Apple to release iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 14 and tvOS on September 16

Apple said its latest iOS 14 software will be released on September 16, ahead of the company’s release of the next-generation iPhones.

We saw our first glimpse at iOS 14 earlier this year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which included home screen widgets and reply threading in Messages. It also comes with new Maps features, including adding cycling as a transportation option, and routing for electric vehicle owners so they can find charging points along the way.

iOS 14 also comes with an in-built translator, an improved and redesigned Siri, and better security and privacy features in the Safari browser.

But one privacy feature promised by Apple will be delayed. Apple said it would allow iPhone users to opt-out of in-app tracking, which the company said would not be immediately enforced when iOS 14 is released. It follows an uproar from ad giants — including Facebook — which lobbied against the proposal. Apple said it would give developers until next year to adjust to the changes.

iOS 14 will be supported on iPhone 6s and later, and lands as a free download.

Apple said it will also release its upcoming iPadOS 14, watchOS 14 and tvOS 14 on September 16.

Apple won’t force developers to let users opt out of tracking until next year

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Imitation Learning in the Low-Data Regime

Posted by Robert Dadashi, Research Software Engineer, and Léonard Hussenot, Student Researcher, Google Research

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a paradigm for using trial-and-error to train agents to sequentially make decisions in complex environments, which has had great success in a number of domains, including games, robotics manipulation and chip design. Agents typically aim at maximizing the sum of the reward they collect in an environment, which can be based on a variety of parameters, including speed, curiosity, aesthetics and more. However, designing a specific RL reward function is a challenge since it can be hard to specify or too sparse. In such cases, imitation learning (IL) methods offer an alternative as they learn how to solve a task from expert demonstrations, rather than a carefully designed reward function. However, state-of-the-art IL methods rely on adversarial training, which uses min/max optimization procedures, making them algorithmically unstable and difficult to deploy.

In “Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning” (PWIL), we introduce a new IL method, based on the primal form of the Wasserstein distance, also known as the earth mover’s distance, which does not rely on adversarial training. Using the MuJoCo suite of tasks, we demonstrate the efficacy of the PWIL method by imitating a simulated expert with a limited number of demonstrations (even a single example) and limited interactions with the environment.

Left: Demonstration of the algorithmic Humanoid “expert”, trained on the true reward of the task (which relates to speed). Right: Agent trained using PWIL on the expert demonstration.

Adversarial Imitation Learning
State-of-the-art adversarial IL methods operate similarly to generative adversarial networks (GANs) in which a generator (the policy) is trained to maximize the confusion of a discriminator (the reward) that itself is trained to differentiate between the agent’s state-action pairs and the expert’s. Adversarial IL methods boil down to a distribution matching problem, i.e., the problem of minimizing a distance between probability distributions in a metric space. However, just as GANs, adversarial IL methods rely on a min/max optimization problem and hence come with a number of training stability challenges.

Imitation Learning as Distribution Matching
The PWIL method is based on the formulation of IL as a distribution matching problem, in this case, the Wasserstein distance. The first step consists of inferring from the demonstrations a state-action distribution of the expert, the collection of relationships between the actions taken by the expert and the corresponding state of the environment. The goal is then to minimize the distance between the agent’s and the expert’s state-action distributions, through interactions with the environment. In contrast to adversarial IL, however, PWIL is a non-adversarial method, enabling it to bypass the min/max optimization problem, instead aiming to directly minimize the Wasserstein distance between the agent’s and the expert’s state-action pair distributions.

Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning
Computing the exact Wasserstein distance can be restrictive since one must wait until the end of a trajectory of the agent to calculate it, meaning that the rewards can be computed only when the agent is done interacting with the environment. To avoid this restriction, we use an upper bound on the distance instead, from which we can define a reward that we optimize using RL. We show that by doing so, we indeed recover expert behaviour and minimize the Wasserstein distance between the agent and the expert on a number of locomotion tasks of the MuJoCo simulator. While adversarial IL methods use a reward function from a neural network that must be optimized and re-estimated continuously as the agent interacts with the environment, PWIL defines a reward function offline from demonstrations, which does not change and is based on substantially fewer hyperparameters than adversarial IL approaches.

