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Google Voice has an incredibly useful function that provides you with a transcribed version of your voicemail—but if often gets things wrong. Now, Google is throwing neural networks at the problem to help improve its performance dramatically. The service now uses Google’s recurrent neural networks, similar to those used by Google’s voice search in Chrome…
The Google Maps lady might sound all friendly and helpful, but like any mom, she gets real sassy if you keep asking her if you’re there yet. As spotted by Android Police, the latest version of Google Maps for Android is hiding a neat Easter Egg. In turn-by-turn navigation mode, there’s a microphone button so…
Motorola won’t be officially launching the new version of its venerable budget smartphone until next week, but it might as well cancel the event: thanks to an accidental leak on Moto’s site, we already have all the details. https://gizmodo.com/the-best-cheap-smartphone-for-every-off-contract-need-1671295476 The Moto Maker page for the new phone was briefly live on Motorola’s site — certainly,…
My first, unwrinkled brain reaction: Oh my God, that man is on fire. Like, flames are coming out of his body on fire. And he’s surfing! And doing things that aren’t get these flames that are coming out of my body off my body. I don’t know about you but if I see myself on…
As the EU’s self-appointed morality police, Germany publicly spanked Greece earlier this month for being so financially frivolous. Well, Germany has its own money troubles! Namely, a catastrophe-riddled $6 billion airport that the country continues to pour money into—with no opening date in sight. Scheiße! This week’s Businessweek engages in some A+ finger-pointing to call…
Watch as airplanes cut straight through Paris as they fly right on top of Champ-Elysses and hit all the landmarks of Paris, from La Defense to the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre and everything in between. The footage gets a little jittery at times and almost looks fake, but it’s so cool to rip…
The infrastructure being built for Qatar’s World Cup is using the most cutting-edge construction technologies. Yet due to the poor treatment of migrant workers, an estimated 4,000 people could die building it. A new timeline of construction deaths shows this inconsistency throughout history: Even though construction methods have improved over time, worker conditions don’t always…
A U.S. Appeals court just ruled that butt-dials (your phone calling a random contact due to, generally, contact with your butt) are not protected under federal wire-tapping law—which means that your inadvertent communications can be used against you. The case centered around a former Northern Kentucky airport board chairman who accidentally dialed the assistant of…
Twenty miles off the coast of Ventura lies Santa Cruz Island — a remote mecca for adventure. We spent a weekend exploring it. Here’s how you can too. After having a two week and nearly 200 mile sufferfest on the Sierra High Route, I needed to relax. My idea of relaxation, however, is kayaking around…
Pretty new touchscreen voting booths are nice, but if we truly want to get more people voting in this country, we have to make it much more convenient. A project that received funding from the Knight Foundation this week has a smart idea to digitize the absentee ballot and let people mail votes via smartphone.…
The latest shot in in the brewing livestreaming app war has been fired by Meerkat. You can now stream footage to the service from your GoPro, which is both useful and cool. The GoPro-Meerkat integration is currently in Beta, and though we can’t try it this second (our GoPros are in a moving crates on…
Bungie’s sci-fi shooter Destiny isn’t without its faults. In fact, it has many faults. But one thing you can rarely knock about it is the game’s awesome armor designs. Now those lovely armors are going to be turned into a line of incredible Destiny 1/6th scale action figures by the fine folks at 3A. 3A…
Taking selfies with wild animals is utterly moronic, and yet that fact isn’t dissuading Yellowstone tourists from trying to snap smiling vacation photos alongside bison. On Tuesday, a 43-year-old Mississippian woman attempting this misguided stunt was charged by the angry animal and tossed in the air before escaping. This latest Yellowstone bison victim, who had…
Stop hoping that Pluto will regain its former designation as a planet. It isn’t going to happen. But the good news is, Pluto is something much cooler than a mere planet. It’s the largest dwarf planet we know, and one half of the first binary planet system. Pluto didn’t get demoted, it got promoted. We’re…
Sometimes you should fight for what you love and keep on trying to make things work and never stop chasing it down but once that’s over and you’ve reached your limit or realized the expiration date already hit, you should let it go. Life works better that way. And in this short animation, a boy…
The dream of teledildonics, or having sex over the internet using remote-controlled sex toys, has been around since the 1990s. Every once in a while, new companies try to perfect the technology, so that you can enhance your sexting with a little something extra. But now the dream is about to die — thanks to…
How could anyone, young or old, be picky about what they eat when they’re chowing down on dinner using a pair of easy hinged chopsticks with a chomping T-rex head on one end? This brilliant alternative to a fork from Fred & Friends has a spring mechanism inside so even novice chopstick users can get…
On Monday the Smithsonian Institution launched a Kickstarter campaign to preserve astronaut Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit. Now with over $420,000 raised and a healthy 26 days left, the campaign is on track to easily exceed its $500,000 goal. But the Smithsonian’s road to crowdfunding success has been a long and bumpy one. Update: July…
Next week is going to be an absolute onslaught of tech—Oneplus Two, Moto X, and finally Windows 10. Before we’re consumed in all that gadget-y goodness, let’s take a look during the dying days of this week at some of the great software recently making all our smartphones even better. Android Pause Paste was one…
The increasing popularity of hobby drones poses myriad challenges to the skies, but as the Wall Street Journal reports, they’ve given rise to one that’s more surprising than any other: How do you take a drone down when you need to? Last week, hobby drones flying over a California wildfire prevented firefighters from being able…
