Google Assistant can now schedule your smart devices, and more tech news today

Your tech news digest, by way of the DGiT Daily tech newsletter, for Monday, 23 November 2020.

1. AI assistants: Still dumb but Google just got better

Voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant seemed to burst out into our world promising much, but struggled to go further. Alexa still baffles me on the lack of depth as to what it can do, with basic problems just never really being fixed. Siri has well-documented problems that remain a blight on Apple.

Google Assistant remains the benchmark and can surprise me with its capabilities at times, but is never far from doing something strange or frustrating.

• Still, the ability to set a timer or quickly ask a question when your dog eats a blueberry (“Hey Google, are blueberries safe for dogs?”) is handy, while acknowledging the privacy concerns.

But here’s something. Someone found on Reddit (curiously not announced by Google yet, for whatever reason) that Google Assistant now handles “scheduled actions”, which was as confirmed on a Google Developers page — still a long way from being properly announced, though.

Anyway, it’s great: you can now say, starting with “Hey Google…” or “Ok Google…”:

• “…turn off the lights in five minutes.”
• “… turn on the lights at 7 AM.”
• “… turn on the lights at sunset.”
• “…turn off the lights at 11 PM.”
• “…turn on my coffee maker at 8 AM tomorrow.”
• “…turn on the light for a minute.”
• “…run my sprinkler in a week at 5 PM.”
• And so on. You get the idea. I put in too many examples. Sorry.

Anyway, I tried it all and it works! With a few problems:

• If you say tomorrow without specifying a time, nothing happens despite the command being acknowledged
• While you can cancel a scheduled action, by saying either “Hey Google, cancel my scheduled Actions,” or “… remove my [device]s’ schedule,” it this doesn’t work yet. I guess it’s coming.
• The comments are all very excited for a simple way to set a sleep timer for TV, lights on and off, turning on the coffee machine… but of course, you’ll need to have your house equipped with some smart lights and smart plugs to achieve any or all of this.
• And IoT devices and smart homes, eesh. That’s a whole thing in itself, as Troy Hunt (the “Have I Been Pwned” guy) detailed today: IoT Unravelled Part 1: It’s a mess… But then there’s Home Assistant. You have to be both super committed and super willing to dedicated hours and days and weeks for goals that go beyond simple on/offs with apps. It’s a maze.
• Still, this tiny step from Google shows useful progress. About time.

2.  Yet another report out of South Korea points to Samsung ditching the Galaxy Note series (Android Authority).

3. POCO M3 specs confirmed ahead of tomorrow’s launch: new mid-range option for Europe and eventually India? (Android Authority).

4. OPPO says you won’t be able to buy that rollable phone from last week, in the short-term (Android Authority).

5. ICYMI: Lots of OnePlus 9 news from new leaks: leaked renders provide design cues, and camera details (Android Authority).

6. Oxford University and AstraZeneca vaccine trial shows up to 90 percent effectiveness — only needs normal refrigeration, not sub-zero temperatures, and it’s likely to be cheaper (The Verge).

7. Chrome extensions will have to show how they use your data, and with limits on how extensions can use that data (Engadget).

8. A Dutch journalist easily logged in to an official EU defense video conference, gatecrashing the event to show how extremely lax the Zoom call security really was. The culprit was the Dutch minister who tweeted a photo giving out 5/6 digits of the required PIN (BBC).

9. Amazon lays off dozens of employees at its Amazon Prime Air drone org, switching to working with third-parties to build new models (FT, $).

10. Airbnb executive and former FBI official resigned from the company last year over a Chinese request for real-time data sharing. “We’re not here to promote American values,” is not a great look (WSJ, $).

11. Attackers dupe GoDaddy staff into helping them take down cryptocurrency services that were using GoDaddy for their domains. If you’re using GoDaddy with a high-value website, look after it somewhere more secure (Gizmodo).

12. 16-year-old Charli D’Amelio is the first person with 100 million followers on TikTok. Her TikTok bio for most of the year: “Don’t worry, I don’t get the hype either.” (CNET).

13. Hyundai gets the green light to launch “fully driverless cars” in Las Vegas, although the actual details here mean at some time in the future, not like, tomorrow. (Jalopnik).

14. SpaceX might try a launch today of its next Starlink satellites after last night’s was called off (Twitter).

15. Nintendo’s theme park is looking fantastic (Kotaku).

16. “ELI5: Why do traditional cars lack any decent ability to warn the driver that the battery is low or about to die?” (r/explainlikeimfive).

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