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Amazon is expanding its automatic transcription service for AWS, Amazon Transcribe, to include support for medical speech, the company announced this morning at its AWS Re:Invent conference. The new machine-learning powered service, Amazon Transcribe Medical, will allow physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real-time, without any human intervention, Amazon claims.

Unlike some services, the physicians won’t have to say things like “comma” or “full stop,” but can speak normally during the dictation process. The text can then be fed to downstream systems including ER systems or AWS language services, like Amazon Comprehend Medical for entity extraction.

The service is also HIPAA compliant and scales with the users’ needs, meaning you’ll only pay for what you actually use and without upfront fees, notes Amazon.

From a technical perspective, the service works as follows.

You first capture audio through a device’s microphone, then send PCM audio to a streaming API, based on the Websocket protocol. The API responds with a series of JSON blobs wit the transcribed text, plus word-level time stamps and punctuation. This can also be optionally saved to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket.

Amazon Transcribe Medical, which builds on 2017’s debut of Amazon Transcribe, arrives at a time when Amazon is increasing its investments in the medical space — particularly in terms of the intersection of voice technology with medicine.

Last week, for example, Amazon launched a medication management service for Alexa which allows consumers to make voice requests for refills and get medication reminders.

The company has also made it possible for Alexa voice apps to be HIPAA compliant, acquired health startups like PillPack and Health Navigator, launched its own healthcare service for employees, Amazon Health, and has been piloting the use of Alexa in a hospital environment.

Amazon is not alone in working with speech recognition in the healthcare space — this is an area Google is working in as well, with Google Brain, plus Microsoft, established players like Nuance and Philips, and a wide range of startups. 

Amazon Transcribe Medical is initially available in the U.S. East (North Virginia) and U.S. West (Oregon) regions.

A young father and kitchen worker in Pittsburgh was thrilled to get a job with a big restaurant chain that paid $15 an hour — much more than he had been making in fast food.

Soon after starting, however, he learned that his schedule was set through an algorithm that crunches a range of data — from weather forecasts to past sales — to predict customer traffic, optimize shifts, and, ultimately, maximize profits. As a result, his hours were extremely unpredictable and sometimes his shifts were cancelled minutes before they were set to start. A job he believed would provide security now barely gave him enough hours to make rent and provide for his family. And it was all because of how his employer used technology.

The Pittsburgh worker’s story is not unique; the average American worker hasn’t gotten a meaningful raise in over 40 years, which has been made worse by meager benefits packages, volatile schedules and pay, and barriers to worker voice. While technology didn’t cause these longstanding challenges, the industry has failed to disrupt them — and at times even scaled and amplified them — as new technologies proliferate the workplace. This is one of the reasons there is a growing backlash against the tech industry, from the Uber and Lyft protests that grounded New York traffic to a halt to Google walkouts to the customer uproar that spurred DoorDash to change its tipping practices. And legal action abounds. Just last week, New Jersey fined Uber $649 million, while Washington D.C. sued DoorDash .

But the future doesn’t have to be this way. New and emerging technologies have the power to improve the lives of workers and make jobs more stable, fair, and dignified, while still delivering value and profit. The first step is making sure workers have a seat at the table — and a voice — to shape every aspect of technology, from design and development, investment and adoption, and policymaking and governance. Several new initiatives led by business, government, and workers are embracing this approach and, in the process, offer models for how to create a new, win-win relationship between tech and workers.

Workers and industry are beginning to partner to develop new technologies. The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (PAI) is a coalition of major tech companies, from Apple to Google, created with the mission of sharing the benefits of artificial intelligence. PAI recently launched an effort focused on workers and labor, engaging directly with workers and their representatives to develop a set of actionable recommendations about how to integrate AI into the workplace in a way that creates greater opportunity and security for workers. MIT, which is prolific in developing innovative technologies often in partnership with industry, is exploring inviting in groups of workers to advise their labs, an idea that emerged from the labor leaders who are involved with the University’s Work of the Future Taskforce. Tech companies should consider adopting and even deepening these practices of partnering directly with workers and worker groups and inviting them in to shape the development of new tech and business practices around tech adoption.

Government is bringing together business and workers to create policy. Government at all levels has been caught off guard by how quickly new technologies have transformed entire industries and struggled to develop the policies and programs needed to ensure that communities and workers benefit from the changes. To address this, California Governor Gavin Newsom recently launched a commission on the future of work. The president of the Service Employees International Union co-chairs the commission, and members include representatives of domestic workers and restaurant workers serving alongside leaders in business, government, and tech.

