Author: azeeadmin

Apple has placed a series order for Foundation, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic series of science fiction stories and novels.

Deadline reported earlier this year that the show was in development, but this was just the latest of several attempts to adapt Foundation, including a version developed by Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan for HBO.

Now, however, it looks like Foundation really will happen at Apple, with David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman as showrunners. (Like Nolan, Goyer was one of the writers on The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, while Friedman created Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) The series will be produced by Skydance Television, and Asimov’s daughter Robyn will be one of the executive producers.

The Foundation series (initially a set of stories published in the 1940s, then collected into book form in the ’50s and followed up by long novels that Asimov wrote in the ’80s) focuses on the fall of a long-lived Galactic Empire, with a small group of scientists at the edge of the galaxy working to preserve knowledge and minimize the period of chaos.

Elements of that plot description might make it sound like the ingredients for Apple’s version of Star Wars — and indeed, Asimov’s work is seen as a big influence on George Lucas’ films.

But in its print form, at least, Foundation is far from your typical space opera, focusing more on debate and political intrigue than action, and taking place over hundreds of years, with often interchangeable characters swapped out between stories. In other words, Goyer and Friedman will probably have to make some significant changes.

These are my favorite books by my favorite author, so I’m more excited about this than any of the other original shows that Apple’s planning (even the company’s other space opera, which is being developed by Battlestar Galactica‘s Ron Moore). I sure hope they don’t screw it up.

The largest trend in photography over the last five years or so, not counting smartphones, has been the emergence and maturity of mirrorless camera systems. These operate in a very different manner from traditional SLRs, and as such market leaders with decades embedded in the latter — namely Canon and Nikon — have resisted making the shift. That changes for Nikon today with its announcement of the Z6 and Z7, which show the company is making the change wholeheartedly.

The Z series comprises both these two cameras and a new lens mount, which in many ways is the more important news for photographers. The F mount has been around for decades and boasts some of the world’s best glass. But ultimately a more or less clean break was needed, and the Z mount manages to provide that, as well as solid back-compatibility for those who can’t bear to part with their old standby kit.

The cameras themselves, which have been rumored for ages and were known to be imminent, are both full-frame, meaning their sensor is as big as a 35mm still-film frame. Full-frame cameras are generally intended for professionals or deep-pocketed hobbyists: bodies generally cost well over $1,000 but offer improved image quality for a variety of reasons.

So it’s somewhat ambitious of Nikon to aim at this elevated market, where competition is tough, standards are high and prices are higher. Old favorites like the Canon 5D vie with new challengers like Sony’s a9, and it seems as if slowly but surely the latter are coming out on top, due in no small part to the advantages conferred on them by their mirrorless nature.

The Z7 starts at $3,400, which puts it squarely in professional territory. The Z6, at $2,000, sacrifices resolution but offers some other advantages — aside from holding onto that $1,400. If it were me I’d go for the latter, no question.

Big and small changes

The Z7 is the new flagship, and it closely replicates the ability of the popular Nikon D850, while adding a variety of improvements. Most obvious is body size; the camera is much, much smaller and lighter than its SLR predecessor, but is still far from petite. It also improves on a few stats like burst speed and autofocus in ways that will be appreciated by pros, and a new 10-bit N-LOG video output mode should provide more flexibility in post.

Its sibling, the Z6, has a lower megapixel count (24 versus 45) but further improves burst speed and may in fact prove superior in terms of video performance.

Both make the switch to an electronic viewfinder, or EVF, and apparently Nikon was very particular about this component. The resolution of the OLED eyepiece is 1280×960, which sounds low compared with phone and VR displays, but should be fine — and really, motion and color are more important. The rear LCD is also OLED, as is a little up-facing status display on the top plate.

Both also have in-body stabilization, which means lenses can be lighter and cheaper. The stabilization will work with older lenses too (more on this in a moment) and in cases where a long lens has its own stabilization system, the camera will defer to that at least on some axes.

I haven’t had a chance to play with these in person but I expect to soon; in the meantime, as always, DPReview has a solid set of first impressions.

