Google Home Max coming to Canada on May 16 for $499

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Toronto - Smart speakers come in a number of varieties. You have the cheaper hockey-puck sized mini speakers that connect to the Internet easily enought but, because of their size, don't sound great. You have the larger coffee mug sized speakers that sound a bit better but only have so much room to accomodate bass. At the top end, you get the large smart speakers that are geared towards bigger sound with more complex audio capabilities.

All these speakers do the same thing and some even allow you to hook up to your existing loudspeakers to get that Hi-Fi sound. For homes that don't have a high-fidelity speaker, Google is offering its Google Home Max speaker as the one to rule them all.

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LG adds Google Assistant support to its new TVs

The new LG C8 OLED TV can run Google Assistant

If you own LG’s 2018 OLED and Super UHD LCD TVs, you now have access to Google Assistant. This was first announced at CES 2018 but is now made live to coincide with Google I/O. What Google Assistant brings to LG is being able to talk to your TV and control it as well as control any other compatible smart home devices—including almost 100 smart appliances from LG alone. Combining Google’s tech with LG’s ThinQ tech, you can speak through the built-in microphone on the remote and have it do things like find and play content, do web searches, switch picture modes, turn off the TV, and control the sound bar. If you own a Google Home speaker and connected it to your TV, you don’t even need to use the remote.

Source: CNET

You can soon play Steam games on Android and iOS with Valve's Steam Link app

Video game distribution platform Steam is looking to give you access to your purchased games on your mobile devices with an app it’s releasing on the week of May 21. Valve Steam Link will give you access to your games on both Android and iOS—and it’s not limited to phones but includes tablets and Android/Apple TV, too. The app will be free for download.

There are a few things to take note of, though. You will only be able to play if your device is connected to a 5GHz Wi-Fi network or hard-wired through Ethernet to make sure it’s connected to your PC/Mac. In terms of controller support, Valve said it’ll support the Steam Controller and MFI controllers and “more across both platforms” but it hasn’t released specifics beyond these.

Source: Android Central

Google’s Duplex phone call-making AI needs to identify itself

One of the attention grabbing announcements at this year’s Google I/O is Duplex, an artificial intelligence service that will make calls for you when you want to do things like setup an appointment for a haircut or asking about a business’ operating hours. The demo at the conference showed two replayed calls with small business employees that don’t seem to have caught on they were talking to a bot. As explained on Google’s blog post about the technology, the company is trying to make the technology sound natural. But it doesn’t address the issue of disclosure or whether it’ll alert those on the other end of the line that they are talking to a bot.

Fast Company reached out to Google and the company repeated part of the blog post saying: “It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that. We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.” And when they wanted to further clarify that the Duplex will identify itself as a bot, the representative reiterated the last sentence so we have to wait and see what Google does with the technology and that they remain aware of the implications or any issues that may arise with this new tech it’s introducing.