Pixel Phones Gain Safety Check; Smartphone Sales; AI Detects Fake News

Google’s Pixel phones can now perform scheduled check-ins for your safety.
The Next Web reports with a new ‘safety check’ within the Pixel’s Personal Safety App you can ask your phone to check in to make sure you’re okay at a given time. You might use it walking home at night, are hiking alone, or are otherwise in a potentially risky situation. If you don’t respond to the safety check, your phone will alert your emergency contacts, and you also have the option to share your location or call 911 from the app or check in screen.

Globally, smartphone sales were down 20% in the first quarter, but iPhone Sales only Dropped an Estimated 8%. According to Gartner, Samsung’s sales were down 22.7 percent, and Huawei’s sales were down 27.3 percent. Xiaomi was the only smartphone manufacturer that saw a slight increase in sales, with the overall smartphone market down 20.2 percent….“The coronavirus pandemic caused the global smartphone market to experience its worst decline ever,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner.

AI tools could improve fake news detection by analyzing users’ interactions and comments, according to Venturebeat.com. Researchers affiliated with Microsoft and Arizona State University propose an approach to detecting fake news that leverages a technique called weak social supervision. They say that by enabling the training of fake news-detecting AI even in scenarios where labeled examples aren’t available, weak social supervision opens the door to exploring how aspects of user interactions indicate news might be misleading.