Z-mount into the future

For many, the biggest change will be the switch to the new Z-mount system. There will be a series of Z lenses, and bonny lenses they will be, with the new dimensions allowing improved optics across the board. Everyone is hot about a F/0.95 Noct lens Nikon has been teasing for 2019. But with a hundred million F-mount lenses out there, backwards compatibility is a must.

For them there is the FTZ adapter, which fits between the Z and the old lens, bridging the old technology and the new. If the lens is relatively new and supports automatic aperture and focus, those will be available. And, in fact, these lenses will benefit from the new autofocus system and may perform better than they did originally, if not identically — slight changes will no doubt emerge from the addition of the new optics.

Older lenses, such as classics with manual focus and aperture, will still fit the adapter but can’t be magically endowed with automatic features.

The adapter is not inconsiderable in size — more like a pancake lens than a filter. So your favorite lightweight walk-around setup may be impacted negatively. But overall it seems like it should do nicely for most.

Nikon has made its play, and the Z series looks like a natural jump for thousands of photographers who have stuck with the brand for years out of loyalty and investment. It doesn’t take much away, it adds quite a bit and in a few years it will probably be a no-brainer rather than a “well, maybe.”

I wrote the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces. I wrote that same law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to provide vital protections to sites that didn’t want to host the most unsavory forms of expression. The goal was to protect the unique ability of the internet to be the proverbial marketplace of ideas while ensuring that mainstream sites could reflect the ethics of society as a whole.

In general, this has been a success — with one glaring exception. I never expected that internet CEOs would fail to understand one simple principle: that an individual endorsing (or denying) the extermination of millions of people, or attacking the victims of horrific crimes or the parents of murdered children, is far more indecent than an individual posting pornography.

If you want to be the CEO of an internet titan where schools communicate with students, artists with their fans or elected officials with their constituents, you need to limit content like pornography — and they all do. But for some reason, these CEOs think it’s entirely appropriate to allow these other forms of indecency to live on their platforms. Their ineptitude is threatening the very legal foundation of social media.

Social media cannot exist without the legal protections of Section 230. That protection is not constitutional, it’s statutory. Failure by the companies to properly understand the premise of the law is the beginning of the end of the protections it provides. I say this because their failures are making it increasingly difficult for me to protect Section 230 in Congress. Members across the spectrum, including far-right House and Senate leaders, are agitating for government regulation of internet platforms. Even if government doesn’t take the dangerous step of regulating speech, just eliminating the 230 protections is enough to have a dramatic, chilling effect on expression across the internet.

Were Twitter to lose the protections I wrote into law, within 24 hours its potential liabilities would be many multiples of its assets and its stock would be worthless. The same for Facebook and any other social media site. Boards of directors should have taken action long before now against CEOs who refuse to recognize this threat to their business.

It’s telling that Reddit, of all the social media sites, has been on the forefront of striking a balance — telling because they’re the only site owned by a traditional pre-internet corporation. This balance is not the one I would have chosen — and certainly there have been missteps and failures — but an average user of Reddit won’t encounter the extremes of obscenity and indecency that it allows in darker corners of the site. And even they have defined certain speech as too indecent to be permitted on their platform.

There are real consequences to social media hosting radically indecent speech, and those consequences are looming. They are threatening to undo more than 20 years of internet law and jurisprudence that has protected speech and expression as never before. The forces of government regulation and control never sleep. Unfortunately, the internet CEOs have been asleep at the wheel.

As fields of research, machine learning and artificial intelligence both date back to the 50s. More than half a century later, the disciplines have graduated from the theoretical to practical, real world applications. We’ll have some of the top minds in both categories to discuss the latest advances and future of AI and ML on stage and Disrupt San Francisco in early September.

For the first time, Disrupt SF will be held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It’s a huge space, which meant we could dramatically increase the amount of programming offered to attendees. And we did. Here’s the agenda. Tickets are still available even though the show is less than two weeks away. Grab one here.

