Snips lets you build your own voice assistant to embed into your devices

 French startup Snips is now helping you build a custom voice assistant for your device. Snips doesn’t use Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service or Google Assistant SDK — the company is building its own voice assistant so that you can embed it on your devices. And the best part is that it doesn’t send anything to the cloud as it works offline. If you want to understand how a… Read More

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Best Dell Laptops, Chromebooks, and Tablets

Dell laptops consistently rank at the top of reviews and recommendations. You can rely on most of their offerings to be good. But some are better than the others. These are the best Dell laptops, Chromebooks, or tablets you can buy today. There are a number of reasons to go for a name-brand laptop. You will get a higher resale value when you upgrade. Common issues with the device are addressed on the internet. And you get better after-sales service than what a small brand would do. Dell’s wide variety of machines also makes it easy to find the right...

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Facebook will show which Russian election troll accounts you followed

 Facebook is building out a tool to show which Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts associated with Russian Internet Research Agency election troll farm you Liked or followed. Launching by the end of the year as part of the Facebook Help Center, the tool will show a list of all the IRA accounts you followed. The IRA is a group based in St. Petersburg, Russia with ties to Kremlin. It’s… Read More
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Minted rolls out an on-demand photography service for around $100 per session

 When you go through a big life event — say a milestone birthday for a parent or a wedding — there are probably going to be a lot of mini-events that happen before and after the big one. But you might not think to hire a professional photographer for them and stick with a couple phone cameras because it can be tough to find those photographers. So Minted, a company that’s… Read More

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Surprise Everyone With the Perfect Gift Cards This Christmas

Holiday shopping can be fun, but it can also be a huge hassle. Between figuring out what to buy everyone, fighting the crowds, and searching for deals, who has the energy? Plus, you never know if the gift you buy is what they really want or can even use. This year, do all your shopping in one place and get the gifts you know friends and family will like: gift cards. These awesome websites let you shop until you drop without crowds or sale-hunting. Exclusive Gift Card Shops Online gift card stores that sell only that item can make your...

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How to Use Microsoft OneNote for Work

Microsoft OneNote is a powerful free tool to capture your digital and handwritten notes. However, it can do so much more than that. OneNote is particularly useful for workplace productivity. Below, we’ll look at five ways you can use OneNote to get more done at work. 1. Use Quick Notes to Save Your Best Ideas Like many people, you probably get some of your brightest work-related ideas at the most unexpected times. Maybe they pop into your head during a commute or when you’re in the shower. Work is something individuals think about a lot. Fortunately, OneNote has a built-in...

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3 Blockchain Credit Agencies Changing Our Relationship With Money

The Equifax data breach was shocking for several reasons. For many people, Equifax perfectly illustrated a major problem with personal and private data protection. An agency that exists solely to collect deeply personal credit information is found wanting. And then again, in the aftermath, the recovery site is redirected to a malicious page. We could keep talking about Equifax all day. But at this juncture, it is time to look forward to the lessons we can learn. Better still, we can talk about the technology that will stop another Equifax-style loss of data taking place. This article is going to...

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10 macOS High Sierra Productivity Features You Should Know About

From the outside, macOS High Sierra does not look like a groundbreaking update. Even judging by the name, it seems like a small upgrade over macOS Sierra. But when you dig deeper, you find that this update is filled with new technologies and little features that put an end to longtime annoyances. Some of these new features will help you be more productive. Here are the 10 new macOS High Sierra features you should know about. 1. Auto Reader in Safari Safari’s Reader mode gets a big update in High Sierra. You can now tell Safari to always open a...

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How to Recover a Lost Partition in Windows

We’ve all experienced that feeling of dread when an important file or folder isn’t where you expect it to be. Normally, the problems are caused by user error. You’ve probably accidentally moved it or renamed it. But sometimes, the underlying issue is more serious. That feeling of dread can quickly turn to one of absolute panic. The number of potential causes for missing or inaccessible files or folders is almost endless; it’s impossible to cover them all in one article. Instead, in this piece, we’re going to look at one specific example: lost partitions. How Does a Partition Become “Lost”?...

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PacketZoom lands $5M Series A investment to speed up mobile apps

 PacketZoom, a startup that helps app developers speed up and optimize app delivery on mobile devices, announced a $5M Series A today. The round was led by Baseline Ventures with participation from First Round Capital, Tandem Capital and Arafura Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $9M, according to Crunchbase. The company combines a content delivery network (CDN)… Read More

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Facebook’s ad system shown failing to enforce its own anti-discriminatory policy

 Results from a new ProPublica investigation suggest the tech giant is failing at even simple self-policing. Read More
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How to Share Your Location With Contacts in WhatsApp

Sharing your location with a contact can be extremely useful if you’re lost or if your car has broken down in an area you’re not familiar with. Rather than try to explain to someone where you are, you can easily share your location with them using a smartphone. You can share your location using a variety of apps including Google Maps, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and more. If you’re preferred messenger app is WhatsApp, sharing your location with a contact, or a group, is pretty easy. Just do the following: Open up a chat conversation with the group or individual contact you...

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3 New Ways to Customize in Firefox Quantum

Firefox’s completely revamped version, Firefox Quantum, has arrived. This new age of Firefox brings speed improvements, a fresh new look, and less resource usage. If you’ve just upgraded to Quantum, you should know a few quick ways to customize your browser. These either weren’t in older versions of Firefox or have changed in Quantum. First, make sure you have Quantum installed. Visit Menu > Help > About Firefox to check for updates if you already have Firefox installed, or grab a fresh copy from Mozilla’s website if you’re new to Firefox. Once you have Quantum, select the three-bar Menu icon...