Training curves for PWIL on Humanoid. In green, the Wasserstein distance to the state-action distribution of the expert. In blue, the return (the sum of rewards collected) by the agent.

A Measure of Similarity for the True Imitation Learning Setting
As in numerous challenges in ML, a number of IL methods are evaluated on synthetic tasks, where one usually has access to the underlying reward function of the task and can measure similarity between the expert’s and the agent’s behaviour in terms of performance, which is the expected sum of rewards. A byproduct of PWIL is the creation of a metric that can compare expert behavior to an agent’s behavior for any IL method, without access to the true reward of the task. In this sense, we can use the Wasserstein distance in the true IL setting, not only on synthetic tasks.

Conclusion
In environments where interacting is costly (e.g., a real robot or a complex simulator), PWIL is a prime candidate not only because it can recover expert behaviour, but also because the reward function it defines is easy to tune and is defined without interactions with the environment. This opens multiple opportunities for future exploration, including deployment to real systems, extending PWIL to the setup where we have only access to demonstration states (rather than states and actions), and finally applying PWIL to visual based observations.

Acknowledgements
We thank our co-authors, Matthieu Geist and Olivier Pietquin; as well as Zafarali Ahmed, Adrien Ali Taïga, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold, Johan Ferret, Alexis Jacq and Saurabh Kumar for their feedback on the manuscript.

Google launches new AI-powered meeting room hardware

Google today announced the Google Meet Series One, a new video conferencing hardware suite for meeting rooms. Built in collaboration with Lenovo, the Series One uses high-end cameras and microphones and then marries them with Google’s AI smarts thanks to using Google’s own Coral M.2 accelerator modules with the company’s Edge TPUs.

Previous Google Meet hardware efforts from companies like ASUS, Acer and Logitech were generally built around a Chromebox. This new effort uses a custom-built compute system at its core and combines that with an almost Google Nest-like tablet-sized screen, a soundbar with eight built-in microphones, additional microphone pods and one of two cameras.

Image Credits: Google

The cameras are maybe the most interesting option here, with the Smart Camera XL features a 20.3-megapixel sensor and 4.3x optical zoom. Thanks to these specs, it can be used as a digital PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) camera. With that, the system can always automatically zoom in to frame everybody in the room and when the next person joins, it can zoom and pan as necessary to make sure everybody is still visible.

The regular Smart Camera can still do most of this, but it doesn’t feature the optical zoom, making it a better solution for smaller rooms. Google partnered with Huddly to develop this camera system (and the two companies also collaborated on previous Meet hardware projects).

But Google also put a lot of effort into the audio system. With its eight beam-forming microphones built into the soundbar and advanced noise cancellation techniques running on Google’s AI chips, the system should be able to filter out most distractions. Companies can add additional soundbars that only feature the speakers and microphones without the AI chips to cover even larger rooms. These additional units only feature the speakers and microphones, without the additional AI hardware since all of the processing needs to be done centrally.

Image Credits: Google

One nice touch here is that the team also made it easy to install these systems thanks to using Power-over-Ethernet. That should make installing one of these systems in a conference room pretty easy.

Since this is Google, it’s probably no surprise that you can also use the Google Assistant on this system, providing you with hands-free control over the room (something that’s maybe more important today than ever before).

The smallest room kit, with the basic Smart Camera but without the tablet-style meeting controller and microphone pod, will retail for $2,699. For $2,999 you get a complete set with one standard camera, soundbar, microphone pod and controller and if you have a very large room, you can opt for the $3,999 version with the additional soundbar, two microphone pods and the Smart Camera XL.

