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Google Assistant can now schedule your smart devices, and more tech news today
August 09, 2025
1. AI assistants: Still dumb but Google just got better
Voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant seemed to burst out into our world promising much, but struggled to go further. Alexa still baffles me on the lack of depth as to what it can do, with basic problems just never really being fixed. Siri haswell-documented problemsthat remain a blight on Apple.
Google Assistant remains the benchmark and can surprise me with its capabilities at times, but is never far from doing something strange or frustrating.
But here’s something. Someone found onReddit(curiously not announced by Google yet, for whatever reason) that Google Assistant now handles “scheduled actions”, which was as confirmed on aGoogle Developers page— still a long way from being properly announced, though.
Anyway, it’s great: you’re able to now say, starting with “Hey Google…” or “Ok Google…”:
Anyway, I tried it all and it works! With a few problems:
2. Yet another report out of South Korea points toSamsung ditching the Galaxy Note series(Android Authority).
3.POCO M3 specs confirmed ahead of tomorrow’s launch: new mid-range option for Europe and eventually India? (Android Authority).
4.OPPO says you won’t be able to buy that rollable phone from last week, in the short-term (Android Authority).
- ICYMI: Lots of OnePlus 9 news from new leaks:leaked renders provide design cues, andcamera details(Android Authority).
6.Oxford University and AstraZeneca vaccine trial shows up to 90 percent effectiveness— only needs normal refrigeration, not sub-zero temperatures, and it’s likely to be cheaper (The Verge).
7.Chrome extensions will have to show how they use your data, and with limits on how extensions can use that data (Engadget).
- A Dutch journalist easily logged in to an official EU defense video conference,gatecrashing the event to show how extremely lax the Zoom call securityreally was. The culprit was the Dutch minister who tweeted a photo giving out 5/6 digits of the required PIN (BBC).
9.Amazon lays off dozens of employees at its Amazon Prime Air droneorg, switching to working with third-parties to build new models (FT, $).
- Airbnb executive and former FBI official resigned from the company last yearover a Chinese request for real-time data sharing. “We’re not here to promote American values,” is not a great look (WSJ, $).
11.Attackers dupe GoDaddy staff into helping them take down cryptocurrency servicesthat were using GoDaddy for their domains. If you’re using GoDaddy with a high-value website, look after it somewhere more secure (Gizmodo).
12.16-year-old Charli D’Ameliois the first person with 100 million followers on TikTok. HerTikTok biofor most of the year: “Don’t worry, I don’t get the hype either.” (CNET).
13.Hyundai gets the green light to launch “fully driverless cars” in Las Vegas, although the actual details here mean at some time in the future, not like, tomorrow. (Jalopnik).
14.SpaceX might try a launch todayof its next Starlink satellites after last night’s was called off (Twitter).
15.Nintendo’s theme parkis looking fantastic (Kotaku).
- “ELI5: Why do traditional carslack any decent ability to warn the driver that the battery is low or about to die?” (r/explainlikeimfive).
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