only on mobile platforms. The RPG in question is called Dragalia Lost, and a trailer is already out.

Dragalia Lost is a mobile-exclusive title

A new RPG game is coming on mobile, so get your hands ready for an intense gameplay. The news is official, as Nintendo has already confirmed it. It will develop the title together with the Cygames studio, so Dragalia Lost is already confirmed.

Nintendo decided to start this collaboration as it needed Cygames’ help for game development. The company revealed they wanted to insert some exquisite animations in the game, as they aim high. Dragalia Lost wants to offer players a whole new experience, so they could make use of all the resources out there.

The RPG will probably be out in the summer

Cygames is quite a well-known studio in Japan. In fact, you must have heard of other titles produced by it. Granblue Fantasy is one of its best-known games, but Shadowverse, The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls, or Rage of Bahamut are other popular titles.

If you are curious about Dragalia Lost, you’ll need to stay patient. Both companies are reserved about the details on the game, but promise everyone it will be worth the wait. Most likely, Dragalia Lost will be out sometime this summer, so you won’t have to wait too long.

Nintendo also gets some other benefits from this collaboration. The two companies will use a third-party business to administer their stock, and Nintendo will get 5 percent of the other studio’s stock. In fact, this collaboration might hide some other intentions as well. Cygames is currently working on Project Awakening, a console game, and Nintendo might be involved as well.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Astronomers are on an unending quest to find life on other planets. However, the search for Earthlike exoplanets is quite a tough one, and the results aren’t always so satisfying. This is why researchers thought of creating an alien searching AI that will look for planets that might support life.

The AI assesses the habitability of exoplanets

Any task becomes easier if you can get some help from a machine learning system. Therefore, researchers from the University of Plymouth, UK, decided to develop an alien searching AI. This algorithm will be able to predict if different exoplanets are likely to host life. Researchers will feed the algorithm with the requirements for life on a planet. Depending on the conditions on each exoplanet, the system will calculate the likelihood of that planet to sustain life.

The alien searching AI is great for finding patterns hidden in different results, as well as analyzing big masses of data. Therefore, such a system might identify some patterns in the exoplanets that researchers might fail to see. At the same time, it can run a scan of all the conditions at the same time.

The alien searching AI can assess multiple exoplanets at the same time

In other words, it can tell if all the given exoplanets are habitable or not. Such a process usually takes time, so human researchers took long to come up with results for one single planet. Now, the alien searching AI can do it for all planets at the same time. Once it finds a planet with a high percentage, it selects and focuses on its special conditions.

Researchers taught the alien searching AI to separate planets into five groups. These groups are named after the planet or cosmic object they resemble the most. Therefore, the categories are Earth, early Earth, Venus, Mars, and Titan, one of Saturn’s natural satellites. Even if the quest for life is actually longer, the AI brought valuable results and helped with a better categorization of exoplanets.

Image source: NASA

Social media apparently thrives on lies, especially Twitter. According to a massive new study, fake news on the social media network travels six times faster than truth and reaches far more people.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed every major contested news story in English from Twitter’s inception up to 2016, including about 126 thousand stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than a decade. Throughout this time, the study found that fake news spread through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information”.

According to the lead author of the study, Soroush Vosoughi, of MIT, who has studied fake news since 2013, false information “outperforms” true information and the reason may lie in human nature rather than social media bots.

The scientists said that the average fake news story takes about 10 hours to reach 1.500 Twitter users, while true information takes about 60 hours to reach the same number of users. This would mean that false information reaches 35 percent more people than true news, the study said.

In addition, researchers found that true stories rarely get retweeted to more than one thousand people while the top 1 percent of false stories reached as many as 100 thousand people.

When looking at how stories link from one user to another, the study revealed that deceitful information got to as many as 24 generations, while true ones barely spread to a dozen.

The concept of fake news has been debated and analyzed more extensively in recent months ever since evidence surfaced of Russia’s repeated attempts to spread disinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign to damage Hillary Clinton.

While the researchers admitted that the study was funded by Twitter, the social media platform has not commented on the recent findings. However, the company did admit earlier this month that they need help from outside experts to better deal with the issue.

The study was published in the journal, Science.

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Users spend -0.12% less time on Facebook, according to the official report of the social network for the fourth quarter of 2017. Mark Zuckerberg claims that this is a reflection of the recent content changes brought to Facebook.

 

Facebook recently published its activity report for Q4 of 2017. Among the report highlights was the 20% rise, which led to a $4.23 billion profit or $1.44 a share.

 

The social network’s profit might have also reportedly been higher if not for the tax charge. This seemingly led to a 77 cents a share decrease.

 

Facebook was charged with tax provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which were due for payment on January 1st, 2018. The tax reduced the corporate income tax rate to 21%, according to the report. Also, the Facebook provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion.

 

The company’s total revenue rose by 47% and reached 12.97 billion. Expectations were around $12.55, based on the people responded to a Yahoo Finance poll.

 

Around 89% of Facebook’s total ad sales came from mobile ads, which shows that companies and customers are more focused on mobile traffic than on desktop usage.