Google is making Meet free for everyone

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Waze gets smarter with trip suggestions, lane guidance, traffic notifications and more

Google-owned navigation app Waze is gaining a number of new product features as well as a partnership with Amazon Music, the company announced at its first major virtual event, Waze On. Among the changes, Waze is gaining personalized recommendations based on a user’s trip history, as well as traffic notifications, ETA improvements, lane suggestions, expanded Google Assistant integration, and more.

Waze’s trip suggestions are one of the more notable new features, as they tap into the Waze user’s historical driving patterns to make inferences about where the user may be headed to next. The feature, which will roll out next month, will be based on trips the user took in the past as well as the locations they’ve recently driven to, Waze says. The suggestions will offer the driver a visual overview of their trip, including details like the time the trip will take and the expected traffic.

Image Credits: Waze

Another new feature, traffic notifications, will alert users when traffic begins to build up or the driver risks being late on both favorite and frequent destinations, as well as one-time planned drives. These will also arrive next month, Waze noted.

Among the smarter improvements, is a new addition called Lane Guidance. As the name suggests, Waze will now be able to tell drivers what lane to be in when they’re merging or exiting a stretch of highway. This feature is rolling out now.

Image Credits: Waze

Waze also updated its ETA calculations in areas where there are fewer drivers — a reflection of the impact the pandemic has had on historical driving patterns. With some areas seeing fewer cars on the road due to companies’ embrace of remote work, Waze says it’s been harder to predict the changing flow of traffic. The update should help it take into account the reduction in traffic when making calculations in some areas.

In a much-needed update, users will now be able to save their itinerary for a planned drive directly to the Waze app from the Live Map feature on the web.

Image Credits: Waze

Waze has also expanded Google Assistant integration to French, Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Waze users.

The Waze Carpool service received a few updates, too. It now offers instant booking and auto approve features for drivers and riders. Drivers can also get real-time ride requests as they begin a drive, allowing them to pick up more riders along the way.

Image Credits: Waze

Amazon Music, meanwhile, joined the Waze Audio Player partner program, which allows Waze users to listen to third-party services from Waze’s audio player. Amazon Music users will be able to access the Waze app from the music app, as well. The audio program itself is not new. Waze already works with other music and audio partners, including Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, YouTube Music, Deezer, TIDAL, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, NPR One, Scribd, and others.

Image Credits: Waze

Waze at the event said it now sees over 140 million users worldwide per month contributing to the community by driving over 36 billion kilometers and reporting over 70 million incidents in 185 countries.

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Facebook launches a climate change information center and commits to eliminating ‘scope 3’ emissions by 2030

Even as Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, admits that climate change “is real” and that “the science is unambiguous and the need to act grows more urgent by the day” the platform appears unwilling to take steps to really stand up to the climate change denialism that circulates on its platform. 

The company is set to achieve net zero carbon emissions and be supported fully by renewable energy in its own operations this year.

But as the corporate world slaps a fresh coat of green paint on its business practices, Facebook is looking to get out in front with the launch of a Climate Science Information Center to “connect people with science-based information.”

The company is announcing a new information center, designed after its COVID-19 pandemic response. The center is designed to connect people to factual and up-to-date climate information, according to the company. So far, Facebook says that more than 2 billion people have been directed to resources from health authorities with its COVID-19 response.

The company said that it will use The Climate Science Information Center to feature facts, figures and data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their global network of climate science partners, including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and others. This center is launching in France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. to start. 

While Facebook has been relatively diligent in taking down COVID-19 misinformation that circulates on the platform, removing 7 million posts and labeling another 98 million more for distributing coronavirus misinformation, the company has been accused of being far more sanguine when it comes to climate change propaganda and pseudoscience.

A July article from The New York Times revealed how climate change deniers use the editorial label to skirt Facebook’s policies around climate disinformation. In September 2019 a group called the CO2 Coalition managed to overturn a fact-check that would have labeled a post as misinformation by appealing to Facebook’s often criticized stance on providing and amplifying different opinions. By calling an editorial that contained blatant misinformation on climate science an editorial, the group was able to avoid the types of labels that would have redirected a Facebook user to information from recognized scientific organizations.  

