Google Photos Now Helps You Relive Your Memories

Google Photos now boasts a feature called Memories. These use the Stories format you’ll be familiar with from social media, but with your own photos and videos. The aim being to remind you of days gone by, helping you relive your memories.

Your Smartphone Is Your Best Camera

With smartphone cameras being so powerful these days, many of us use our smartphone as our primary device for shooting photographs. And it’s easy to rack up hundreds of photos in a single day. And over the years these then rack up in their thousands.

Without a dedicated app it would be tough to manage all of these shots. However, Google Photos does all of the hard work for you, backing up and managing your photos for you. And now Google Photos has gained a new feature designed to jog your memory.

How to Use Google Photos Memories

Google unveiled Memories on The Keyword. The company explains that Memories is designed to put “your memories front and center in Google Photos,” with your media “privately presented to you so you can sit back and enjoy some of your best moments.”

Now, it’s easier than ever to relive your best moments.

Rolling out today, you can take a stroll down memory lane right from Google Photos with our new Memories feature. See the highlights from this week over the years. https://t.co/FBtRk2DTQe pic.twitter.com/vG1A210vOg

— Google Photos (@googlephotos) September 12, 2019

Memories puts photos and videos from previous years at the top of your gallery. You’ll see circular galleries at the top, labelled “1 year ago,” “2 years ago,” etc. Click on one and you’ll be shown a selection of photos and videos from this day in the past.

In addition to Memories, Google has added several other new features to Photos. The first is a new search function allowing you search for the text in your photos. For example, a search for “carrot cake” should bring up your mom’s recipe.

In the US you can also now order prints from Google Photos and pick them up on the same day from CVS Pharmacy or Walmart. And if you’d prefer a bigger copy of a photo to hang on the wall, you can now order canvas prints and have them delivered to your home.

Other Amazing Google Photos Features

Memories is a great feature. As it’s so easy to shoot photos with a smartphone, there’s a tendency to forget about them. Memories should prompt more people to look back at their best shots. So we’ll add it to our list of amazing Google Photos features.

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Amazon Wants You to Help Make Alexa Smarter

While Alexa can answer a lot of different questions, there are still gaps in her knowledge. Amazon would like Alexa to know the answer to every single question. And the company is asking for your help in making that happen using Alexa Answers.

Right now, it’s possible to argue that Alexa is stupid. Certainly as stupid as other “smart” assistants such as Siri and Cortana. The point is they all have their limitations, which means it’s really easy to trip them up with a difficult question.

How to Get Started Using Alexa Answers

Amazon’s answer to this is to ask you to help make Alexa smarter. In December 2018, Amazon launched Alexa Answers as an invitation-only program. The idea being to teach Alexa new things by crowdsourcing the task to Alexa users.

Now, Amazon is opening Alexa Answers up to everyone who wants to get involved. All you need to do is visit the Alexa Answers website and sign in. You can then browse questions until you find one you can answer, and submit the necessary information.

I’m working on some new sloth jokes. It’s off to a slow start. pic.twitter.com/N1fk4fLvrq

— Alexa (@alexa99) September 10, 2019

Amazon has added an element of gamification to Alexa Answers. This means you’ll earn points every time Alexa shares one of your answers. You’ll also be able to track how many answers you’ve contributed, how many times Alexa has shared your answers, and more.

To guard against trolls and misinformation Alexa Answers will rely on a combination of human moderators, automated filters, and a rating system for answers. And Alexa will add that an answer is “according to an Amazon customer” in case it’s wrong.

The Funniest Questions You Can Ask Alexa

Alexa Answers is a sensible solution to the problem of making Alexa smarter. While Google can use its indexing system to find the answers to questions, Amazon doesn’t have that luxury. We just have to hope that Alexa users are both intelligent and trustworthy.

We assume you’ve spent at least a few minutes firing questions at Alexa in the hopes of tripping her up intellectually. If not, then you should definitely check out our list of the funniest questions you can ask Alexa.

Image Credit: Sistak/Flickr

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How to work with top influencers and avoid ad blockers

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This prosthetic arm combines manual control with machine learning

Prosthetic limbs are getting better every year, but the strength and precision they gain doesn’t always translate to easier or more effective use, since amputees have only a basic level of control over them. One promising avenue being investigated by Swiss researchers is having an AI take over where manual control leaves off.

To visualize the problem, imagine a person with their arm amputated above the elbow controlling a smart prosthetic limb. With sensors placed on their remaining muscles and other signals, they may fairly easily be able to lift their arm and direct it to a position where they can grab an object on a table.

But what happens next? The many muscles and tendons that would have controlled the fingers are gone, and with them the ability to sense exactly how the user wants to flex or extend their artificial digits. If all the user can do is signal a generic “grip” or “release,” that loses a huge amount of what a hand is actually good for.

Here’s where researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) take over. Being limited to telling the hand to grip or release isn’t a problem if the hand knows what to do next — sort of like how our natural hands “automatically” find the best grip for an object without our needing to think about it. Robotics researchers have been working on automatic detection of grip methods for a long time, and it’s a perfect match for this situation.

Prosthesis users train a machine learning model by having it observe their muscle signals while attempting various motions and grips as best they can without the actual hand to do it with. With that basic information the robotic hand knows what type of grasp it should be attempting, and by monitoring and maximizing the area of contact with the target object, the hand improvises the best grip for it in real time. It also provides drop resistance, being able to adjust its grip in less than half a second should it start to slip.

The result is that the object is grasped strongly but gently for as long as the user continues gripping it with, essentially, their will. When they’re done with the object, having taken a sip of coffee or moved a piece of fruit from a bowl to a plate, they “release” the object and the system senses this change in their muscles’ signals and does the same.

SmartArm’s AI-powered prosthesis takes the prize at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup

It’s reminiscent of another approach, by students in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, in which the arm is equipped with a camera in the palm that gives it feedback on the object and how it ought to grip it.

It’s all still very experimental, and done with a third-party robotic arm and not particularly optimized software. But this “shared control” technique is promising and could very well be foundational to the next generation of smart prostheses. The team’s paper is published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

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