 

Less Time on Facebook, the Company’s Target?

 

Facebook’s CEO recently announced three updates to Facebook’s algorithm and specialists say at least one change is due to come.

 

“2017 was a strong year for Facebook, but it was also a hard one. Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent… In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day”, said Mark Zuckerberg.

 

The CEO and founder of Facebook also mentioned that the community would be stronger on the long term, as planned. Reportedly, the average time spent on Facebook declined by 2 minutes per each of its 1.4 billion daily users.

 

Image source: Pixabay

Jess Cliffe, the co-creator of Counter-Strike, a successful video game, was arrested and accused of having sexually exploited a child. According to reports, he has yet to be charged. The Police did not issue any comments on the case by the time this article was published.

 

According to a record obtained by news sources, Cliffe was booked for arrest Thursday, at 1:17 AM PT in the King County Jail. He was denied bail but was also not charged with any crime.

 

Little information has been currently revealed. Cliffe is reportedly expected to have a bail hearing on Friday afternoon.

 

He is now suspended from his activity as a computer game designer for the Valve Corporation.

 

“We are still learning details of what actually happened. Reports suggest he has been arrested for a felony offense. As such we have suspended his employment until we know more”, said a spokesperson for Valve Corp.

 

Jess Cliffe Doesn’t Have a Criminal Background

 

Jess Cliffe has been working for Valve Corporation since 2003. He does not have a criminal history, and the police have made no prior visits to his home before this arrest, according to reports.

 

Cliffe’s only other encounter with authorities was back in 2013 when he pleaded not guilty to assault charges. These charges were later dismissed.

 

Cliffe created the famous Counter-Strike together with Minh Le in 1999, while a student at Virginia Tech.

 

The video game went to become a worldwide success. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a newer version of the game, currently has more than 500,000 players and over 1,7 million reviews.

 

CS players might also know Cliffe for his being the voice behind the phrase Counter-Terrorists Win! The game involves counter-terrorists who are trying to prevent a terrorist attack.

 

Image source: Wikimedia

Facebook representatives have announced a new change to the social platform’s network algorithms, which will now show more local news and posts from local publisher, according to a new blog post. It is the third change in a series of Facebook updates released since the start of the year.

 

From now on, the Facebook newsfeed should show more local news, which might have a direct impact on users and/or their communities. This update will also include local events.

 

The new algorithm will identify local publishers by correlating them with readers from a specific area. It will then make them more visible both to users that already liked the page as well as to their friends.

 

This new algorithm is first being tested in the US and will likely be utilized in other countries later on.

 

Also, users can choose the sources of their news with the See First feature. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, posted that this new update comes as a response to the users’ feedback.

 

“Many people told me they thought that if we could turn down the temperature on the more divisive issues and instead focus on concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together”, he explained.

 

A new dedicated section is also being tested as it was introduced through this latest update. Today In, as it is called, will show more news and information from the users’ communities. It is currently available in only six US cities.

 

Also recently, Zuckerberg announced that the Facebook newsfeed would show fewer posts from pages, in benefit of meaningful interactions with friends. This came as the first major update in the current series. The second targeted the fact that news must be trustworthy and informative to be visible.

 

There are More Facebook Updates on the Way

 

Experts from the digital industry consider that at least one new announcement from Facebook should be released sometime soon. They consider that future Facebook updates need to further explain how informative content actually works and will be selected.

 

Other specialists state that Facebook representatives need to explain the trustworthiness aspect, to make these changes perfectly clear.

 

The Facebook algorithm will have to come with a method of avoiding fake news, even if they’re local ones.

 

Some also believe that it is hard to point out if this latest change will significantly help local publishers. As it is, these should gain exposure, which could well be a win-win for both parties involved.

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Tesla Inc. is planning on powering the Australian outback with the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery starting from December 1st. The 100-megawatt battery can store enough energy to power thirty thousand homes for approximately one hour.

The company won a bid this summer to build the battery for South Australia, with Tesla Inc.’s CEO, Elon Musk, promising to install it within 100 days of signing the agreement. Musk said in a Twitter post back in March, that he could install the battery within that time limit or else it would be free.

Tesla Inc. is reportedly on track to meet the deadline. The grid connection deal was signed on September 29 and by then the company was half-way through installing the battery packs.
“The world’s largest lithium-ion battery will be an important part of our energy mix,” stated South Australia’s Premier, Jay Weatherhill.

Musk offered to help Australia prevent its electricity blackouts as they have been a topic of debate as of late. South Australia is the country’s most wind power-dependent state, a factor which Musk took into consideration. The battery can store power produced both by the wind and the sun which is then released into the grid when blackouts occur.

Australia’s energy market operator has warned that this summer will take a toll on power production, especially in South Australia and its neighboring state, Victoria.
The state hasn’t revealed yet how it will pay for the lithium battery, which is part of a $510 million plan to solve the Australian energy crisis.

Tesla Inc. acquired solar-power provider, SolarCity Corp, last year which was a valuable investment for Musk considering his long term prospects regarding clean energy. The entrepreneur believes a combination of those two clean energy technologies will be able to eliminate the need for fossil fuels.

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