Why you’ll never again fully trust that it’s a real person on the other end of the phone line, Equifax responds to an investigation into its data breach with new details, and some leaked details on a big smartphone launch coming next week.
 |
 |
 |
Trending on Twitter, Google Duplex is an AI system that can book appointments over the phone. If you’re like me, you’ve been talking to your Google Assistant or Google Home for awhile now. Well, Google has put all that speech data to good use and has delivered a natural language processing system that sounds completely conversational. Unveiled yesterday at its Google IO conference, the assistant is smart enough to phone a business and schedule an appointment for you. Just listen to this example of it booking a haircut.
https://twitter.com/jmorse_/status/993908955792326656
And that capability is coming to your Google Assistant as early as this summer, to help you schedule a trim, make restaurant reservations, or request business hours.
Trending on Reddit, we now know even more about just how bad last year’s Equifax data breach was. So as a reminder, we knew that 146.6 million people were affected by this breach. That hasn’t changed, but now we know that 38,000 American driver’s licences and 3,200 passports were exposed in the breach too. That adds to the stockpile of information we already knew about, including 145.5 million social security numbers and 209,000 payment cards. Equifax blames the breach on the actions of one employee, running an old version of Apache Struts. Something tells me the U.S. congressional committees investigating this may decide the blame goes a bit further than that.
Trending on Google, new details about the OnePlus 6 smartphone have leaked. OnePlus is holding a May 16 launch event in London and Canada is expected to get this phone sometime in June. This company has a reputation for offering premium smartphone hardware at a reduced price compared to the big brands like Apple and Samsung. Here’s what we know: it will have 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. There’s a glass back, a fingerprint scanner, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The screen is AMOLED, and the camera is likely to support slo-mo video.
That’s what’s trending today. Hashtag Trending is produced by the ITWC Podcast Network. If you enjoy Hashtag Trending, please be sure to give us a rating and a review on Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.