The show features the themes currently facing the technology world including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Some of the top minds in AI and ML are speaking on several stages and some are taking audience questions. We’re thrilled to be joined by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobots, Claire Delaunay, Nvidia VP of Engineering, and among others, Dario Gil, IBM VP of AI.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO and chairman of Sinovation, a venture firm based in the U.S. and China, and he has emerged as one of the world’s top prognosticators on artificial intelligence and how the technology will disrupt just about everything. Dr. Lee wrote in The New York Times last year that AI is “poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.” Dr. Lee will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Colin Angle co-founded iRobot with fellow MIT grads Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner in 1990. Early on, the company provided robots for military applications, and then in 2002, introduced the consumer-focused Roomba. Angle has plenty to talk about. As the CEO and Chairman of iRobot, he led the company through the sale of its military branch in 2016 so the company can focus on robots in homes. If there’s anyone that knows how to both work with the military and manage consumers’ expectations with household robots, it’s Colin Angle and we’re excited to have him speaking at the event where he will also take questions from the audience on the Q&A stage.

Claire Delaunay is vice president of engineering at Nvidia, where she is responsible for the Isaac robotics initiative and leads a team to bring Isaac to market for roboticists and developers around the world. Prior to joining Nvidia, Delaunay was the director of engineering at Uber, after it acquired Otto, the startup she co-founded. She was also the robotics program lead at Google and founded two companies, Botiful and Robotics Valley. Delaunay will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees.

Dario Gil, the head of IBM’s AI research efforts and quantum computing program, is coming to Disrupt Sf to talk about the current state of quantum computing. We may even see a demo or two of what’s possible today and use that to separate hype from reality. Among the large tech firms, IBM — and specifically the IBM Q lab — has long been at the forefront of the quantum revolution. Last year, the company showed off its 50-qubit quantum computer and you can already start building software for it using the company’s developer kit.

Sam Liang is the CEO/Co-Founder of AISense Inc, based in Silicon Valley. Funded by Horizons Ventures (DeepMind, Waze, Zoom, Facebook), Tim Draper, David Cheriton of Stanford (first investor in Google), etc. AISense has created Ambient Voice Intelligence technologies with deep learning that understands human-to-human conversations. Its Otter.ai product digitizes all voice meetings and video conferences, makes every conversation searchable and also provides speech analytics and insights. Otter.ai is the exclusive provider of automatic meeting transcription for Zoom Video Communications.

Laura Major is the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works, where she leads R&D, product design and development and manages the multi-disciplinary engineering team. Prior to joining CyPhy Works, she worked at Draper Laboratory as a division lead and developed the first human-centered engineering capability and expanded it to included machine intelligence and AI. Laura also grew multiple programs and engineering teams to contribute to the development and expansion of ATAK, which is now in wide use across the military.

Dr. Jason Mars founded and runs Clinc to try to close the gap in conversational AI by emulating human intelligence to interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech. AI has the potential to change everything, but there is a fundamental disconnect between what AI is capable of and how we interface with it. Clinc is currently targeting the financial market, letting users converse with their bank account using natural language without any pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus. At Disrupt SF, Mars is set to debut other ways that Clinc’s conversational AI can be applied. Without ruining the surprise, let me just say that this is going to be a demo you won’t want to miss. After the demo, he will take questions on the Q&A stage.

Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing, will join us at Disrupt SF 2018 to explain Rigetti’s approach to quantum computing. It’s two-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, Forest. Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date according to Crunchbase, with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead.

Kyle Vogt co-founded and eventually sold Cruise Automation to General Motors in 2016. He stuck around after the sale and still leads the company today. Since selling the company to GM, Cruise has scaled rapidly and seemed to maintain a scrappy startup feel though now a division of a massive corporation. The company had 30 self-driving test cars on the road in 2016 and later rolled out a high-definition mapping system. In 2017 the company started running an autonomous ride-hailing service for its employees in San Francisco, later announcing its self-driving cars would hit New York City. Recently SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings LLC and when the deal closes, GM will invest an additional $1.1 billion. The investments are expected to inject enough capital into Cruise for the unit to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019.

