The Defender

Whether you’ve come to say “Hola!” or “Bienvenue” or “Auf Wiedersehen,” Google Assistant is ready to answer you right back as the smart assistant becomes the first of its kind to go fully  bilingual .  Users can now speak two languages interchangeably with the Google Assistant on smart speakers and phones and the Assistant will respond in kind. As of right now, the Assistant can understand any pair of languages with English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, with more languages to come in the coming months. Although it’s an advancement for the worldwide market, there have been hints of the new ability coming since the beginning of the year as Google rolled out new features and analysts reverse-engineered the launch of new routines and integrations for Assistant. Google announced at the beginning of the year that it anticipated offering support for up to 30 languages by the end of 2018. In February, it announced a breakthrough feature by which Google Assi...

LG may be best known to many readers as a top-tier Android smartphone maker, but the South Korean company has its fingers in plenty of other pies, too. One of those more surprising-but-exciting pies involves the creation of a new artificial intelligence-powered robot exosuits, set to be shown off at  IFA 2018  in Berlin. Called Cloi SuitBot, the lower body robotic exosuit is designed to enhance wearers’ leg movements to aid with activities such as warehouse workers lifting heavy objects. It was created in association with the startup SG Robotics.“It is just one example of a wide range of revolutionary A.I. products designed to interact with users to dramatically elevate user convenience and create new opportunities to advance our robotics initiative into a next-gen growth engine,” Song Dae-hyun, president of LG’s Home Appliance and Air Solution Company, said in a statement. Previous Next The use of artificial intelligence will help SuitBot to customi...

The federal government says it is deeply worried over the spate of building collapse and the attendant loss of lives as a result of using substandard materials by developers.  Minister of works, housing and power conveyed governments’ position at a workshop on retooling the Nigerian construction industry to meet emerging global best practice. Fashola was represented by an official Dickson Onoja who advocated an urgent need to migrate the nation’s building code from the 1963 JCT to the 2011 international format to stem the frequency of failing buildings and the economic impact. Also speaking, president of the Nigerian institute of quantity surveyors Obafemi Onashile echoed the views of the works minister. The forum was also to evolve a roadmap for reviewing engineering designs for sustainable buildings in Africa future cities in line with the specifications of the United Nations Development Programmes, UNDP.

Apple has made some investments and a big bet on AR in recent years, and we’ve seen some of its early work in this space on products like Animoji,  Memoji , and the Measure app on the iPhone. Now, according to recent job postings, it looks like the next Apple product that could get transformed by augmented reality will be the Maps app. An examination of Apple’s career site by  Thinknum  reveals that Apple is looking for a number of AR applications engineers at various levels, along with a technical artist, FX artist, and UI artist. These AR-related job postings span from August 10 through August 22, and Thinknum posited that these jobs may have been created to support the Apple Maps team. In July, the  Apple Maps  team was searching for a product architect, and interestingly, augmented reality was one of the areas highlighted in that job description. “Digital maps have become essential tools of our everyday lives, yet despite their ubiquity, they ar...

Vice president Yemi Osinbajo says the Buhari administration will continue to create the right environment for the growth of technology and startups. Professor Osinbajo said this when he paid a visit to ventures platform hub on Wednesday, along with the British secretary for Africa and international development, Harriett Baldwin. The vice president commended the entrepreneurial creativity of young Nigerians in the technology sector. The British secretary for Africa and international development, Harriett Baldwin, explained that the UK would invest more in Nigeria’s technology sector. At the event the vice president interacted with technology start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Apple probably isn't planning to add Pencil support to its 2018 iPhones What is going on with Apple’s 2018 iPhone range? Expected to launch later this year, rumors are spreading about a 6.5-inch iPhone X Plus, a 5.8-inch iPhone X, and a 6.1-inch iPhone that may be cheaper than the other two models. The names are not certain either — the 2018 iPhone models have been linked with the names iPhone 9 and iPhone 11, due to the iPhone X’s introduction in late 2017. There is also the chance Apple will come up with an entirely new way of naming its iPhones. There are a lot of intertwined rumors — some related to each other, some not, and they’re all almost always confusing. We’ve done our best to make sense of them, so here is our rundown of what to expect from the 2018 iPhone range. Specifications Almost every iteration of the iPhone has seen some internal improvements that make it faster, stronger, and better than the iPhones that came before. Apple typically makes ...

Engineers in Germany have developed a new compact imaging system that’s capable of recording hyperspectral images in five dimensions. This 5D process means capturing data related to multiple wavelengths of light, along with spatial coordinates, as a function of time. The 5D system represents the first laboratory setup in which high-quality spatial and spectral resolution, depth accuracy, and high frame rate imaging have all been combined into a single compact system. It opens up exciting possibilities for security, medical imaging — and even grocery shopping. The basic principle of the sensor is not dissimilar to the stereo vision that we possess as humans. However, instead of two eyes, which are limited to the detection of only visible light, the 5D imaging system utilizes two hyperspectral cameras operating in the visible to near-infrared range. Because the scene is captured from two slightly different directions, it’s possible to establish the depth informati...

Instagram   is at last quenching the thirst of its thirsty, thirsty unverified users. The company just  introduced a trio of new features  designed to make Instagram a generally safer and more authentic place to hang out ( third-party 2FA  — enable it!) and for the first time the platform now offers users a straightforward way to request verification. On Instagram, blue check marks are fairly rare, even among pretty big brands and public figures. Getting verified on the platform has long been the stuff of legend — no one quite knows what goes on behind the scenes but knowing a guy doesn’t hurt. Remarkably, there’s even a super sketchy black market  where people charge thousands of bucks to hook you up with verified status (or more likely to just rip you off). The whole thing has always been kind of mysterious, with little blue checks quietly sprinkled around in no discernible pattern. It looks like those days are over. While it’s too early to t...

Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates. The posts’ removal took place following the recent API change that  prevented  Twitter users from continuing to automatically publish their tweets to Facebook. According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it. TechCrunch was alerted to the problem by a reader,  Lawrence Miller , who couldn’t find any information about the issue in Facebook’s Help Center. We’ve since confirmed the issue ourselves with several affected parties and confirmed it with Facebook. Given the real-time nature of social media — and how difficult it is to pull up old posts — it’s possible that many of the impacted Facebook users have yet to realize...