It’s a good news day in tech today. The U.S. is once again curbing annoying robocalls, Microsoft revealed a new 40 million initiative to improve healthcare in AI, and Google trying to create a beefier chat client for the workspace.
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Thank you for tuning in to Hashtag Trending, it’s Thursday, January 30th, and I’m your host, Tom Li
Trending on Reddit, The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a massive lawsuit against five U.S. companies for scam calls. Most of these companies place the calls from India and prefer to use VoIP systems to abuse callers. According to the Justice Department, the calls, disguised as calls from government and social services, have caused “massive financial losses to elderly and vulnerable victims across the nation”. The amount of calls generated is staggering. TollFreeDeals.com, a company named in the lawsuit, placed 720 million calls in just 23 days.
Trending on Google, Microsoft has launched a new $40 million initiative to fund AI in healthcare. The new funding is exclusively for non-profits and research centers. Over the course of the next five years, Microsoft will distribute the money towards enabling technologies that would help the diagnosis and treatment of deadly ailments. In addition, Microsoft would also supply the research facilities with access to their cloud tools and expert data scientists.
Trending on Reddit, Google is back once again with a new instant messaging app. So far, Google has tried its hands in Allo, Hangouts, Duo, Messages as well as a number of older projects. This time though, it’s looking to harmonize Google Drive, Gmail, and Hangouts into a single platform for the office. Oh, by the way, Google will start shutting down Hangouts this year for consumers. If you’re a Gsuite subscriber, you can download the Hangouts Chat messaging client instead. For everyone else, you can transition to the Google Messages app.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Tom Li, thanks for listening.