Having workers at the table for future of work conversations is all too rare, and it is already making an impact: the commission is not defaulting to only the typical solutions — guaranteed basic income and retraining — and is also exploring a range of ideas, from how workers might earn value from their data to the business case for improving job quality.  A number of cities and states are considering launching similar commissions, and New Jersey already has one in place.

When all else fails, workers are becoming the tech developers and investors they need. Many worker organizations are hopeful about the promise of technology, but they take issue with how tech is is too often used to amplify and scale business practices that hurt workers. Palak Shah, Director of National Domestic Worker Alliance’s innovation lab, is one of several, innovative leaders who is not waiting on the tech industry to develop what workers need and is instead building the tech herself. “Silicon Valley is great at optimizing for convenience… but we wanted to optimize for dignity and equity,” she said.

Over the past few years, Shah and a diverse team of organizers, developers, and domestic workers have launched a new fintech product to extend paid time off to house cleaners for the first time ever, a digital tool to help more nannies access contracts rather than work under the table, and even launched an investment fund that puts domestic workers in the investor role, directing capital to where they believe it would most improve their lives. This stands alongside a handful of other impactful efforts launched in the past few years, such as the Worker’s Lab and Employment Tech Fund, that fund a number of technologies designed for and by workers, as well as startups founded by former low-wage workers and worker organizers, such as Driver’s Seat, which supports ride-hail drivers in aggregating and capturing value from their data.

From city hall to the boardroom to protests in the streets, society is asking who tech should serve. The answer is clear: technology can and must work to disrupt the structural inequities in our workplace and economy. This starts by ensuring that workers have a seat at the table to shape how new technologies are developed, applied, and governed.

Accel, one of the world’s most influential venture capitalist firms, is becoming more bullish on India.

The Silicon Valley-headquartered firm, which largely focuses on early stage investments, said today it has closed $550 million for its sixth venture fund in India.

This is a significant amount of capital for Accel’s efforts in India, where it began investing 15 years ago and has infused roughly $1 billion through all of its previous funds combined.

Anand Daniel, a partner for Accel in India, told TechCrunch in an interview that the VC fund will continue to focus on identifying and investing in seed and early stage startups.

But the fund realized that it needed more money so that it could actively participate in follow-on rounds (later stage financing rounds) of its portfolio startups. The announcement today follows Accel’s similar recent push in Europe and Israel, where it closed a $575 million fund.

Like in many other markets, Accel’s track record in India is quite impressive. It participated in the seed financing round of e-commerce firm Flipkart, which was then valued at $4 million post-money. Walmart bought majority stake in Flipkart last year for $16 billion.

Accel, which has nine partners and more than 50 members in total in India, also invested in the seed round of SaaS giant Freshworks, which is now valued at over $3 billion, food delivery startup Swiggy, also valued at north of $3 billion, and recently turned unicorn BlackBuck.

The VC firm says 44 startups in its India portfolio today are valued at over $100 million. In total, including Flipkart’s $21 billion market value, Accel’s portfolio firms have created $44 billion in market value.

More to follow…

Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its login system, which security researchers say could have been used to trick unsuspecting victims into giving over complete access to their online accounts.

The bug allowed attackers to quietly steal account tokens, which websites and apps use to grant users access to their accounts without having them to constantly re-enter their passwords. These tokens are created by an app or a website in place of a username and password after a user logs in. That keeps the user persistently logged into the site, but also allows users to access third-party apps and websites without having to directly hand over their passwords.

Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity company CyberArk found that Microsoft left open an accidental loophole which, if exploited, could’ve been used to siphon off these account tokens used to access that victim’s account — potentially without ever alerting the user.

CyberArk’s latest research, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, found dozens of unregistered subdomains connected to a handful of apps built by Microsoft. These in-house apps are highly trusted and as such, associated subdomains can be used to generate access tokens automatically without requiring any explicit consent from the user.

With the subdomains in hand, all an attacker would need is trick an unsuspecting victim into clicking on a specially crafted link in an email or on a website, and the token can be stolen.

In some cases, the researchers said, this could be done in a “zero-click” way, which as the name suggests requires almost no user interaction at all. A malicious website hiding an embedded webpage could silently trigger the same request as a link in a malicious email to steal a user’s account token.

Luckily, the researchers registered as many of the subdomains they could find from the vulnerable Microsoft apps to prevent any malicious misuse, but warned there could be more.

The security flaw was reported to Microsoft in late October and was fixed three weeks later.

“We resolved the issue with the applications mentioned in this report in November and customers remain protected,” said a Microsoft spokesperson.