READ MORE

• It looks like Brandon Middaugh is heading up the $1B Microsoft climate fund
  
• Jeff Bezos announced a $10 billion fund to fight climate change
  
• Amazon’s ‘climate pledge’ commits to net zero carbon emissions by 2040 and 100% renewables by 2030
  

Facebook disputes that characterization. “If it’s labeled an opinion piece, it’s subject to fact checking,” said Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Facebook.

“We look at the stuff that starts to go viral. There’s not a part of our policies that says anything about opinion pieces being exempted at all.”

With much of the Western coast of the United States now on fire, the issues are no longer academic. “We are taking important steps to reduce our emissions and arm our global community with science-based information to make informed decisions and tools to take action, and we hope they demonstrate that Facebook is committed to playing its part and helping to inspire real action in our community,” the company said in a statement.

Beyond its own operations, the company is also pushing to reduce operational greenhouse gases in its secondary supply chain by 75% and intends to reach net zero emissions for its value chain — including suppliers and employee commuting and business travel — by 2030, the company said. Facebook did not disclose how much money it would be investing to support that initiative.

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What if lifesaving prescriptions were affordable for all? | Kiah Williams

What if lifesaving prescriptions were affordable for all? | Kiah Williams

As prescription drug costs skyrocket in the US, thousands of people are forced to forgo lifesaving medications -- all while manufacturers and health care facilities systematically destroy perfectly good, surplus pills. Kiah Williams shares how SIRUM -- a nonprofit that delivers unused medications to families who need them most -- plans to drive down prescription prices by recycling almost a billion dollars' worth of medications in the next five years. (This ambitious plan is a part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)

https://ift.tt/3bY8en0

Click this link to view the TED Talk

Things To Know Before You Sign Up For Any Streaming Service

Everybody is heading for live streaming and eventually, you will too. Almost 50% of American households have streaming devices and soon it will reach 100%. Ultimately, there will be no concept of traditional TV and everything will be delivered via the internet. Hence, adopting a future trend now is a wise option. We have accumulated […]

The post Things To Know Before You Sign Up For Any Streaming Service appeared first on ALL TECH BUZZ.

Europe’s top court says net neutrality rules bar ‘zero rating’

The European Union’s top court has handed down its first decision on the bloc’s net neutrality rules — interpreting the law as precluding the use of commercial ‘zero rating’ by Internet services providers.

‘Zero rating’ refers to the practice of ISPs offering certain apps/services ‘tariff free’ by excluding their data consumption. It’s controversial because it can have the effect of penalizing and/or blocking the use of non-zero-rated apps/services, which may be inaccessible while the zero rated apps/services are not — which in turn undermines the principal of net neutrality with its promise of fair competition via an equal and level playing field for all things digital.

The pan-EU net neutrality regulation came into force in 2016 amid much controversy over concerns it would undermine rather than bolster a level playing field online. So the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU)’s first ruling interpreting the regulation is an important moment for regional digital rights watchers.

The #ECJ interprets, for the first time, the #EU regulation enshrining #InternetNeutrality with regards to the #Internet users’ rightshttps://t.co/ATb3CgbPxg

— EU Court of Justice (@EUCourtPress) September 15, 2020

Despite the existence of a net neutrality regulation, European carriers have continued offering packages that ‘zero rate’ certain apps, such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp, for example — raising questions over whether such offers comply with the rules. Today’s ruling suggests they do not.

In another example from Hungary, one of carrier Telenor’s 1GB data tariffs (screengrabbed below) touts unlimited domestic data consumption for a number of social apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Twitter — meaning all other apps/services are at a disadvantage as usage is throttled by the user’s 1GB allowance.

