Google Home brings the fight to Amazon Alexa

Google Home is taking the fight to Amazon Alexa with a slew of new features including its own calling feature (as we reported earlier). What’s more, Google Home now also gets access to the free tier service of Spotify and support for SoundCloud and Deezer, among other music and radio services. The smart speaker now also supports HBO Now, Crackle, and Hulu. Google also adds Bluetooth connectivity from any compatible device, including the iPhone.

Aside from these, one of the new big features is what the company calls Proactive Assistance. Google Home will identify important information you might want to know and as the name suggests, it will light up on its own to let you know that it has something to tell you. An example shown at Google I/O demo was that it’ll alert you if you need to leave a bit earlier because of traffic in your area. Google promises to roll out these features slowly and will add more capabilities over time.

Source: BGR

How the Smartphone has reinvented basic marketing

 

There was a time not so long ago, where the thought of creating a good quality marketing video meant spending a huge amount of money. As a minimum, you would need to buy a fairly expensive video recorder, tripod and microphone. Once you had recorded your content, you would then need to use costly editing software to get the video output into a finished shape.

Alternatively, you could contact a professional video production team to create your video for you. While the end product would no doubt be of good quality, the thousands that it set you back would ensure that you had no budget left for anything else that year. To put it bluntly, producing videos was too expensive for many businesses to consider, especially the ones who didn’t have a big marketing budget or startups that hadn’t amassed any significant profit yet.

Click to read more ...

Google Home will be able to make calls to US and Canada

Google Home has speakers, it has a microphone and it is connected to the Internet and has all your gMail info. Soon, it will be able to take all of these capabilities and put them to good use by taking calls. You will soon be able to make voice calls to anyone in the US or Canada. It's not clear if this is a regional feature or if Canadian Google Home devices will be able to use the feature. 

Source: Google

Instagram isn’t done taking Snapchat's features, introduces ‘face filters’

Instagram adds one more missing piece to its Story feature: Snapchat lenses. Those augmented reality-based filters that lets you add things like bunny ears or a dog’s snout on you. Of course, Instagram can’t call these lenses so they opt to call them “face filters.” You can access the feature at the bottom right of the Story window. It looks like a face icon with sparkles on them. And just like Snapchat lenses, you can go through the different filters to play around with.

As Mashable’s Raymond Wong points out, this blatant copying of Snapchat might not look good but it has been paying off for Facebook. Last month, Instagram garnered 200 million daily active users using Stories, which is already more than the entire daily active user base of Snapchat.