It’s not the first time Microsoft has acted to fix a bug in its login system. Almost exactly a year ago, the software and services giant fixed a similar vulnerability in which researchers were allowed to alter the records of an improperly configured Microsoft subdomain and steal Office account tokens.

Read more:

• A bug in Microsoft’s login system made it easy to hijack anyone’s Office account
• StockX was hacked, exposing millions of customers’ data
• DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9 million customers, workers and merchants
• Equifax breach was ‘entirely preventable’ had it used basic security measures, says House report
• Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’
• Capital One breach also hit other major companies, say researchers
• Macy’s said hackers stole customer credit cards — again

A couple weeks back Tesla unveiled the its first pickup truck, called the Cybertruck. During its unveiling the company showed a butt-to-butt pull-off. Besides being a silly test, this particular demo was flawed in multiple ways, giving the Tesla a major advantage. Here’s the math to prove it.

It’s likely Tesla will redo this test if it hasn’t already. After the original test went viral, a VP at Ford suggested Musk send Ford a Cybertruck so the company behind the F-150 can produce a better comparison. Ford quickly released a statement saying the comment was tongue-in-cheek and Ford has nothing to prove. However, Musk had already responded, telling the Ford VP to “bring it on”, later noting that Tesla would conduct another test “next week.”

It looks great on video to connect two trucks and have a pull-off but it produces little real-world conclusions. A better test would involve weighted trailers and conclusions based off range, handling and capacity — you know, things that matter to truck buyers.

Lucid Motors today is breaking ground on its manufacturing facility. Located in Casa Grande, Arizona, the factory will be used to build the Lucid Motor Lucid Air electric sedan. According to the company, production will begin in late 2020.

This groundbreaking is the latest step taken by Lucid Motor towards getting the Lucid Air on the streets. Earlier this year, the company hired Peter Hochholdinger to head up its manufacturing operations. Hochholdinger came to Lucid Motors after a two-year stint at Tesla, where he oversaw its Fremont, CA factory as well as other sites around the world. Before Tesla, he was a senior director of production at Audi.

Last September, Lucid Motors secured $1 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which the company said at the time would be used to finance the commercial launch of the Lucid Air. Lucid Motors it will invest over $700 million into the Casa Grande factory by the mid-2020s.

“The Lucid Air is a cutting-edge electric vehicle designed, engineered, and destined for manufacture entirely in America,” said Peter Rawlinson, CEO, and CTO, Lucid Motors. “We are proud to be moving forward on our commitment to manufacturing the Lucid Air in Casa Grande. With supportive investors, an outstanding team of designers and engineers, and a product strategy that extends well beyond the Air, we expect today to be just the start of a longstanding presence in this dynamic city.”

Lucid Motor’s Casa Grande facility is said to result in approximately 4,800 direct and indirect jobs by 2029. It’s also estimated to produce $32 billion revenue impact for the city and county over 20 years.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said in a rebased statement that attracting a high-tech automotive company such as Lucid Motors is a testament to Arizon’s talent, business environment, and geographical location.

Lucid Motors says it picked this location after a search that included 13 US states and 60 sites. It says that it chose the area based on business climate, infrastructure, talent, location, and the Arizona-Sonora region’s automotive supply chain.

Lucid Motors was founded ten years ago with a different name and mission. Then called Atieva, the company focused on electric car battery technology until 2016 when it changed its name as it shifted to producing electric vehicles.

Ikea believes its approach to making small spaces more liveable applies even on other planets: The company has been working with an Earth-based research facility that is meant to mimic what a Mars habitat would be like, according to Fast Company. Originally, Ikea sent a designer to the station to seek out inspiration for creating functional furniture for small apartments – but it quickly became a two-way street, which could mean the Swedish home furnishing company has a say in how future human colonists live on other planets.

As detailed by FastCo, Ikea designer Christina Levenborn spent time living in the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, which is situated in a desert and designed to feel as close as possible to the experience of living and working on the actual red planet. At any given time, there are usually a number of these types of simulated research projects going on, taking crews of volunteers and putting them into a simulated work/life scenario to help us prepare for when astronauts do the real thing. NASA is hoping to begin establishing a more permanent human presence on the Moon by 2024, which means this work could have real-world applications in space sooner rather than later.

Levenborn did indeed design an Ikea collection inspired by her time in the habitat, but she and others at Ikea returned the favor as well, coming up with organizational strategies and interior design layouts that emphasized a sense of privacy and personal space even in very cramped quarters, using Ikea shelving units and modular, wheeled furniture for flexibility and tidiness. Warm lighting and outdoor equipment for indoor use also contributed to making the habitat more… well, habitable.