A Budapest court hearing two actions against Telenor, related to two of its ‘zero rating’ packages, made a reference to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling on how to interpret and apply Article 3(1) and (2) of the regulation — which safeguards a number of rights for end users of Internet access services and prohibits service providers from putting in place agreements or commercial practices limiting the exercise of those rights — and Article 3(3), which lays down a general obligation of “equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic”.

The court found that ‘zero rating’ agreements that combine a ‘zero tariff’ with measures blocking or slowing down traffic linked to the use of ‘non-zero tariff’ services and applications are indeed liable to limit the exercise of end users’ rights within the meaning of the regulation and on a significant part of the market.

“Such packages are liable to increase the use of the favoured applications and services and, accordingly, to reduce the use of the other applications and services available, having regard to the measures by which the provider of the internet access services makes that use technically more difficult, if not impossible. Furthermore, the greater the number of customers concluding such agreements, the more likely it is that, given its scale, the cumulative effect of those agreements will result in a significant limitation of the exercise of end users’ rights, or even undermine the very essence of those rights,” the court writes in a press release.

It also found that no assessment of the effect of measures blocking or slowing down traffic on the exercise of end users’ rights is required by the regulation, while measures applied for commercial (rather than technical) reasons must be regarded as automatically incompatible.

The full CJEU judgement is available here in French and Hungarian. (Update: And in English here.)

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Facebook announces $4.3 million grant for small businesses in India, introduces support for gift cards

More than a third of small and medium-sized businesses on Facebook in India expect cash flow to be a challenge for them as they navigate through the coronavirus pandemic in the next few months, according to a report by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank.

Facebook, which reaches nearly every internet users in India and which collaborated with OECD and World Bank on the report, wants to help. The social giant today announced a grant of $4.3 million for more than 3,000 small businesses across Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore (Indian cities where the company has its offices).

In an interview with TechCrunch, Ajit Mohan, head of Facebook India, said the grant includes both cash and ad credits, with cash constituting the larger share. These businesses don’t have to advertise on Facebook to be eligible for the grant, he said. Businesses can apply for the grant starting today.

The India grant is part of the company’s $100 million global grant for small businesses that it announced in March.

Gift Cards on Facebook and Instagram

Additionally, Facebook and Instagram have also launched capabilities for businesses in India to sell gift cards. “During the pandemic, it’s been inspiring to see how people and businesses have come together on the Facebook family of apps to support their local communities,” said Mohan.

These gift cards, which will be issued by startups Quiksilver and PayU, are designed to help businesses get the immediate cash flow to stay afloat. Users can redeem these gift cards at these businesses later on.

The announcement today comes as Facebook begins to engage deeply with small businesses in the country. The company invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms earlier this year and said it would work with the Indian giant to explore ways to serve the nation’s 60 million businesses.

“The recovery of small businesses from the pandemic will be critical to the recovery of Indian economy, and we want to do everything we can to help. Today we’re building on our commitment by announcing the small business grant for India,” said Mohan.

Scores of businesses in India already use Facebook to reach potential customers. WhiteHat Jr., an 18-month-old startup that teaches coding to kids, is one of the businesses that has used Facebook extensively in recent quarters. The startup was acquired by Indian decacorn Byju’s for $300 million last month.

More on Facebook’s business in India tomorrow. Mohan will be joining us at Disrupt conference.

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N95 masks could soon be rechargeable instead of disposable

The pandemic has led to N95 masks quickly becoming one of the world’s most sought-after resources as essential workers burned through billions of them. New research could lead to an N95 that you can recharge rather than throw away — or even one that continuously tops itself up for maximum effectiveness.

The proposed system, from researchers at Technion-IIT in Israel and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, is not one of decontamination, as you might expect. Instead, it focuses on another aspect of N95 masks that renders them less effective over time.

N95s use both mechanical filtering, in which particles are caught in a matrix of microscopic fibers, and electrostatic filtering, in which particles are attracted to surfaces that carry a static charge. It’s like the old trick where you rub a balloon on your head and it sticks — but at the scale of microns.

