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The Google Assistant can now understand some queries in Hindi and display text-based Hindi replies Google Assistant can now answer some Hindi queries, albeit in a limited fahion. The company’s AI-based assistant can now understand voice commands in Hindi and displays results in the same language. The Assistant is currently limited to replying in text and Hindi voice replies aren’t supported yet. A spokesperson from Google got in touch with us and stated, "The Google Assistant on Android phones and iPhones is currently available in English in India, built for English input but supporting a few selected Hindi queries. While we've launched the Hindi Google Assistant on Allo, it's not available on phones yet. We are looking to bring the Assistant experience to more Indian languages over time." First reported by Android Soul, the feature is only accessible if the user has selected ‘English (India)’ as their preferred language. This can be done by heading into Langu...

Urban legend has it that some of the greatest ideas in history started with a napkin. The Gettysburg Address, the poem that gave way to the U.S. National Anthem, and the premise of the Harry Potter series—each were reportedly born into the world through the medium of sketches on scrap paper—and when app creators put pen to paper for their ideas, this is often a canvas of choice. While rapid prototyping with the napkin and the whiteboard holds its charms, less charming is the prospect of translating quick sketches into working code. Last summer, a group of Garage interns tackled this problem by creating a prototype of their own: meet Ink to Code, a Microsoft Garage project, now available in the United States and Canada. Ink to Code is a Windows app that enables developers to draw wire frame sketches and export them into Visual Studio, expediting the process of prototyping Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Android user interfaces. The Garage Internship takes a unique, ent...

Montreal-based travel booking platform Busbud has closed an $11M Series B round led by iNovia Capital. New investors backing the company include Teralys, Claridge and Plaza Ventures. Existing investor Real Ventures also participated in the round. As its name suggests, Busbud’s platform is focused on intercity bus and coach travel. But it’s also inked partnerships with some of the multi-modal travel booking platforms which are also aiming to simplify travel planning and ticket buying online, as a route to expand its reach. Busbud says its website has about 3 million unique monthly visitors from 100+ countries at this point. It also offers ticket booking via its Android and iOS apps. On the bus travel supplier side, it says it has more than 1,300 partner operators in its marketplace. Erik Blachford, former CEO of Expedia, and Philippe Vimard, former CTO/COO of publicly-listed eDreams/ODIGEO Travel Group (and currently CTO of doctor booking platform Doctolib) are also joinin...

American Express announced today that it has acquired Mezi, the AI-based virtual travel assistant, for an undisclosed amount. After the deal closes, Mezi will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Express. Its technology is already powering AskAmex, a personal concierge app for cardholders that launched its pilot program last year. Mezi users send requests for flights, hotels and restaurant reservations through the app’s SMS-like interface. Mezi then makes suggestions and, once it figures out what users want to do, forwards requests to human assistants to finalize bookings. Founded in 2015 as a personal shopping chatbot, Mezi builds its own deep learning and natural language processing systems instead of using services by IBM Watson and other providers. Its co-founders, CEO Swapnil Shinde and his twin brother, CTO Snehal Shinde, previously launched Indian streaming music service Dhingana, which was acquired by Rdio in 2014. After selling Dhingana, the Shinde siblings crea...

After an insistent number of leaks, Lenovo-owned Motorola has today finally launched an upgraded variant of their Moto X4 smartphone. While most of the hardware and software remains the same, Moto has bumped up the RAM to 6GB and is now offering Android 8.0 Oreo out-of-the-box. That’s it. The Moto X4 6GB variant is no different from its previous iterations, but the bigger RAM is going to draw in users looking for an almost stock Android and smoother user experience. This variant of the device, as the rumor mill had suggested, will be available for purchase on February 1 at midnight (i.e 11:59 PM on 31st January). Before we talk about the pricing and location where you’ll be able to grab the Moto X4, let us take a brief look at the specs sheet of the device: Specifications : The Moto X4 sports a 5.2-inch full HD LTPS IPS screen with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080 and pixel density of 441ppi. It is powered by the octa-core Snapdragon 630 SoC clocked at 2.2 GHz, which ...

