Philips Hue adds E14 white and colour ambiance candle bulbs

Philips Hue is continuing its dominance in smart lights and connected home products with smaller E14 candle bulbs for smaller lamps. These will be ideal for smaller lamps or bedside table lamps. These colour ambiance or white bulbs fit in nicely in Philips Hue households or offices who may have the larger lamps and bridge but are still stuck with traditional E14 bulbs on smaller lamps.

Philips says that the addition of the E14 fitting means that Hue is now compatible with 80% of light fixtures worldwide.

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‘Actions on Google’ to open Google Assistant to third-party developers

If Google plans to unseat the Amazon Echo in its own category, it’ll need all the help it can get. And that’s what it is planning to do with the Actions on Google program launching in December. This program will allow developers to build “Actions” for Google Assistant (akin to the 3,000+ “skills” of Amazon’s Alexa). There will be two flavors to this: Direct Actions and Conversation Actions. Direct is similar to what you can do with Siri, Alexa, and even Google’s own Google Now voice assistant. You ask it for information, schedule a meeting, etc.

Conversations, on the other hand and as its name suggests, is more of a back and forth. One example given at the Google event is when Scott Huffman tried to get an Uber and had Google Assistant pass the conversation off to Uber to finalize the request. And that’s where developers would need to work with Google. Aside from the Google plans to release an Embedded Google Assistant software development kit to let tinkerers load Google Assistant on things like Raspberry Pi as well as for other hardware manufacturers to have Assistant in other products.

Source: The Verge

Symantec sets to protect connected vehicles from zero-day attacks

Symantec introduced Symantec Anomaly Detection for Automotive to protect against zero-day attacks and never-before-seen issues facing modern connected vehicles. Bringing Symantec’s extensive security and sophisticated analytics expertise across complex networks to the vehicle, Anomaly Detection for Automotive provides the crucial ability to identify issues for early remediation.

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Video: Dash is the hotel amenity delivery robot of your dreams

Crowne Plaza hotels are testing Dash, a smart amenity delivery robot which might soon replace bellhops, pages or porters. Dash can be programmed to deliver various amenities to specific hotel room guests. It can navigate the hotel, dash to the hotel room door, call the guests and when the door is opened- it completes the delivery. No need to tip Dash but you can rate timeliness or level of service and if Dash receives a good rating, it will break out into an R2-D2 type happy dance. The robot is being tested and has so far delighted various guests, Crowne Plaza is looking to deploy Dash in various hotels around the world.