Twitter says it’s ending support for all Twitter iOS users who are running older versions of the iOS operating system. According to a message in the app’s update text in its latest App Store release this week, only those users running iOS 10 or higher will continue to have a supported mobile client.

The company’s message notes this decision will allow it to streamline its app development for all clients.

Typically, moving off older platforms means a company can more quickly roll out new features and take advantage of the benefits provided by newer frameworks, without worrying how to support legacy users along the way.

It’s not unprecedented for social apps to make this choice, either – LinkedIn and Snapchat also only support iOS 10 or higher. Facebook, meanwhile, caters to anyone on iOS 9 or above.

iOS 10 was released nearly 2 years ago, and next month, Apple device owners will gain access to the public release of iOS 12.

Ditching older versions of iOS is not as risky for Twitter as ditching users on older versions of Android, because a majority of iOS users upgrade when Apple rolls out a new mobile operating system. In fact, Apple’s data indicates only 5% percent of users are still on iOS 9 or below. At Apple’s scale, that’s still millions, but translated to Twitter’s install base it’s a much lower number.

During its Q2 2018 earnings, Twitter said it had 335 million monthly active users. And of course, many of those are running Twitter on Android. Presumably a very, very small percentage of users are on iOS 9 or below. Twitter must believe it’s small enough to be an acceptance loss, if it comes to that.

This would hardly be news except for the fact that the decision comes at a time when Twitter is losing users – it lost 1 million users in Q2 – and when Twitter has been killing off a number of other client applications, as well. The company had already shut down many versions of the TweetDeck client app it acquired, and this year it shuttered Twitter for Mac along with most of its TV apps. It also ended support for legacy APIs, knowing that doing so would impact third-party clients’ ability to operate. And now it’s shedding a small number of iOS users, too.

Twitter says that anyone still running iOS 9 or older will no longer receive updates, so those who want to receive performance improvements, bug fixes and new features will need to upgrade.

With all these changes, it’s clear that Twitter is focused on limiting the number of platforms it has to support, so it can better address the needs of its users. Time will tell if it’s successful with that, however.

Moving to a new city can be tough for a number of reasons, but what’s arguably hardest about moving is a competitive and expensive housing market, and lack of a pre-existing social support network. That’s the problem startup Bungalow is trying to solve.

Bungalow, which just raised a $14 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Founders Fund, Atomic VC, Cherubic Ventures and Wing Ventures, offers people relatively affordable places to live with others who have been vetted by Bungalow’s platform. As part of the round, Keith Rabois of Khosla will join Bungalow’s board of directors. Bungalow also raised a $50 million debt facility to fuel its home growth costs. Bungalow had previously raised a $7 million seed round.

Bungalow, which joins the likes of WeLive, OpenDoor, Common, Roam and so many others, aims to be cheaper than getting your own studio or one-bedroom apartment, and offer a better experience than finding a roommate via Craigslist. Bungalow works with homeowners to lease their homes as the master tenant for three years at time. From there, Bungalow rents out the property on a room-by-room basis while guaranteeing occupancy to the homeowners.

“There aren’t as many families that are looking for these four, five, six-bedroom homes and so the incremental additional cost for those additional bedrooms is not commensurate with the individual rate at which we can lease out those individual bedrooms,” Bungalow co-founder and CEO Andrew Collins told me. “And so we were able to therefore basically create value out of that and then with scale that margin that we’re able to create within those given homes in an incredibly profitable and exciting coupling.”

For the renter, Bungalow says it’s about 30-40 percent cheaper than a studio. Depending on the market, of course, the prices can vary. Bungalow also furnishes shared common spaces, provides utilities, Wi-Fi and housekeeping in the monthly rental cost. In addition to what’s provided inside the space, Bungalow hosts monthly events for members in its properties to meet each other within a given market.

Bungalow currently operates 200 properties across seven markets, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. In total, there are 750 people residing in a Bungalow-leased property. All residents first must go through credit and background checks, as well as interviews with any existing residents before moving in. But that process can happen very fast, the company said. Some people have moved in same-day, but on average people look about 10 to 20 days ahead of when they’re trying to move.

