Amazon Prime Music brings Alexa hands-free functionality to mobile devices

Starting today, Prime Music is bringing Alexa wake word capability to the Amazon Music mobile app, providing customers with a full integration of voice capabilities. Now, when customers open the Amazon Music app, they can ask Alexa to play music wherever they go without touching to talk – a completely hands-free listening experience!

When the Amazon Music app is open and in the foreground on any iOS and Android smartphones, customers can safely utilize all of the innovative voice features they use on Echo devices to play music by mood, genre, artist or song title and much more, no searching or browsing required. Customers can now simply say “Alexa”, to play, pause, move back and forth between songs, and much more.

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IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty says AI needs to, "augment human intelligence, not replace it."

Echoing the sentiments of Microsoft's Satya Nadella, IBM's CEO Ginny Rometty recently stressed the need for ethical quidance for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Technoplogy leaders know the importance of keeping a technology as world changing as machine learning and AI (Artificial Intelligence), which are set to impact every industry as well as replace millions of jobs.

“At IBM, we fundamentally believe in the power of technology to make our world a better place to live, and to benefit the lives of the many, not just the few,” Rometty said in a prepared statement before her keynote at the high proficle Viva Technology conference in Paris yesterday. “We all have a responsibility to use innovation to make a difference, and through Call for Code our collective goal is to help people in need and build a better future.”

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Samsung might be using Wear OS for upcoming smartwatches

Is Samsung ditching Tizen for Wear OS?

The Samsung Galaxy Gear and Gear Live were the last Android Wear-powered smartwatches Samsung released before shifting to its own Tizen operating system. That might change soon, though. According to Evan Blass (a.k.a. @evleaks), Samsung employees have been spotted wearing Gear watches that were Wear OS-powered instead of Tizen-powered.

It has been rumoured that Samsung was planning to rebrand its Gear smartwatches. The company has even applied for trademarks on the names Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Fit. But with these new rumors, it looks like they might even be thinking of dropping its own operating system in favor of the rebranded Wear OS platform. Samsung hasn't released a smartphone in a while, so it should be interesting to see what they plan to do with this.

Source: Android Central

Twitter kills off Android TV, Roku, and Xbox apps

Twitter has been slowly culling and consolidating its official apps and is getting rid of some third-party API features. The latest victims are the apps for Android TV, Roku, and Xbox apps. These apps let users watch live streams and view Moments. These apps haven't been updated in a while so it doesn't come as a surprise that Twitter is ending development for them. If you are using these versions of Twitter, you have until tomorrow, May 24th, to use them.

Source: Android Police