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Apple has acquired the veteran automatic speech recognition (ASR) firm Novauris Technologies.

Novauris was split from the British research division of Dragon Systems, now known as Nuance Communications, popular for their voice dictation and voice search technology. The company is full of voice tech vets, including those who worked at Nortel, Aurix, Dragon and SRI (the company that helped build Siri).

Apple, as is their standard comment, says "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

Supposedly, Apple made the acquisition last year and the team has been working on improving Siri, which has its share of problems.

Novauris Technologies has a full list customers including Verizon Wireless, Panasonic, Samsung, SingTel, Alpine, BMW and many more.

Intel has shown off some interesting new chips this week, including a 64-bit Android kernel and a new SoC aimed at Chromebooks and other low-end PCs.

Codenamed 'Braswell,'the new SoC will be the successor to the current-generation Bay Trail processors found in Chromebooks and cheaper Windows PCs. The new SoC will be built on the efficient 14nm manufacturing process and will offer improved performance along with better power efficiency.

The 64-bit Android kernel is optimized for Intel Architecture (IA) devices and Android 4.4, even though the OS is 32-bit. "With this release, the company ported, validated and tested the Android Open Source code on IA, taking on the work that developers typically would need to do on their own. This release will provide the ecosystem with 64-bit kernel support for development of next-generation devices," says the company.

Finally,the company discussed two other mobile chips: The SoFIA 3G and the Intel XMM 7260. The 3G is a dual-chip SoC aimed at low-end smartphones. The XMM has five-mode support, including the Chinese 4G TD-LTE and TD-SCDMA networks, which should increase Intel's potential base significantly.

Samsung has received praise from official due to the inclusion of anti-theft features in the Galaxy S5 smartphone.

Samsung's Galaxy S5 will come with two features: Find My Phone and Reactivation Lock. Find My Phone allows a phone owner to track down their device in the event that it gets stolen or is lost. Reactivation Lock is a feature that can be set to require the owner's account information to perform a reset.

"The decision ... to provide Samsung's Find My Mobile and Reactivation Lock features on Galaxy S5 smartphones and to allow those features to be activated for free is a step forward in our effort to ensure the industry makes effective theft deterrents available on every smartphone sold in America," a joint statement from New York's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and San Francisco's district attorney, George Gascon, reads.

The pair have been raising the issue of smartphone theft in the United States as more and more Americans are held up for their phones. They argue that if every smartphone in the United States had a "Kill Switch" that could be activated remotely, it would destroy the value of such items in the black market and reduce the incentive to steal them.

Apple has announced this week that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will begin on June 2nd and extend through June 6th.

The company will reveal upcoming features for iOS and OS X, giving developers a first look from over 1000 Apple engineers.

"We have the most amazing developer community in the world and have a great week planned for them," said Philip Schiller, Apple's SVP of Worldwide Marketing. "Every year the WWDC audience becomes more diverse, with developers from almost every discipline you can imagine and coming from every corner of the globe. We look forward to sharing with them our latest advances in iOS and OS X so they can create the next generation of great apps."

Ahead of its anticipated launch on April 14th on the PlayStation 4 (PS4), you can check out a beta of the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn this weekend.

To get the beta, just head to the PlayStation Store and search for it this weekend, April 4 - April 7. Remember to uninstall the first beta client if you have it installed.

The beta will take place on live servers. So you will see the same worlds, the same game that 1.8 million players all around the world are already enjoying.

Those who have pre-ordered FFXIV will be able to access the game from April 11 - April 13 before everyone else. You can start building your character, getting a head start and making friends from all over the globe.

Remember, users currently playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on PlayStation 3 are eligible to upgrade to the PlayStation 4 version starting 11 April, 2014 for free.


Sources and Recommended Reading:
FXIV: ARR launching on the PS4 in 14 days!: na.square-enix.com
"PS4" Upgrade Campaign: eu.finalfantasyxiv.com

(via: Engagdet)

Microsoft has confirmed a few milestones for its application stores this week.