That Ikea’s approach to making small spaces more liveable on Earth would apply off-Earth, too, is hardly surprising. But it is a good example of how contributions to ongoing efforts to help humans set up research and experimentation facilities on the Moon, Mars and beyond.

It’s not friend portability, but Facebook has announced the launch today of a photo transfer tool to enable users of its social network to port their photos directly to Google’s photo storage service, via encrypted transfer.

The photo portability feature is initially being offered to Facebook users in Ireland, where the company’s international HQ is based. Facebook says it is still testing and tweaking the feature based on feedback but slates “worldwide availability” as coming in the first half of 2020.

It also suggests porting to other photo storage services will be supported in the future, in addition to Google Photos — which specifying which services it may seek to add.

Facebook says the tool is based on code developed via its participation in the Data Transfer Project — a collaborative effort started last year that’s currently backed by five tech giants (Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter) who have committed to build “a common framework with open-source code that can connect any two online service providers, enabling a seamless, direct, user initiated portability of data between the two platforms”.

Facebook also points to a white paper it published in September — where it advocates for “clear rules” to govern the types of data that should be portable and “who is responsible for protecting that data as it moves to different providers”.

Behind all these moves is of course the looming threat of antitrust regulation, with legislators and agencies on both sides of the Atlantic now closely eyeing platforms’ grip on markets, eyeballs and data.

Hence Facebook’s white paper couching portability tools as “helping keep competition vibrant among online services”. (Albeit, if the ‘choice’ being offered is to pick another tech giant to get your data that’s not exactly going to reboot the competitive landscape.)

It’s certainly true that portability of user uploaded data can be helpful in encouraging people to feel they can move from a dominant service.

However it is also something of a smokescreen — especially when A) the platform in question is a social network like Facebook (because it’s people who keep other people stuck to these types of services); and B) the value derived from the data is retained by the platform regardless of whether the photos themselves travel elsewhere.

Facebook processes user uploaded data such as photos to gain personal insights to profile users for ad targeting purposes. So even if you send your photos elsewhere that doesn’t diminish what Facebook has already learned about you, having processed your selfies, groupies, baby photos, pet shots and so on. (It has also designed the portability tool to send a copy of the data; ergo, Facebook still retains your photos unless you take additional action — such as deleting your account.)

The company does not offer users any controls (portability tools or access rights) over the inferences it makes based on personal data such as photos.

Or indeed control over insights it services from its analysis of usage of its platform or wider browsing of the Internet (Facebook tracks both users and non users across the web via tools like social plug-ins and tracking pixels).

Given its targeted ads business is powered by a vast outgrowth of tracking (aka personal data processing), there’s little risk to Facebook to offer a portability feature buried in a sub-menu somewhere that lets a few in-the-know users click to send a copy of their photos to another tech giant.

Indeed, it may hope to benefit from similar incoming ports from other platforms in future.

“We hope this product can help advance conversations on the privacy questions we identified in our white paper,” Facebook writes. “We know we can’t do this alone, so we encourage other companies to join the Data Transfer Project to expand options for people and continue to push data portability innovation forward.”

Competition regulators looking to reboot digital markets will need to dig beneath the surface of such self-serving initiatives if they are to alight on a meaningful method of reining in platform power.

The holiday season is officially on, and Disrupt Berlin 2019 opens  its doors in just nine days. We’re ready to celebrate both occasions in festive style with a one-day Cyber Monday special. Buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin* today, 2 December, and you can pick any gift — up to $200 in value — from the TechCrunch Gift Guide.

Not familiar with our gift guide? You’re in for a treat. TechCrunch folk verge on the maniacal when it comes to choosing the gadgets, gear and services we use. Since we love to share, we curate the guide and pack it with absolutely awesome stuff.

Once you purchase your pass* to Disrupt Berlin today, we’ll contact you the week after the conference ends to get your preferred selection from the gift guide priced up to $200 (US). Cross a name off your holiday shopping list and choose a gift for a loved one, a friend or your kids. And if you decide to pick a cool gadget for yourself — hey, who are we to judge?

If you want to talk about gifts that keep on giving, Disrupt Berlin tops the list. This international conference boasts thousands of attendees from more than 50 countries, 200 media outlets and hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting the very latest innovations across the tech spectrum. It’s opportunity on steroids.