While Bungalow’s current model is leasing assets from homeowners, it’s set up to operate any type of asset, Collins said, whether that’s a joint-venture or independently owned by Bungalow. Within the next six to 12 months, Bungalow is looking to launch in up to 12 new markets in the U.S. Next year, Bungalow hopes to expand its offering outside of the U.S.

Mixmax, a service that aims to make email and other outbound communications more usable and effective, today announced the official launch of its new IFTTT-like rules for automating many of the most repetitive aspects of your daily email workflow.

On the one hand, this new feature is a bit like your standard email filter on steroids (and with connections to third-party tools like Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign, Greenhouse and Pipedrive). Thanks to this, you can now receive an SMS when a customer who spends more than $5,000 a month emails you, for example.

But rules can also be triggered by any of the third-party services the company currently supports. Maybe you want to send out a meeting reminder based on your calendar entries, for example. You can then set up a rule that always emails a reminder a day before the meeting, together with all the standard info you’d want to send in that email.

“One way we think about Mixmax is that we want to do for externally facing teams and people who talk a lot of customers what Github did for engineering and what Slack did for internal team communication,” Mixmax co-founder and CEO Olof Mathé told me. “That’s what we do for external communication.”

While the service started out as a basic Chrome extension for Gmail, it’s now a full-blown email automation system that offers everything from easy calendar sharing to tracking when recipients open an email and, now, building rules around that. Mathé likened it to an executive assistant, but he stressed that he doesn’t think Mixmax is taking anybody’s jobs away. “We’re not here to replace other people,” he said. “We amplify what you are able to do as an individual and give you superpowers so you can become your own personal chief of staff so you get more time.”

The new rules feature takes this to the next level and Mathé and his team plan to build this out more over time. He teased a new feature called ‘beast mode’ that’s coming in the near future and that will see Mixmax propose actions you can take across different applications, for example.

Many of the new rules and connectors will be available to all paying users, though some features, like access to your Salesforce account, will only be available to those on higher-tier plans.

Twitch has teamed up with The Pokémon Company to allow viewers to binge watch the Pokémon: The Series TV show and related movies on its site, and “catch” Pokémon badges along the way. While the former is one of Twitch’s many retro binge watch fests – it’s previously streamed old shows like Bob Ross, Julia Child, Mister Rogers, SNL, and most recently, Knight Rider – the interactive feature it’s debuting is something new.

According to the company, Twitch will launch its own Pokémon extension to accompany the broadcast. This overlay, called “Twitch Presents: Pokémon Badge Collector,” will encourage viewers to collect Pokémon badges that appear on the screen for points, which places them on a leaderboard.

This is only the second time Twitch has added an interactive element like this to one of its viewing events, and its addition could see users watching for longer periods of time, as a result. The first was a “watch and win” extension during a Doctor Who broadcast, but it was different as it focused on collecting contest entries.

Twitch also notes this will be the longest viewing event it’s ever held.

The binge will see 16 movies and 19 TV seasons with 932 episodes streamed across Twitch’s network, starting on August 27, 2018, and spanning until 2019. This will kick off with the first season, Pokémon: Indigo League at 10 AM PDT on the 27ths for audiences in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The content will air on TwitchPresents and on its companion channels in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

“The Twitch community has a passion for Pokémon based on the warm embrace the series received when we celebrated the brand’s 20th anniversary, as well as the cultural milestone that was set when over a hundred thousand Twitch members played Pokémon together,” said Jane Weedon, Director of Business Development at Twitch, in a statement about the launch.

The viewing event comes at a time when reports claim Twitch is going after a wider audience than just gamers. The company has been wooing creatives like vloggers, cooks, artists, and others to come to its site, instead of only broadcasting on YouTube. And it’s been airing non-esports content through marathon events like this new one with Pokémon. According to Bloomberg, TV show livestreams are one of the two fastest-growing genres on the site, the other being “IRL” (in real life) content.