The software giant says there are over 400,000 apps now available between the Windows Phone Store and the Windows Store. It was recently unveiled that the Windows Store had just reached 150,000, implying the Windows Phone Store is at 250,000, a significant number for sure, but still behind the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, which have a million a piece.

In addition, the two app stores are now seeing a combined 14 million in daily app downloads.

The company recently announced that all Windows devices will be getting universal apps due to a new Windows RunTime ecosystem to launch with Windows Phone 8.1.

Developers will be able to use common code and have their applications work on Windows phones, PCs, tablets and even the Xbox One. The experience can be modified for screen size and different environments while keeping most of the code the same.

The Xbox 360 Edition of Minecraft has reached over 12 million sales, and the Xbox One edition will be coming, eventually.

The milestone was announced by the official Xbox website along with a Q&A with Mojang's Daniel Kaplan about Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition". Kaplan said that they never would have imagined the game being so successful.

"I remember when we started talking about sales numbers that we would be super happy to sell 1 million copies. That would have put us on par with BF1943 and Castle Crashers, which both are awesome games, so that was something to aim for. We never even dreamed of selling 12 million," he said.

The most requested feature addition they are hounded for is bigger worlds, but Kaplan explained that bigger worlds would require the guarantee of a hard drive in every Xbox 360.

"Since not all 360's ship with hard drives that makes things tricky. Luckily, on Xbox One, that's not an issue," he said.

On Xbox One, Kaplan said that the Minecraft: Xbox One Edition" will be coming, "eventually."


Sources and Recommended Reading:
Minecraft Creeps Past 12 Million Sold on Xbox 360: news.xbox.com

Google has been fined €1 million ($1.4 million) in Italy because its Street View vehicles were not clearly recognizable.

Italy's data protection watchdog imposed the fine on Google for not making the Street View cars it used to photograph Italian streets in 2010 clearly recognizable to the general public.

"Cars belonging to the giant of Mountain View roamed Italy's streets without being entirely recognizable as such, therefore not allowing the people present in those places to decide whether to be photographed or not," the Italian regulator said, reports Reuters.

In 2013, Google was fined €145,000 in Germany because its Street View cars had accidentally intercepted payload data from unsecured wireless networks.

It has also been sued for the accidental data collection in the United States, where it is being accused of violating federal wiretap laws.

Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music have filed suit against major Russian social network vKontakte (VK) over "large scale music piracy" being facilitated through its services.

The Russian divisions of the major labels each filed separate lawsuits, in conjunction with local industry group NFMI and the IFPI.

vKontakte, which has 145 million registered users (with over half in Russia) has never inked licensing deals with content rights holders and is allegedly keeping a massive catalog of music uploaded by its users, at least according to the labels. "VK's music service, unlike others in Russia, is an unlicensed file-sharing service that is designed for copyright infringement on a large scale," noted IFPI chief executive Frances Moore. "We have repeatedly highlighted this problem over a long period of time. We have encouraged VK to cease its infringements and negotiate with record companies to become a licensed service. To date the company has taken no meaningful steps to tackle the problem, so today legal proceedings are being commenced."

Samsung has made the ATIV SE official, following a few major leaks.

The Windows Phone 8 device has a 5-inch 1080p display, a 2.2GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, a microSD slot, a 2600mAh battery and a 13MP rear-facing camera.

Samsung has included an infra-red blaster, allowing for control of home devices like TVs, 'Ativ Beam' for quick NFC-based sharing to other Samsung devices, and other Samsung applications. The device also has 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4.0 and all other standard radios.

The company's latest appears to have a rather refined design compared to the colorful and plastic Lumias, with a silver brushed look.

Verizon has the phone up for pre-order, priced at $200 with two-year contact and a ship date of April 12th. If you prefer to go without a contract, you can get the device for $600.