Having taken a lot of the heat over the past year for their collective failure to curb blatantly false and misleading news on their platforms, tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter have started tweaking their algorithms and removing fake profiles to prevent their respective platforms from being used for nefarious purposes by politically-motivated groups and individuals. As part of its continuing efforts to preserve journalistic ethics and curb the spread of propaganda disguised as reportage, online social media giant Facebook has announced an initiative called ‘The Facebook Journalism Project‘ whereby the company will award up to $1 million in journalism scholarships over the next five years. As part of that plan, the company says it is teaming up with four organizations that represent journalists from diverse backgrounds. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, Native American Journalists Association and National Lesbia...

More than anything, Paytm is synonymous with cashbacks. But, the flip side of the coin is equally rewarding. In a recent development, the employees of the company, owned by One97 Communications have drawn significant returns by liquidating the stocks owned by them via ESOPs (employee stock ownership plan). Following this secondary sale of stocks by employees, Paytm is now valued at $10 billion which makes it the second most-valued internet company in India. More than 200 existing and former employees traded their stock holdings in the company for a payout of nearly $47 million (₹300 crore). The new valuation is a brilliant upsurge from the company’s valuation in May 2017 which is when it weighed at $7 billion after an investment of $1.4 billion from Softbank. With this, the multi-armed enterprise lags behind only Flipkart, which is estimated to be worth $12 billion. Paytm, with a workforce of 5,000, rewards its employees with ESOPs taking multiple criteria into considerati...

RED's much-hyped Hydrogen One smartphone is edging ever-closer to market, according to an update from its creators. In a thread on the camera company's reduser forums, the makers of the holographic-display phone have revealed pre-order will open "probably in April," with an official ship date "sometime in the summer". Details beyond this are vague, but according to the post carrier support for the phone is "unprecedented" and social media partners will include "big dogs." The update also included a reiteration of the phone's specs. It'll come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835x processor (unlocked or carrier specific), one headphone jack and a dual SIM slot. It's also slated to be slightly bigger than other 5.7" cell phones and slightly thicker. "Think SOLID," writes co-creator Jim. The internal battery is also sizeable at 4500mA, although this isn't a surprise given the phone's 4V purpose. This 4V -- or ...

Wish you could do more with your phone than just run Android? Codeweavers is working to sort you out: it’s just released version 3.0 of the Wine compatibility layer for Linux-based systems, which can now be built into an APK package and installed on your Android device. Once you grab the installer from this page and install it on your device (Android Police noted that it works better on some phones like the OnePlus 5T, and crashes on others like the Google Pixel from 2016), you’ll be greeted by a full-screen Windows 7 interface – Start menu and all. In addition, Wine v3 works better with x86 Android devices than those powered by ARM processors; if you’re on the latter, you’ll be limited to running apps that were ported to Windows RT (the XDA Developers forum has a nice list of them). Regardless of your processor type, you’ll need to bring your own Windows programs to the device, because none are bundled with this build. You might also want to conne...

If your conversations on iMessage have suddenly started making a lot less sense, you’re not the only one. Apple’s ultra-popular messenger is suffering from an annoying bug that messes up the order of your texts. The result is such that texts might appear in a totally different order for various participants in the same conversation. You can check out these screenshots from a chat between TNW’s editor-in-chief Alejandro and editorial community manager Georgina; the images ought to give you a better idea of what the issue is. For the sake of clarity, Georgina took the first screenshot, while Alejandro provided the second one: As you will notice, the same messages appear in the same chat – but for some reason, both users see them in a different order. The discrepancy in order is even more evident in the feature image above, where I’ve marked each corresponding message with a respective color. The issue appears to be pretty widespread, with some miffed use...

Stories are a huge part of Snapchat, and now the company is making it easier to share them with people who don’t have the app. Not every story can be shared outside the app. The feature only works for Official Stories, unpartnered Our Stories, and Search Stories. This needs a bit of explanation. So, official Stories are more visible, and come from a handful of selected Snapchat users. In the UK, that includes the likes of Dua Lipa, Rita Ora, Stormzy, and talk-show host and We Buy Any Car pitchman, Phillip Schofield. Our Stories are hand-curated stories from specific events. So, for example, Snapchat might pick some stories from a music festival or gig. Search Stories are far simpler; these appear in organic search traffic when using the app. With me so far? Good. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. For whatever reason, Snapchat has allowed Stories to become fractured and complicated, but I digress… It’s worth mentioning that these stories have diff...