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Instagram rolls out pinned comments to everyone
You'll have some more control over the conversation on your posts.
Twitter says disappearing ‘Fleets’ are reported less often than tweets
Could Twitter's experiment with Stories help it fix harassment?
Twitter test asks you to ‘rethink’ sending mean replies
No, it's not an edit button.
Tumblr's digital literacy campaign targets fake news and bullying
Tumblr is launching a year-long digital literacy campaign to fight fake news, cyberbullying and other toxic internet behavior. Tumblr hopes the campaign, dubbed World Wide What, will spread internet safety awareness and start healthy conversations with the Tumblr community. (Full disclosure: Tumblr has ties to Verizon, Engadget's parent company.)
Lenovo’s Smart Clock becomes a more capable home hub
The Lenovo Smart Clock already won Best of CES 2019 and earned our approval, but it's not done adding features. Today, Google announced a few welcomed updates that bring the device more in line with the Google Home Hub.
Google Photos will let you manually tag faces it doesn't recognize
Google Photos' product lead David Lieb took advantage of some downtime this week to start a surprisingly open dialogue on Twitter. Yesterday, he asked users what they want to see next from Google Photos -- new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. The conversation lasted for hours, and it shed light on a few changes coming to the service. One of the most notable is that Google Photos plans to add a manual face tagging feature that will let users tag faces it doesn't recognize.
Instagram's latest Stories sticker is a direct link to group chats
Instagram is introducing a new feature that will let users start private group messages around specific Stories. The company announced the change on Twitter today. Users will soon be able to add a "join chat" sticker to their Stories. If followers tap the sticker, they'll be added to a private group chat -- though the author will have the ability to approve or deny requests.
Facebook will rank comments to make conversations more meaningful
Facebook wants to make conversations on public posts more meaningful. Today, it will start ranking comments to promote those that are most relevant to users. It will give priority to comments that have interactions from the original poster, as well as comments or reactions from friends of the person who created the post.
Twitter is testing new labels for conversation threads
In a tweet today, Twitter announced that it's experimenting with new labels on conversation threads. The labels -- author, mention and follow -- are another attempt to make the platform more conversational and easier to follow. This may never move past the trial phase, but it's further proof that Twitter is bent on helping users make sense of threads.
A week with Twitter's attempt at a more civil internet
Over the past few months, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been adamant that one of his goals is to "increase the health of public conversation" on the site. Because it's no secret that, as great as Twitter is at connecting you with people across the world, it's also great at connecting you with bots, trolls and spam. Unsurprisingly, Twitter wants to change that. And it's hoping to find a solution by publicly testing new conversation features, through an experimental program that users can apply to participate in. This launched last week as an app called Twttr, which I've been using as my main tool for reading and writing tweets for the past week.
Twitter tests conversation 'subscriptions'
Twitter is testing yet another new feature: a "subscribe to conversation" button that would let users follow a thread without liking or replying to it. Twitter user and software engineer Jane Manchun Wong (who's known for finding this kind of thing) discovered the prototype in the Android version of the app. In response to her tweet about it, Twitter said this is an attempt to make the platform more conversational. It's now the latest in a flood of changes we've seen from Twitter.
Twitter will test new conversation features out in the open
Twitter is launching a new program to let users reshape how conversations on its site look and feel, the company announced today in an interview with Engadget at CES 2019. The idea is for users to try out new organization and context features with their followers, such as the status updates and "ice breaker" tweets we saw being tested last year, which are designed to encourage people to talk to each other. Twitter is set to start testing the program in the coming weeks, and while anyone will be able to apply to join, only a few thousand users are actually going to get in.
Twitter tests status updates and ‘ice breaker’ tweets
Last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that one of his company's goals is to "increase the health of public conversation" on its platform. And it's a talking point Twitter has come back to throughout the year. In March, it reached out to experts for ideas on how to promote healthy, open and civil conversations online and in September, the company sought feedback on a proposed policy that would ban dehumanizing speech. Now, the company is testing a handful of new features aimed at encouraging users to talk to each other.
Now you can disable threaded Gmail conversations for iOS and Android
Google has continued to tweak its Gmail mobile apps to try and make things better for its users. The company introduced AI-powered notifications for iOS, added custom swipe actions for Android and has tweaked its threaded conversation view for years. Search for this latter feature on Google, however, and you'll see a ton of people asking how to disable it. Now Google has made it so you can turn this option off for the Gmail app on iOS and Android.
Microsoft buys AI company to improve Cortana's conversational skills
Microsoft has acquired a natural language AI firm called Semantic Machines to help Cortana and other bots carry on natural conversations, it announced. The tech "uses the power of machine learning to enable users to discover, access and interact with information and services in a much more natural way, and with significantly less effort," wrote Microsoft AI & Research CTO David Ku. What's more, Microsoft will establish a "conversational AI center" in Berkeley to amp up its language tech and "take conversational computing to a new level."
Twitter asks for help fixing its toxicity problem
Twitter has definitely come under a lot of fire in recent years for issues ranging from not doing enough to stop harassment on its platform to allowing foreign actors to sow political discord. In the past, the company has tweaked its tools, giving individuals more options when it comes to controlling what they're exposed to online, as well as updated its guidelines a handful of times. But today, Twitter announced it's trying out another route -- asking people outside of the company to propose ways that it can promote healthy, open and civil conversations online.
Elon Musk's OpenAI will teach machines to talk using Reddit
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has delivered the first DGX-1 supercomputer to Elon Musk's OpenAI nonprofit, and the researchers already have a project in mind. Believe it or not, they want to teach AI to chat by reading through Reddit forums, according to MIT Technology Review. That seems dicey given the site's countless, bizarre forums, but the sheer size of it is what attracted the team. "Deep learning is a very special class of models because as you scale [them] up, they always work better," says OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy.
How much should we trust tech companies?
Last week, the internet was awash with journalists' interpretations of Spotify's new privacy policy. Depending on whom you ask, the policy was eerie, creepy or just downright atrocious. While Spotify scrambled to reassure us that it wasn't really interested in snooping through your photos or tracking your every move, people publicly quit the service, argued with its CEO and generally hated on the company. Such public outcries are now commonplace. But what is it about the industry that evokes such an endemic distrust? Why are we so quick to believe they're out to do us harm? Aaron Souppouris and Devindra Hardawar try to get the bottom of the matter. Or at least argue about it.
Bing now lets you ask follow-up questions after your searches
Google sometimes lets you ask follow-up questions when a search doesn't provide all the answers. Bing, however, has required that you phrase each query as if you're starting fresh -- a bit of a headache if you're the curious sort. That won't be a problem for much longer, as Microsoft is rolling out a Bing update that adds conversational, context-aware searching to the mix. If you ask who President Obama's wife is, for example, you can then ask "how tall is she?" (spoiler: fairly tall) without having to mention Michelle by name -- the engine knows who you're referring to. The feature doesn't appear to be available everywhere just yet, but it shouldn't take long before you're holding short chats in your web browser.
Shroud of the Avatar video gives six-month dev update
Buckle down to a half-hour video from Lord British himself taking you through the development progress of Shroud of the Avatar now that it's hit the six-month mark. Lord British begins by showing off Kingsport Village and talking about how housing is one of the big features and choices of the game. The video continues to another town where the devs fade player housing in and out to demonstrate how towns might be built up over the course of the game. The housing decoration system and the different types of dwellings were toured, including Germanic, Druidic, and Nordic dwellings. He also shows off the female avatar, crafting, and the "natural language conversation system." The latter allows players to type full sentences to NPCs, who will then parse the conversation for important keywords. We've got the full developer commentary video for you after the break.