The much-anticipated Radeon R9 295X2 'Vesuvius' has been unveiled in leaked press images, along with its specs.

Built first by Asus, the 295X2 features two Hawaii XT cores with GCN 1.1 architecture, with the GPUs featuring 2816 x 2 stream processors, 176 x 2 texture mapping units and 64 x 2 Raster Operators.

The GPUs each have 4GB GDDR5 RAM, totaling an impressive 8GB of GDDR5 running a "512B X 2 memory bus that is clocked at 1250 MHz effective clock speed."

As far as display outlets go, there are four Display Ports and a DVI port. 4K and multiple monitors should certainly not be an issue with the card.

To cool the beast, AMD has begun using their Project Hydra hybrid cooling system. The card has a 120mm radiator that must be installed into your PC with two fans that lead to two 38cm coolant pipes.

Last year, we reported that a documentary crew had received preliminary approval to dig up a site in New Mexico where Atari allegedly buried millions of unsold Atari 2600 consoles and games.

The urban legend of the desert site has been around for at least two decades, and gamers (and former gamers) have been following the story, us included.

As of this week, the New Mexico Environmental Department has given final approval, pending some stipulations. Fuel Entertainment (the documentary crew), Xbox Entertainment Studios and LightBox Entertainment will be allowed to dig up the site, but must notify the NMED "five working days before any excavation begins and the companies who haul the waste must register as certified or commercial haulers of waste with the NMED before they can remove any waste from the site."

The alleged games and consoles, which supposedly include millions of copies of the awful E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, were buried in September 1983. That year, the video game industry saw a large downtrend due to greater market factors, leaving Atari with millions of unsold and sealed consoles and games, including over 3 million copies of E.T. The company then, according to the myth, dumped the unsold merchandise in the Alamogordo landfill which was later covered by concrete.

Turkey's telecoms authority has confirmed that a two week ban on Twitter has been lifted in the country following a court ruling found it breached freedom of expression.

Twitter had been blocked in Turkey for several weeks after leaked audio recordings of top officials were spread around using the microblogging site. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the recordings as illegitimate and claimed they were part of a smear campaign against his government ahead of an election.

Access to Twitter was blocked in the country ahead of the election, and later on Google's YouTube service was also blocked when recordings were uploaded there.

Opponents of the government claimed the move was an authoritarian attempt to bury a corruption scandal that has plagued Erdogan's rule. It was condemned by the international community also.

Earlier this week, a constitutional court found that blocking Twitter violated freedom of expression, and today access was restored for most users in the country, reports Reuters. However, access to YouTube has not been fully restored as of yet.

Google is attempting to trademark the word 'Glass' but is encountering resistance from the U.S. trademark office and at least one other company.

The search giant has already trademarked 'Google Glass', its 'smart glasses' that have yet to hit retail. However, it would much prefer to have a trademark for the word 'Glass' for its product, and submitted an application for it last year.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office responded to Google by letter, in which a trademark examiner had two main concerns. The first concern is the possibility of consumer confusion, due to similarities with existing or pending trademarks.

The second concern is that 'Glass' is just a descriptive term, and descriptive terms are not entitled to trademark protection.

Google completely disagree, of course, and responded with a 1928 page letter consisting mostly of media coverage of Google Glass. It also argues that Glass is not a descriptive term for Google Glass at all, because the frame and display components don't consist of Glass, but instead are made from plastic and titanium.

The Wall Street Journal also reports that Border Stylo, LLC - which develops a browser extension called 'Write on Glass' - has filed a notice of opposition to Google's application.

Microsoft has thanked a five year old boy for discovering a flaw in its Xbox One system that allowed him to log into his Dad's account without a password.

Kristoffer Von Hassel, from San Diego, discovered a way to get into his father's account and play games he wasn't supposed to. When his Dad noticed, his career in computer security took precedent over any displeasure over his account being hacked, and he asked his son to explain to him how he was doing it.