The combination of these two methods makes N95 masks very effective, but the electrostatic charge, like any charge, dissipates after time as air and moisture pass over it. While decontamination via UV or high temperature may help keep the mechanical filter from becoming a tiny petri dish, they do nothing to restore the electrostatic charge that acted as a second barrier to entry.

In a paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids, Dov Levine and Shankar Ghosh (from Technion and Tata, respectively) show that it’s possible to recharge an N95’s filter to the point where it was close to off-the-shelf levels of efficacy. All that’s needed is to place the filter between two plate electrodes and apply a strong electric field.

“We find that the total charge deposited on the masks depends strongly on the charging time… with the pristine value almost reattained after a 60 min charge at 1000 V,” write the researchers in their paper.

A self-charging N95 mask prototype

It’s unlikely that healthcare workers are going to be disassembling their masks after every shift, though. While a service and special mask type could (and if it’s effective, should) be established to do this, the team also explored the possibility of a mask with a built-in battery that recharges itself constantly:

A solution that can help replenish the lost charge on the masks in real time would be desirable. In this section, we provide a proof-of-concept method of keeping the masks charged, which comes as a logical extension of our recharging method.

We tested a technique by which the filter material maintains its charge and thus its filtration efficiency… Since the currents required are extremely small, a large battery is not required, and it is possible that a small compact and practical solution may be feasible.

The image above shows a prototype, which the team found to work quite well.

Of course it’s not quite ready for deployment; IEEE Spectrum asked Peter Tsai, the creator of the N95 mask, for his opinion on it. He suggested that the team’s method for testing filtration efficacy is “likely questionable” but didn’t take issue with the rest of the study.

Though it won’t be in hospitals tomorrow or next week, the team notes that “crucially, our method can be performed using readily available equipment and materials and so can be employed both in urban and rural settings.” So once it’s thoroughly tested it’s possible these rechargeable masks could start showing up everywhere. Let’s hope so.

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Leaked memo excoriates Facebook’s ‘slapdash and haphazard’ response to global political manipulation

A former Facebook data scientist dropped a detailed, damning memo on her last day there, calling the social network out for what she describes as an arbitrary, slow, and generally inadequate response to fake accounts and activity affecting politics worldwide.

BuzzFeed News acquired the full memo and has published excerpts in this report, which is well worth reading in its entirety.

Zhang was reportedly fired earlier in September for, as she describes it, ongoing disagreement with management about the company’s priorities and response to widespread manipulation.

In the 6,600-word memo, Zhang describes a system where the focus is very much on ordinary spam — which is of course a major problem for the platform — while “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) attempting to influence elections is not awarded as much priority or resources. Unless it’s politically expedient, for example if a botnet needs to be rolled up before testimony in Congress or pressure from the press.

As the memo reported by BuzzFeed News reads:

It’s an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention… It’s why I’ve seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space.

Overall, the focus of my organization – and most of Facebook – was on large-scale problems, an approach which fixated us on spam. The civic aspect was discounted because of its small volume, its disproportionate impact ignored.

I’ve asked Facebook for comment on the memo, including the following specific claims reportedly made by Zhang:

• Large scale political manipulation returned in Honduras weeks after Facebook made attempts to stop it
• Her report of coordinated manipulation campaigns in Azerbaijan was not investigated for a year afterwards
• More than 10 million fake reactions and accounts were removed from the US and Brazil 2018 elections and never disclosed
• A major political influence campaign in Delhi, India this February was never reported
• Some 672,000 accounts were removed this spring from COVID-related misinformation campaigns in Spain and the U.S., also never disclosed
• Whether to pursue a misinformation campaign at all is often left to mid-level employees like Zhang, who claimed she had “no oversight whatsoever”
• Zhang’s push to dedicate more resources to civic platform problems led to her dismissal

Guy Rosen, Facebook’s VP of Integrity, attempted to play down the memo in a tweet, saying that Zhang was describing “fake likes”: “Like any team in the industry or government, we prioritize stopping the most urgent and harmful threats globally. Fake likes is not one of them,” he wrote. Certainly some of what Zhang describes is fake engagement, but far from all of it, and at any rate Facebook’s judgment in assigning priority is part of what the memo takes issue with.