The Pokémon viewing event, in particular, is aimed at a younger audience who may not have the level of nostalgia for the classic TV shows Twitch previously aired. Instead, Twitch says the livestream is appropriate for fans 13 and up – which means it could attract those whose first real exposure to Pokémon was the mobile game that went viral following its launch in 2016.

The dates and times of the Pokémon series and movies will be on Twitch Presents. The binge fest won’t include newer series, like the Sun & Moon or Sun & Moon Ultra Adventures, however.

Autonomous vehicles need more than a brain to operate safely in a world filled with obstacles. They need maps. Or more specifically, self-driving vehicles need maps that constantly refresh and can deliver important information—like that sudden lane closure due to construction or a double parked vehicle—so they can take the safest and most efficient route possible.

This specific need has provided an opening for startups in what once looked like a locked up mapping market dominated by a few giants.

Carmera, a New York-based mapping and data analytics startup, is one of them. The company, which came out of stealth two years ago, has now raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. Carmera previously raised $6.5 million.

The company announced the funding raise Thursday along with a few other updates including a new feature on its autonomous mapping product and a partnership with New York City. The capital will be used to hire more talent and expand.

“We’ll be doing the most aggressive hiring we’ve ever done this next year,” Carmera co-founder and CEO Ro Gupta told TechCrunch, adding that the company will mostly focus on building out its New York and Seattle offices. Carmera, which has about 25 employees, plans to have more than 50 by the end of next year.

“The money also allows us to be more prospective than simply reacting to customer needs,” Gupta added.

In other words, Carmera can move into new markets where it suspects there will be a need in the future, not just wait for a call from their customers. One of those customers is Voyage, the autonomous driving startup that currently operates self-driving cars in retirement communities.

Carmera has an interesting business model, and one that’s likely attractive to investors looking for startups with a present-day revenue stream. The company  describes itself as a street intelligence platform for autonomy. It’s main product is the Carmera autonomous map, a high-definition map for autonomous vehicle customers like automakers, suppliers, and robotaxis.

The twist here is that the company uses data gleaned from its other product—a fleet monitoring service used by commercial customers with vehicles driven by humans—to keep those AV maps fresh. The fleet product is a telematics and video monitoring service used by professional fleets that want to manage risk with their vehicles and drivers.

These fleets of camera-equipped human-driven vehicles deliver new information to the autonomous map as they go about their daily business in cities. Carmera calls this a “pro-sourcing” swarm.

The startup has now added a real-time events and change management engine to its autonomous map that Gupta contends is a major leap forward because it not only provides more detailed information to self-driving vehicles, it gives these driverless vehicles a suggested path.

In some mapping products, there’s general a base map and then a dynamic overlay. The problem, Gupta explains, is that when things change like a lane closure, the dynamic map only flags it, leaving it up to the vehicle to figure out what to do next.

“That works fine when humans are driving, it just doesn’t go far enough for AVs,” Gupta said. “What they need to know is how do I path plan around it?”

Carmera’s real-time events and change management feature.

The map will detect a change in milliseconds, classify it within seconds and then validate and redraw the base map within minutes, according to Carmera. The company is giving companies deploying autonomous vehicles API access to this data at every stage.

Carmera also has a “site intelligence product,” a jargon term that means the company provides spatial data and street analytics (like how pedestrians move within a particular intersection) to urban planners.

Carmera announced Thursday it will begin sharing data such as historical pedestrian analytics and real-time construction detection with New York City’s Department of Transportation. Carmera will get access to key city data sets in return. The partnership with NYC DOT follows an earlier data sharing initiative with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.

Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are no longer solely the domain of super cheap smart speakers. Google, in particular, has been courting third-party hardware makers pretty aggressively in an attempt to put the consumer AI on as wide a range of products as possible.

Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound 1 and 2 certainly hit the high of the spectrum. The pricey speakers are the first in the company’s line to get Google Assistant functionality, though B&O has already promised to add it across its devices. Both models already feature the tech necessary for such an addition, including an array of five mics.

The company’s also added four buttons on top of the device, which can be assigned to various functions, like weather, news and the like. New models will ship with Assistant on board starting next month, priced at of $1,750 and $2,250 for the 1 and two, respectively.