We packed the Disrupt Berlin agenda with world-class speakers, presentations, in-depth Q&A Sessions, panel discussions and workshops. The cream of the international early-stage startup crop will compete in the Startup Battlefield pitch competition for a $50,000 equity-free prize and bask in the spotlight of investor and media attention.

You’ll find infinite networking opportunities in Startup Alley. Our expo floor will be home to hundreds of pre-Series A startups eager to connect and impress. While you’re in the Alley, be sure to meet our Disrupt Berlin 2019 TC Top Picks — a cadre of innovative startups handpicked by TechCrunch editors.

This year, the TC Hackathon finalists will pitch the products they built in less than 24 hours live on the Extra Crunch stage. If you’re looking for creative devs in your startup — or if you just appreciate code poetry — this is a great opportunity to see the solutions these highly skilled competitors created to address real-world problems.

And CrunchMatch, our free business match-matching service available to all attendees — makes networking easier, more productive and less stressful. Who doesn’t love that?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Tis’ the season — take advantage of our one-day Cyber Monday celebration. Buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019 today*, and you get to choose a gift — worth up to $200 — from the TechCrunch Holiday Gift Guide. Come and join us in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

*Purchase must occur before 11:59pm CET on 2 December and must be a full-priced pass without any additional discounts applied. You will be contacted via the email address you submit in your registration after the event has been completed to provide your preferred gift selection valued up to $200 USD.

India has long been a wonderland for cellphone users. At a time when most telecom operators across the globe charge anywhere between $5 to $10 for a gigabyte of mobile data, telcos in India deliver that for just a few cents.

Spare another $2 to the same telecom operator, and you get a gigabyte of mobile data everyday for a month and all your nationwide calls become free.

How is that possible, you ask? In 2016, India’s richest man launched Reliance Jio, a telecom network that undercut the local competition by offering unlimited voice calls and bulk of 4G mobile data at industry-low prices. Vodafone and Airtel — two of the top three carriers in India — dramatically moved to revise their tariffs to aggressively compete with Jio, but in doing so they began to bleed a lot of money.

So now they are making some changes that suddenly make cellphone plans in the country less attractive — but fret not, these plans are still miles ahead of comparable offerings in most other markets.

Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel, and Reliance Jio — three telecom operators that command over 90% of India’s mobile subscriber base of more than 1.1 billion users — have hiked their tariffs by up to 42% for their prepaid customers. (In India, unlike many other markets, the vast majority of people prefer to pay as they go instead of signing up for a monthly subscription.)

The revised plans from Vodafone start from 26 cents for daily usage and go up to $33.4 for a year-long validity — that is about 42% costlier compared to the previous offerings. The operator’s new tariffs will go into effect starting Tuesday.

Bharti Airtel’s new tariffs are priced similarly, though the operator says it will offer “generous data and calling benefits” to make up for the hike.

The changes are a direct result to make up for the massive losses Airtel and Vodafone reported last month. In the quarter that ended in September, Airtel lost more than $3.2 billion, while Vodafone posted a loss of $7.1 billion.

While these losses reflect the competition heat that both the networks have been facing from Reliance Jio, which now leads the market with over 350 million subscribers, they largely address a one-time potential outstanding payment these companies owe to the government related to a court dispute surrounding 14-year-old adjusted gross revenue.

Last month, chief executives of both the telecom networks requested the Indian government to give them more time to pay the fine. Vodafone chief executive added that if the government did not budge, the British firm’s India business might just collapse.

The Indian government budged and offered a small bailout after it postponed certain payments.

Over the weekend, Reliance Jio said it would be introducing new plans, too, that will be “priced up to 40% higher” in a move to “strengthen the telecom sector” and strangely “keep consumers at the center of everything.” Its revised plans would go into effect this Friday.

Its announcement follows a two-month old decision to hike the prices after other telecom operators floated the idea that they would continue to levy what they call an “interconnect fee.”

When a call from one network is placed to a phone on another network, the former carrier has to pay an “interconnect fee” to the latter. Prior to 2017, the interconnect fee in the country was set at about 14 paise (roughly 1.8 cents) for each minute of the call. In 2017, the Indian telecom regulator cut the interconnect charge to 6 paise per minute, adding that in January 2020, the interconnect fee would no longer be valid. In recent months, Airtel and Vodafone, among other networks (but obviously not Reliance Jio), have been exploring ways to extend this deadline.

At any rate, some industry executives say that these tariff hikes were inevitable. Rajan Mathews, who heads the trade group Cellular Operators Association of India, said in a recent interview that the old prices were simply unsustainable for these businesses and carriers needed to address the price war more maturely.