Hashtag Trending- U.S. sues scam callers; Microsoft’s $40 million AI health care plan; Google’s new chat client

It’s a good news day in tech today. The U.S. is once again curbing annoying robocalls, Microsoft revealed a new 40 million initiative to improve healthcare in AI, and Google trying to create a beefier chat client for the workspace.

Hashtag Trending on Amazon Alexa Google Podcasts badge - 200 px wide

Thank you for tuning in to Hashtag Trending, it’s Thursday, January 30th, and I’m your host, Tom Li

Trending on Reddit, The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a massive lawsuit against five U.S. companies for scam calls. Most of these companies place the calls from India and prefer to use VoIP systems to abuse callers. According to the Justice Department, the calls, disguised as calls from government and social services, have caused “massive financial losses to elderly and vulnerable victims across the nation”. The amount of calls generated is staggering. TollFreeDeals.com, a company named in the lawsuit, placed 720 million calls in just 23 days.

Trending on Google, Microsoft has launched a new $40 million initiative to fund AI in healthcare. The new funding is exclusively for non-profits and research centers. Over the course of the next five years, Microsoft will distribute the money towards enabling technologies that would help the diagnosis and treatment of deadly ailments. In addition, Microsoft would also supply the research facilities with access to their cloud tools and expert data scientists.

Trending on Reddit, Google is back once again with a new instant messaging app. So far, Google has tried its hands in Allo, Hangouts, Duo, Messages as well as a number of older projects. This time though, it’s looking to harmonize Google Drive, Gmail, and Hangouts into a single platform for the office. Oh, by the way, Google will start shutting down Hangouts this year for consumers. If you’re a Gsuite subscriber, you can download the Hangouts Chat messaging client instead. For everyone else, you can transition to the Google Messages app.

That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Tom Li, thanks for listening.

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada
Tom Li
Tom Li
Telecommunication and consumer hardware are Tom's main beats at IT World Canada. He loves to talk about Canada's network infrastructure, semiconductor products, and of course, anything hot and new in the consumer technology space. You'll also occasionally see his name appended to articles on cloud, security, and SaaS-related news. If you're ever up for a lengthy discussion about the nuances of each of the above sectors or have an upcoming product that people will love, feel free to drop him a line at tli@itwc.ca.

ITWC podcast network

Subscribe to ITWC podcasts and never fall behind on the conversation in technology again. Our daily podcasts are perfect to add to your smart speaker’s daily briefing or to your favourite podcast app on your smartphone. 

Cyber Security Today Podcast

#Hashtag Trending Podcast