Tausi Insider

Photo : svastika ( Shutterstock ) For those of us with iPhones, sharing our location with friends and family is simple. The Find My app (formally Find My Friends) is your one- stop shop for tracking the contacts, devices, and items in your life. But on Android, there’s not an obvious equivalent. You won’t find a “Share Location” option when texting your friends on Pixel, Galaxy, or OnePlus. But a s it turns out, Android’s Find My alternative might be more useful than Apple’s app. When you want to share your location on Android with a friend, don’t turn to a third-party app. Use one of Google’s instead: Google Maps. Everyone’s favorite navigation app is the perfect solution to keep tabs on your friends. The best part? It isn’t platform-specific, so you can track your friends on Android and iPhone. You can even use Google Maps location sharing on a computer, since it’s tied to your Google Account. The feature requires you to have your friend’s Gmail address in your Google contacts...

Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, the co-founders of Cohere AI company, have hired YouTube CFO Martin Kon as their president and COO. Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail Toronto artificial-intelligence startup Cohere Inc. has hired YouTube chief financial officer Martin Kon to become its president and chief operating officer as the company tries to bring its high-profile language-processing tools to market. Cohere specializes in large language models – AI that’s trained to digest text from across the internet to understand how to process and spurt out responses to prompts with increasing sophistication. The language-processing field has gained increasing attention in recent weeks as well-known competitor OpenAI made its ChatGPT tool available to the public – leading people worldwide to give the tools endless combinations of commands and gawk at the humanlike, frequently accurate writing that it puts out. At just three years old, Cohere has become a centrepiece of Toronto’s renowned AI...

Photo : Lukmanazis ( Shutterstock ) Google Chrome users in the U. S. can now launch select video games directly from Google Search results, much like you already could for movies, music, and TV shows. The games run in your browser via cloud streaming services such as GeForce Now or Microsoft Cloud Streaming, meaning you can play on any computer, smartphone, or tablet that runs Google Chrome. Even weak devices can play games this way—often in 1080p resolution and 60fps with minimal input lag—as long as you have a strong and stable internet connection. Wait, isn’t this just Google Stadia? If you’re thinking, “couldn’t Chrome already do this?” you’re correct. Google’s Stadia cloud streaming service also lets you play games through Chrome or the Stadia app on phones and smart TVs. However, Google plans to discontinue Stadia in January 2023. This new feature, though similar, is separate from the Stadia service, though probably not from the underlying technology. Replies to Google’s ...

It has been a long, wild year. You might not even remember everything that happened. You know who does, though? Google. The search giant just released its Year in Search for 2022 , and it’s pretty illuminating. It’s both a trip back through the last 12 months, and also a reminder that you likely didn’t keep up with half the inane pop culture 2022 served up. Google’ Year in Search allows you to browse the top search results from 58 different countries, as well as see global results. Unsurprisingly if you were on social media at all between late January and, say, May, he top search of the year, in the U.S. and globally, was “Wordle.” Of course. The viral puzzle sensation came in three spots above “Queen Elizabeth,” who ruled England for 70 years and died in 2022 and still couldn’t come out on top. Betty White died too, and even she landed one spot above the late monarch (Betty White is the one true queen?). Her Majesty was upstaged yet again in “News,” coming in second behind “Ele...

Photo : Shutterstock ( Shutterstock ) It’s a classic holiday scene: You unwrap a brand new game console, complete with all the games on your wishlist. After weeks of waiting, it’s time to sit back, cocoa in-hand, fire up the machine, and...wait for all of the updates to load. Maneuvering through setup screens and software updates is the worst part of opening any new tech gift, which is why some gifters take it upon themselves to take care of handling the menus and updates ahead of time. But is that a good idea? When someone opens a gift, they want to be able to use it right away, especially if that gift is super fun, like a game console or a phone, and the recipient is an impatient child (whether in age or temperament). If you unwrap a Nintendo Switch this year, you’re going to want to pop in Mario Kart or Zelda and get playing ASAP. You might even remember when that was the norm—from the NES to the GameCube, as long as everything was plugged in correctly, all you needed to do ...

Photo : Tada Images ( Shutterstock ) One-time passwords (or OTPs) are an easy way to add a bit of security to account logins. Once you provide the correct password, you receive an SMS with a unique code. Enter the code, and you’re in. Of course, after that, the code is useless, but it doesn’t automatically delete off your phone. It’s a text like any other, and if you’re like me, these useless texts live on your phone forever . Luckily, Google changed things this year . Now, you can go to “Message organization” and choose “ Auto-delete OTPs after 24 hours .” From now on, these SMSs will delete themselves after one day, which should clean up your inbox considerably. https://www.tausiinsider.com/tausiinsiders-22-favorite-android-hacks-of-2022/?feed_id=327200&_unique_id=64128f31686e3

Photo : Proxima Studio ( Shutterstock ) We commonly think of YouTube as a platform for sharing videos with large public audiences, but it can also be a great way to back up or share videos privately, as long as you follow the platform’s copyright rules. As David Gewirtz explains over on ZDNET , YouTube’s Content ID checks still apply to videos uploaded as private (meaning only the uploader can access them), or unlisted (which are viewable to anyone with a link, or if they show up in public playlists). Scanning unlisted and private videos is actually helpful for professional content creators. They can upload a video as private to confirm it passes YouTube’s Content ID checks before the video goes public, or adjust the video if necessary and avoid demonization or serious copyright strikes. However, this is a major inconvenience for users that just want to share videos with select friends or upload a school project for easy viewing. Usually, if your content is flagged by YouTube’s Co...

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The U.S. Justice Department and eight states filed an antitrust suit against Google GOOGL-Q on Tuesday, seeking to shatter its alleged monopoly on the entire ecosystem of online advertising as a hurtful burden to advertisers, consumers and even the U.S. government. The government alleges that Google’s plan to assert dominance in online ads has been to “neutralize or eliminate” rivals through acquisitions and to force advertisers to use its products by making it difficult to use competitors’ offerings. It’s part of a new, if slow and halting, push by the U.S. to rein in big tech companies that have enjoyed largely unbridled growth in the past decade and a half. The antitrust suit was filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference Tuesday that “for 15 years, Google has pursued a course of anti-competitive conduct” that has halted the rise of rival technologies and manipulated the mechanics of online ad auctions to force adver...