Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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One note for anyone wanting that voice transcript feature in the pixel 4 voice recorder app.
I side loaded it on my galaxy s10e, works fine as far as I can tell.
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Ah interesting! So it doesn’t require the “new” Google assistant!
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I tried one of the newer version, it crashed constantly, but a slightly older version worked. I actually tried the Recorder and Live Transcript app by Google. Recorder is more accurate, but support only one language. Live Transcript on the other hand, last accurate, but support language like Japanese & Chinese even.
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I see, Yeah the version I have I installed right after it came out, so maybe a newer version wouldn’t work.
I haven’t tried the live caption stuff.
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So it seems. I understand google wanting to keep this feature as a selling point of their own devices, but I hope they officially open it up to the rest of the ecosystem down the line.
What gets me about @JeffJarvis attitude to Nightingale is, that Google were caught doing exactly the same thing in the UK last year, got a wrist-slap fine and were ordered to delete all the data.
So, what have they learnt from this experience? Don’t do it again? Get proper authorisation? Be transparent?
Nah, let’s do it in a country with lax data privacy protection and hope nobody notices us.
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What a shock, Jeff Jarvis defending the indefensible 
(When I saw the panel and this week’s topics, I couldn’t bear to watch.)
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I found that Leo was very unfair to Stadia here, maybe he needs to look into it more. To preface it though, one thing Stadia should’ve made clearer is that the service is still in “early access” and will officially launch closer to early 2020.
First, there are achievements in Stadia, though as of right now the UI for seeing them doesn’t exist (you still do unlock the though).
Next, there are many other services that give you games that you don’t actually “own”, to varying degrees. For example on Steam, or as Ant pointed out, on any console if you buy the game online, you only own a license to download, which would stop existing if the companies disappear.
Lastly, Stadia itself will be free at 1080p, the 10$ gives you 4k, as well as free games you can claim. So the right comparison to make here is, if you want to play Red Dead Redemption 2 right now, you’d either have to pay 60$ to Stadia, or 60$ + 300$ for a PS4. The former sounds much better if you aren’t a hardcore gamer with a bunch of consoles already. I do agree it’s not for serious gamers.
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But it was presented in the shareholder meeting. The project/research/partnership. That makes it public knowledge. Just not “regular people” public knowledge. I don’t like that Google came off as if they were hiding this relationship even though it was essentially public knowledge.
Thanks for listening, @big_D. Great feedback
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Come on now, you need to play fair. Yes it’s still cheaper, but anyone playing Stadia right now also paid out $130US (I think? it was $170CDN) for the the Founders edition hardware.
I don’t think anyone is complaining about the licensing. They’re worried (as am I, very much) that Stadia is much more likely to get discontinued with 6 months notice. Steam or PSN or XBox Live are doing fine… they’re already successful… for more than a decade at least. Stadia is new and unproven, is not from a traditional gaming company, but rather from a company who gets bored easily and cancels stuff willy nilly. The problem with Stadia is that people are going to be unwilling to invest in it until they know it will stick around, and it might not stick around if people don’t invest in it.
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anyone playing Stadia right now also paid out $130US
I did preface saying that the current version is early access and the real version will only be available early 2020, at which point you can play a game in 1080 with paying 0$ extra. Also, the 130$ also came with a 70$ Chromecast Ultra, a 70$ controller, 3 months of Pro subscription for you and 3 months for a friend (60$), a free game to start, as well as potentially more free games in the 3 months. But again, while you do get those things with the Founder edition, none of them are required for Stadia once it is out of “beta”.
a company who gets bored easily and cancels stuff willy nilly
That’s quite a bit unfair. Most of the products they cancel are free services and are generally pretty small, or come with a replacement otherwise. Yes, going from Inbox to Gmail sucks, but you didn’t actually lose any of your data. And I don’t think the shutdown of something like Reader is comparable to a paid product like Stadia. Google is already setting up game studios, and has made huge investment in infrastructure for Stadia. It’s not a small project.
You call it unfair, I call it having a bad reputation for cancelling things that people are invested in. I mean when there are multiple sites, and a wikipedia entry about it, I don’t think I’m imagining their bad reputation.
As for killing paid services, users of Google Play Music may lament the imminent death of something they’re paying $10/month for… about the same price as Stadia.
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Google has a lot of dead products because they also have a lot of products period. If you’ve been watching the TWIG and the Google Change log, you’d know that they come up with multiple “products” every week. Notice that I put that in quote because most of the stuff one those websites aren’t what most people would consider a product. The point is that these are small experiments and the vast majority of them matter and almost none of the items on that list can be compared to Stadia.
Not only that, but most people, including you, probably don’t even know what 90% of them are. We’re all techies here, and even in this audience probably no one can tell what any of these 12 randomly selected products on that site are without looking it up: fflick, Aardvark, ZygoteBody, Apture, Knol, Urchin, Needlebase, Postini, BufferBox, Sparrow, SlickLogin, Timeful, Revolv. Some of these are such a joke too; In what universe is Dragonfly, an internal project that was never even released, count as a “killed product”?
As for Google Play Music, while the website itself is being deprecated, all your data, playlists, music, purchases and everything else is being migrated to Youtube Music, so you’re not losing any data you paid for. It’s possible the one day Stadia gets migrated to Youtube Games, but as long as you’re not losing the games you paid for, I don’t think the FUD your spreading applies.
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Well, as an owner of the gear, I am not willing to participate in the marketplace, and will cancel my $12CDN/mo before ever paying once… solely because of the fear that this service is already a flop. I’ve already spent 10 hrs today not playing Stadia because of “issues” out of my control. I’ll keep pumping my money into Steam and PSN where I know success is assured.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who feels this way. I will be recommending against Stadia within my sphere of influence (friends and family.) So it will be interesting to see how many people feel like me versus how many people feel like you.
Being such a strong apologist for Google, I suspect you have a dog in the hunt. Are you a Google employee or contractor perhaps?
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That’s a fair point, Ant. But honestly, Google has such a lengthy, established pattern of obfuscation, opacity, redirects-and-denials, and other arrogant, nasty power plays (see Part 1of Zuboff or Rana Foroohar’s new book for details), I think folks can be forgiven for assuming/expecting the worst from them. (Edit: This is not FUD, it’s a matter of researched fact.)
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I haven’t tried Stadia yet. However, when I play an FPS game on my PC and there is a network studder, the characters on the map jump to their new location. Even though it looks amazing, the temporary lag still makes the game play bad. The rendering is local. So when I heard the reviews, I just figured since the lag was now between me and the rendering, I could now finally actually “see” the lag instead of it just making me think I got a headshot, but really the character had already moved (but I hadn’t seen the movement yet). My internet is always bad, its not like Stadia somehow made my internet worse. Yeah Stadia will add more load, and that could create more stuttering, but again, at least now we can visually “see” the lag. Anyways, have a good night.
Actually… that’s kind of an issue. Right now, a well designed game is only sending a few K per second, say, because they can get away with updates like, player moved to x,y,z, player fired bullet, player jumped, etc… they’re not sending whole frames of large images (well in essence they’re not streaming you a movie of the game.) With Stadia, they’re streaming you a 4K movie of the game along with sending all your mouse interactions, so that’s gonna hit your bandwidth A LOT harder and if bandwidth is part of your issue, then Stadia will actually appear to make things worse for you.
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