The memo states outright what many have suspected is the case all along: That Facebook “projects an image of strength and competence… but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents.” Not only that, but that the picture of Facebook’s efforts to combat this sort of thing is highly tailored by the company itself and not, it seems, in any way a complete or accurate one.

This post will be updated if we receive any substantial comment from Facebook. (It has been updated with Rosen’s tweet.)

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Evidence of Alien Life

Evidence of Alien Life

YouTube launches its TikTok rival, YouTube Shorts, initially in India

As TikTok’s fate in the U.S. remains murky, YouTube today announced the launch of a new short-form video experience it’s calling YouTube Shorts. The feature will allow users, initially in India, to upload 15-second or less short-form videos using a new set of creator tools, including a multi-segment camera, similar to TikTok, speed controls and a timer and a countdown feature. The videos can also be set to music, thanks to YouTube’s access to a large library of songs that it says will continue to grow over time.

The multi-segment camera lets users string together multiple video clips into one short clip. The other controls enable YouTube creators to be more creative than if they simply pressed a “record” button.

These are tools common to the TikTok video recording experience today and are the same features that Instagram recently cloned for its own TikTok rival, known as Reels.

The feature will be prominently highlighted within the YouTube app on Android, and will expand to iOS in time.

Image Credits: YouTube

YouTube says India — notably, a large market where Chinese-owned TikTok is already banned — will be the first to gain access to YouTube Shorts at launch. However, the plan is to bring the feature to more markets in time. YouTube didn’t offer a timeline for when that would happen, though.

Related to this, YouTube will introduce a new watch experience that lets you swipe through YouTube Shorts vertically — also, just like TikTok. The company had already added a new row on the YouTube homepage for watching short videos, and now the new watch experience will make it easier to watch that content and discover new short videos, too, YouTube says.

YouTube earlier this summer announced its plans to begin testing a short-form video feature, but hadn’t offered many details, or even the feature’s name. At the time, YouTube had said that the test would involve recording 15-second videos on both iOS and Android, but only among a small group of creators.

The company clarified to TechCrunch that this earlier experiment had been part of the Shorts product, and it had been experimenting with a multi-segment camera globally. But new today are the options to record with music, speed controls and a timer and countdown.

In addition, YouTube Shorts will feature hundreds of thousands of tracks from partners like T-Series and Believe Digital. It’s also working with music artists, labels and publishers to make more of their content available in YouTube Shorts’ catalog.

Image Credits: YouTube

The news of the larger launch of YouTube Shorts comes as the M&A deadline for TikTok’s U.S. operations is coming to an end. Microsoft has now announced it won’t be the buyer, and reports claim Oracle is winning the bid, but its deal isn’t structured as an outright sale.

TikTok’s potential exit had already seen many rival social platforms looking to woo TikTok users to their own app. Instagram, Snapchat and now YouTube are among those looking to gain an advantage by leveraging the instability around TikTok to launch their own short-form video products. More direct TikTok competitors, like Triller, Dubsmash, Byte and others, have picked up some new customers, as well.

YouTube says the new feature is rolling out in India over the next few days. It characterizes YouTube Shorts as a test it aims to learn from, with the goal of expanding access and improving the product over time.

If you have access to the Shorts camera, you can start creating videos by hitting the plus (+) icon (or soon, the video camera icon on iOS), then selecting “video.” If you see “create a short video” as an option, then you have the Shorts camera. For Android users in India, however, you’ll see the “create” icon has been moved to the bottom of the navigation bar for easier access, YouTube says.

Those without the feature can somewhat participate by tagging their shorter videos (under 60 seconds) as #Shorts in the title or description. These will be tested on the new YouTube home page, along with other short vertical videos.

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