At the SMX East conference I spoke on the topic of voice, and in particular, I discussed how to go about building a personal assistant app. During the QA for that session there were a few questions that went unanswered, and in today’s post I will address five of them. …

Bing has partnered with airlines to provide a more comprehensive flight search experience, the company announced on Tuesday. It makes use of real-time data and direct integrations with airlines to facilitate flight search, comparison and booking. Why we care Bing’s flight search will look familiar to those familiar with Google’s …

  When you buy an Android phone, you’d normally expect it to have Gmail, Google Maps, the Play Store, and the rest of Google’s software suite. That may no longer be the case in Turkey, though. Following a dispute with the country’s antitrust regulator, Google has informed its partners that …

  One of the most frustrating things about comparing mobile systems is how hard it is to actually perform an apples-to-apples comparison. On the desktop side of things, I can easily test an AMD system with exactly the same components as an Intel rig, right down to the power supply …

  We’ve all forgotten to charge something at one time or another. JBL has a new pair of Bluetooth headphones that claim to eliminate the disappointment of an empty battery. The JBL Reflect Eternal headphones have a strip of solar panels on the band, allowing them to trickle charge throughout …

  Microsoft has moved with uncharacteristic speed since it announced the end of its fully custom Edge browser. The company said in late 2018 that it would move to a Chromium-based browser, designed to integrate Microsoft services instead of Google’s. After months of toil, you can try Chromium Edge right …

  Astronomers have released new photos of comet 2I/Borisov, the second known interstellar visitor to our solar system after ’Oumuamua passed through in 2017. Discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, the comet made its closest approach to the Sun on December 8, 2019. NASA has released a pair of photos …

In addition to its new report on the top apps of 2019, app store intelligence firm App Annie also closed out the year with its Decade in Review analysis, which looks at the most popular apps over the past 10 years. Not surprisingly, Facebook dominated the charts, claiming four of …

Paleontologists have found tiny nymphs of a previously unknown ancient insect species trapped in two pieces of 99-million-year-old (mid-Cretaceous period) Burmese amber, along with partially damaged dinosaur feathers, the damage of which was probably made by these insects’ feeding behaviors. Mesophthirus engeli nymphs crawled and fed on dinosaur feathers. Image …

On November 17, 2019, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter made a close flyby of Phobos, the larger and inner of the two natural satellites of Mars. The probe tracked Phobos as the tiny moon passed in front of the spacecraft’s High Resolution Stereo Camera, capturing Phobos’ motions and surface in detail. …