Listen—it’s the beautiful sound of tweets being read aloud by a robot. Twitter has just launched a new ‘skill’ for Alexa-powered devices like the Echo that lets you interact with the service with just your voice.
- You can now ask Alexa to read your timeline, your mentions, and more. You’ll need to learn the specific phrases that Alexa will understand, but it’s all pretty common sense. For example, “Alexa, ask Twitter has anyone retweeted me?” or “Alexa, ask Twitter for my mentions.” Looks like you can’t dictate tweets yet, though. You can enable the new skill in the Alexa app or web portal. [Twitter via TechCrunch]
- In other news, you can now send links to Facebook Moments photo albums that can be viewed on the web, regardless of whether the recipient has the app or is a Facebook friend. You can also now save full resolution versions of photos, presumably an effort to push the Facebook Moments app into Google Photos territory as a destination for all your photos. [TechCrunch]
- Speaking of Facebook, their algorithm-based curation of trending topics isn’t going so well. Fake tabloid articles—including 9/11 conspiracy theories—keep bubbling to the surface. And then Facebook choose to remove the iconic Vietnam War photo of a young girl fleeing napalm when it was posted by a Norwegian newspaper; they’ve since reversed their decision. [Vocativ & The New York Time].
- It’s rumored that Microsoft is going to debut an all-in-one Surface PC in late October. ZDNet is reporting that the PC is likely to headline an October hardware launch event. (“All-in-one PC” typically refers to self-contained desktop machines like iMacs). [ZDNet]
- Sling TV has a new Windows 10 app. There’s nothing groundbreaking about it, but it has all the requisite universal Windows 10 app features, like Cortana integration and Live Tiles. [Sling TV]
Bird image via The Design Work.
