In Tuesday's newsletter, I laid out how to watch (and what to expect from) Amazon's Alexa press event. But aside from unveiling what Alexa will be capable of, there was no silly hardware and no upgraded Echos, but lots of demos. We learned Alexa will be included with an Amazon Prime subscription, and the company will also offer the enhanced digital assistant separately, for 20 per month. Meanwhile, Apple's new entry-level iPhone, the 16e, launches online and in stores today. The 599 phone is arguably 100 too expensive, but it packs a processor that can deliver Apple Intelligence to the masses.

Dormant pruning, or the removal of unproductive portions of a tree while a tree is not actively growing, is an important orchard task to help maintain yield, requiring years to build expertise. Because of long training periods and an increasing labor shortage in agricultural jobs, pruning could benefit from robotic automation. However, to program robots to prune branches, we first need to understand how pruning decisions are made, and what variables in the environment (e.g., branch size and thickness) we need to capture. Working directly with three pruning stakeholders -- horticulturists, growers, and pruners -- we find that each group of human experts approaches pruning decision-making differently. To capture this knowledge, we present three studies and two extracted pruning protocols from field work conducted in Prosser, Washington in January 2022 and 2023. We interviewed six stakeholders (two in each group) and observed pruning across three cultivars -- Bing Cherries, Envy Apples, and Jazz Apples -- and two tree architectures -- Upright Fruiting Offshoot and V-Trellis. Leveraging participant interviews and video data, this analysis uses grounded coding to extract pruning terminology, discover horticultural contexts that influence pruning decisions, and find implementable pruning heuristics for autonomous systems. The results include a validated terminology set, which we offer for use by both pruning stakeholders and roboticists, to communicate general pruning concepts and heuristics. The results also highlight seven pruning heuristics utilizing this terminology set that would be relevant for use by future autonomous robot pruning systems, and characterize three discovered horticultural contexts (i.e., environmental management, crop-load management, and replacement wood) across all three cultivars.

Bimanual coordination is pervasive, spanning household activities such as cutting food, surgical skills such as suturing a wound, or industrial tasks such as connecting two cables. In robotics, the addition of a second arm opens the door to a higher level of task complexity, but comes with a number of control challenges. With a second arm, we have to reason about how to produce coordinated behavior in a higher dimensional action space, resulting in more computationally challenging learning, planning, and optimization problems. The addition of a second arm also complicates data collection--it requires teleoperating a robot with more degrees of freedom--which hinders our ability to rely on methods that require expert bimanual demonstrations. To combat these challenges, we can draw inspiration from how humans tackle bimanual tasks--specifically alternating between using one arm to stabilize parts of the environment, then using the other arm to act conditioned on the stabilized state of the world. Alternating stabilizing and acting offers a significant gain over both model-based and data-driven prior approaches for bimanual manipulation. Previous model-based techniques have proposed planning algorithms for bimanual tasks such as collaborative transport or scooping [1, 2, 3], but require hand-designed specialized primitives or follow predefined trajectories limiting their abilities to learn new skills or adapt. On another extreme, we turn to reinforcement learning (RL) techniques that do not need costly primitives. However, RL methods are notoriously data hungry and a high-dimensional bimanual action space further exacerbates this problem.

When Amazon introduced its 2nd-generation Echo Buds in 2021, the company redesigned them to address nearly every issue with its first attempt. They had true active noise cancellation (ANC), better sound and a smaller size. Amazon took a much different approach for its third version, opting to move from mid-range to a low-cost model with an all-new design that covers most of the basic features you'd expect. As always, the Alexa faithful will get the most out of the new $50 Echo Buds, but in a lot of ways you could argue a budget model that does well with the essentials is where Amazon should've been all along. While the first two iterations of the Echo Buds had similar designs, Amazon completely changed things up for the third generation.

An Amazon listing may have spilled the beans early, but today Beats is officially debuting its latest true wireless earbuds. That premature appearance was mostly accurate: the Studio Buds have a familiar design with loads of improvements on the inside. Those upgrades include better battery life, retooled call performance and updated noise cancellation. There's also a new transparent design option that offers a look at all of those internal components. However, they come with a slightly higher price tag at $170, which means the new version isn't quite as good of a deal as the original.

You won't find it written anywhere in the press materials, but the Beats Studio Buds may as well be called the AirPods 3. From their funky new design and minimalist theme to Apple-ready features like voice-activated Siri, these are immediately the obvious choice right now for AirPods fanatics who don't want to spend up for the AirPods Pro. Wisely, though, Apple has crafted these buds to be nearly as useful for either side of the mobile aisle, including native one-touch pairing for Android or iPhone, a simple but useful Android app, and quick access to alternative voice assistants. The result is a pair of buds that easily outdo the aging AirPods, no matter which phone you choose. The beats have a new pill-like design at their exterior for controls as well as easy insertion. The last Beats earbuds, the Powerbeats, were simply a step-down version of the Powerbeats Pro, chaining the clip-ons together for a more affordable workout option.

Compared to its closest rivals, Amazon was late to the true wireless earbud game. By the time the company introduced its Echo Buds in 2019, Apple was already on version two and the AirPods Pro came shortly after. Google's wired Pixel Buds were two years old, and the company would go on to launch an improved version in 2020. As is typically the case when a company enters a new product category, the first Echo Buds had some flaws despite offering hands-free access to Alexa at an affordable price. Now Amazon has returned with the "all-new" Echo Buds ( $100 and $120) which feature true active noise cancellation (ANC), improved audio quality and a redesign.

A tea bag is an extraordinary thing. Each small sachet contains a mix of leaves from different producers and different places. Hundreds of factors can affect the flavour of each leaf, from the amount of sunlight and rainfall to the type of soil it was grown in, how it was plucked and how it was dried. Yet when you drink a cup of your favourite brew, you expect it to taste exactly like the last one. Tetley, a British teamaker, boasts that its basic blend has had the same distinctive taste since the company was set up in 1822.

Jabra has been surprising us with category-busting earbuds since the brand's first "so-called" true wireless pair (that is, those without wires at all), the Elite and Elite Active 65t. Elite they were, and the follow-up Elite and Elite Active 75t are even better. In fact, Jabra's decision to retroactively add noise canceling to the already stellar 75t series via firmware makes them excellent competition for the new 85t, at a much lower price point. However, while the 85t may look a lot like the 75t--with some extra bulk--Jabra's engineers have drawn up something new here, aimed at long-term wearability and improved sound quality to take on the AirPods Pro, Bose's QuietComfort Earbuds, and other premium-tier rivals. And apart from one notable flaw (for which a fix is reportedly coming) they're about as close to perfect as true wireless gets.

Singapore will be the first country in the world to use facial verification in its national identity scheme. The biometric check will give Singaporeans secure access to both private and government services. The government's technology agency says it will be "fundamental" to the country's digital economy. It has been trialled with a bank and is now being rolled out nationwide. It not only identifies a person but ensures they are genuinely present.