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How to Remove Local Copies of OneDrive Files Without Deleting Them

We’ve previously shown you how to use OneDrive to access all your Windows files from anywhere in the world, and now it’s time to introduce you to another cool OneDrive feature: Files On-Demand. Files On-Demand is a new feature in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. It lets you decide how you want to access files in your OneDrive account. Your choices are: Online-Only Files: These files don’t take up space on your machine. You can only access them when you have an internet connection. They are marked using a cloud icon. Locally Available Files: These are former online-only files that...

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AppLovin scraps acquisition and takes debt financing instead

 The story of AppLovin‘s acquisition has taken another turn. We first reported that the mobile ad startup was in acquisition talks in August of last year, and the announcement came a month later: AppLovin would sell a majority stake Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. Today, however, CEO Adam Foroughi revealed that the deal is (sort of) off. Instead of an outright… Read More

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You Can Now Send 4K Photos Using Facebook Messenger

Facebook is introducing a new feature aimed at smartphone photographers. Which describes 99% of us. Facebook is upping the maximum resolution Messenger supports, from 2K to 4K, meaning you can now send and receive photos at full resolution without Messenger compressing them. I’m old enough to remember a time when viewing a photo online would cost you both time and money. Time, because said photo took an age to load, and money, because metered internet connections were evil. And now, in 2017, you can send 4K photos using Facebook Messenger. What a time to be alive. Smartphone Photography Is Everything...

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You can now request to join someone’s Instagram live stream

 Instagram just rolled out a neat feature for its live product. Users can now request to join a live stream that they’re watching and if accepted, can start broadcasting live as the host’s guest. To request to join a live video a viewer can tap a request button in the comments section. Hosts see the request pop up in real time and can accept or deny, and also have access to a list… Read More
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Google Lens in the Assistant starts rolling out to all Pixel users

 We knew this was only a matter of time, but Google today confirmed that Google Lens as part of the Google Assistant is now rolling out to all Pixel phone owners. That’s something Google already announced at its hardware event, but until now, the timing was unclear. If you don’t see it when you call up the Google Assistant, though, don’t worry. The company says that this… Read More

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Google Lens in the Assistant starts rolling out to all Pixel users

 We knew this was only a matter of time, but Google today confirmed that Google Lens as part of the Google Assistant is now rolling out to all Pixel phone owners. That’s something Google already announced at its hardware event, but until now, the timing was unclear. If you don’t see it when you call up the Google Assistant, though, don’t worry. The company says that this… Read More
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10 excellent battery pack gifts for your friend whose phone always dies

 After putting our favorite battery packs in various gift guides over the years, we decided to go all out this year and do a gift guide JUST for battery packs. I consider myself something of a battery pack aficionado, so I decided to step up to the plate and lay out some of my favorites. Read More

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This DIY project lets you catch a falling muon

 Physicists at MIT have developed and released a $100 muon detector that you can build at home, allowing you to sense deep space bombardment on something that looks like a TV remote. The CosmicWatch is basically a little box that can detect high-energy cosmic rays as they hit the Earth’s atmosphere and decay into muons. Muons hit the Earth in a “light drizzle” say the… Read More

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Understanding Medical Conversations

Posted by Katherine Chou, Product Manager and Chung-Cheng Chiu, Software Engineer, Google Brain Team

Good documentation helps create good clinical care by communicating a doctor's thinking, their concerns, and their plans to the rest of the team. Unfortunately, physicians routinely spend more time doing documentation than doing what they love most — caring for patients. Part of the reason is that doctors spend ~6 hours in an 11-hour workday in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) on documentation.¹ Consequently, one study found that more than half of surveyed doctors report at least one symptom of burnout.²

In order to help offload note-taking, many doctors have started using medical scribes as a part of their workflow. These scribes listen to the patient-doctor conversations and create notes for the EHR. According to a recent study, introducing scribes not only improved physician satisfaction, but also medical chart quality and accuracy.³ But the number of doctor-patient conversations that need a scribe is far beyond the capacity of people who are available for medical scribing.

We wondered: could the voice recognition technologies already available in Google Assistant, Google Home, and Google Translate could be used to document patient-doctor conversations and help doctors and scribes summarize notes more quickly?

In “Speech Recognition for Medical Conversations”, we show that it is possible to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for transcribing medical conversations. While most of the current ASR solutions in medical domain focus on transcribing doctor dictations (i.e., single speaker speech consisting of predictable medical terminology), our research shows that it is possible to build an ASR model which can handle multiple speaker conversations covering everything from weather to complex medical diagnosis.

Using this technology, we will start working with physicians and researchers at Stanford University, who have done extensive research on how scribes can improve physician satisfaction, to understand how deep learning techniques such as ASR can facilitate the scribing process of physician notes. In our pilot study, we investigate what types of clinically relevant information can be extracted from medical conversations to assist physicians in reducing their interactions with the EHR. The study is fully patient-consented and the content of the recording will be de-identified to protect patient privacy.

We hope these technologies will not only help return joy to practice by facilitating doctors and scribes with their everyday workload, but also help the patients get more dedicated and thorough medical attention, ideally, leading to better care.

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1 http://ift.tt/2xuPvy1^↩
2 http://ift.tt/1TlbojH^↩
3 http://ift.tt/2mPT11p^↩

You Can Now Play Animal Crossing on Android and iOS

The Animal Crossing series, which has been delighting gamers since 2001, has gone mobile. The new game, the first to be released on anything other than a Nintendo console, is called Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. And it’s out now on Android and iOS, a day earlier than expected. Not content with owning handheld gaming, Nintendo is trying to find a home on your smartphone too. It kicked things off with Super Mario Run, before launching Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s working on a mobile Legend of Zelda game as well. In the meantime there’s Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp… Animal Crossing Camps...

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