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Tech News Today for June 29, 2017

Tech News for Thursday June 29, 2017

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. If you, like me, think it feels like we just celebrated the 10th anniversary you'd be right. On January 7th of this year, we celebrated the birth of the iPhone because that's when Steve Jobs stood on stage and announced it. But today is the day you could wait in line at a store to buy one. So, we're celebrating again. No matter how you feel about Apple or the sheeple who follow the company, you cannot deny that any product that has sold more than a billion units is worth talking about. Even though there are a lot more Android phones out there than there are iPhones, the iPhone is possibly the best-selling product ever, anywhere. Read more at motherboard.vice.com.

Your mother may have told you that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. That maternal wisdom rarely works online, so Instagram has turned to Artificial Intelligence. Today the Facebook-owned company announced a new system to filter out hateful comments called DeepText. It goes beyond filtering keywords and is designed to understand the context of the comment and decide whether it's toxic or benign. It will launch first in English and later in other languages and the company says it's already being used to combat Instagram spam. This will be turned on by default. Read more at blog.instagram.com.

Carmel DeAmicis has a great piece in Marie Claire magazine about the women behind the Amazon Echo. We discussed Amazon at length on Jason Snell's podcast, The Download, and we talked about how many psychologists Amazon had on staff. It turns out, Toni Reid, who joined the Alexa team as its director in 2014 has a BA in Anthropology, but according to DeAmicis, Reid is seen as a "customer oracle with an uncanny ability to predict users' wants and needs." Many of the leaders of the Amazon Echo are female. Read more at marieclaire.com.

Alphabet is rolling out Google Photos 3.0, now with more facial recognition. The new features, announced at Google I/O back in May, include machine learning that nudges you to share pictures if you forget. Google also says they'll recognize meaningful moments and suggest who you might want to share them with. You can now share with friends and family, even if they don't use Google Photos. This will be so useful and so creepy because imagine what Google will do with that information. Read more at blog.google.

Tech News today with Megan Morrone and Jason Howell streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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