Just like these fitness-obsessed tv hosts Hans and Franz, Google desires to pump you up.
The firm is hatching plans to add fitness-tracking tech and assist for interactive dwelling exercises to its Android TV platform, and to incorporate these software program options into sensible TVs working different firms’ software program as effectively. If the imaginative and prescient comes to fruition, supported sensible TVs would sync with Fitbit trackers and smartwatches working Google’s Wear OS—such because the Samsung Galaxy Watch or Google Pixel Watch—which may very well be used to monitor a person’s progress by means of a collection of lounge exercises. It’ll be like watching a Richard Simmons or Billy Blanks video that may additionally monitor your reps and measure your coronary heart price.
The specifics of the way it will work aren’t clear, because the information—first reported by Protocol—got here from a private meeting Google held with different smart-home firms. Still, it’s apparent that Google’s transferring to compete with smart-home health companies like Apple Fitness+, which makes use of an Apple Watch and an Apple TV, in addition to units like Mirror and Peloton’s Guide.
According to Protocol, this initiative might additionally embody expanded potential to join Nest audio system or different wi-fi audio system together with your Google-powered TV. The report additionally says these modifications will most probably arrive in 2023.
Google is a pair years behind the massive shift to understanding from dwelling that got here in the beginning of the pandemic. But this providing is also seen as a part of Google’s effort to smush all its merchandise collectively. Fusing smart-home tech with Android, Wear OS, and Android TV means your Google stuff will get used extra usually and in additional mixtures.
Here’s what else you want to know concerning the week in shopper tech.
Google Calls Out Apple’s Texting
In extra Google information, the corporate put out a confrontational PSA earlier this week calling on Apple to change the elemental requirements it makes use of for its textual content messages. Apple converts messages to non-Apple units into commonplace SMS messages, as opposed to utilizing the extra richly featured RCS standard Google began pushing closely final 12 months. Because of that, some essential metadata can get misplaced in translation between the platforms.
Google framed Apple’s determination to not assist RCS as an influence transfer, blaming Apple for not adhering to extra trendy requirements. In actuality, it’s probably an try to stage the enjoying area between Apple and Google when it comes to inter-device messaging, the place the previous enjoys important aggressive benefits over the latter; iPhone-to-iPhone messaging comes with a dizzying variety of add-ons and particular options that Apple devotees are loath to surrender. It’s additionally ironic to hear such a plea coming from Google, an organization that has launched a dozen totally different messaging apps over time and may’t even hold the name of its messaging products proper. Undeterred, Google took its marketing campaign to social media, attempting to get different folks to soar on board. Now Google’s simply ready to get a response that Apple “loved this message.”
Ring Ring
Ring digicam movies are controversial. The Amazon-owned firm collects data about each its customers and folks caught on digicam, then can share those videos with law enforcement with out person consent. Still, the movies themselves have captured folks’s consideration. There’s an entire style of viral movies (sure, on TikTok) that revels within the wacky antics of individuals and pets caught on Ring cameras. Now, Amazon is trying to flip these clips into an entire present.
Called Ring Nation, the present can be hosted by comic Wanda Sykes. The content material can be just about what you’d count on: a group of funny and/or horrifying videos of the type of mayhem that occurs on folks’s porches and of their yards. The present is produced by Big Fish Entertainment, the identical manufacturing firm that created Live PD, a police documentary present that was canceled within the wake of George Floyd’s homicide in 2020. Ring Nation comes out September 26.
