Google has been working on a "new interaction language" for years, and today it's sharing a peek at what it's developed so far. The company is showcasing a set of movements it's defined in its new interaction language in the first episode of a new series called In the lab with Google ATAP. That acronym stands for Advanced Technology and Projects, and it's Google's more-experimental division that the company calls its "hardware invention studio." The idea behind this "interaction language" is that the machines around us could be more intuitive and perceptive of our desire to interact with them by better understanding our nonverbal cues. "The devices that surround us... should feel like a best friend," senior interaction designer at ATAP Lauren Bedal told Engadget.

I scrambled for my phone. I was on hold for only five minutes, but for the first time, I didn't need to put my ears through terrible hold music. It has a unique feature that uses the artificially-intelligent Google Assistant to monitor when you've been put on hold with a 1-800 number. You'll hear a loud chime when you're finally connected to a human, so there's no need to attentively sit with the phone in hand and listen to Kenny G for hours on end. It's small, helpful features like this that make me appreciate Google phones.

Nest today introduced a new, more affordable thermostat to its lineup of smart home devices. Simply called the Nest Thermostat, it starts at $129 -- significantly cheaper than the $250 current-gen Nest Thermostat -- and leverages Google's Soli technology to recognize gestures behind its mirror-like display. The new Nest Thermostat comes at a time when many consumers are looking to use less energy in their homes, both because they want to save money and because they wish to take steps that help the environment. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, in April, spending plunged more than 13% -- the steepest drop since the government began to keep records nearly 60 years ago. And in a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 63% of Americans said stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost that they would make sacrifices to comply with them.

Google unveiled its Pixel 5 phone Wednesday, and there's a lot to unpack. Right off the bat, it doesn't have the latest Snapdragon processor, it doesn't have a 1440p display, and it dumps the vaunted Soli radar that powered Motion Sense and Face Unlock. But there are a few other tidbits we've learned since the Launch Night in event that you might have missed: One of the reasons why the Pixel phones have such great cameras is because of their tremendous on-device AI abilities. On previous phones, that was due to specialized co-processors that work with the main chip to quickly process AI-related tasks. On the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3, the Pixel Visual Core handled those tasks, while the Pixel 4 introduced the Pixel Neural Core for handling photo processing, live transcriptions, and the new Google Assistant.

Today any smartphone can generate 3D Photos, but the popular AI-powered effect is actually fairly new. It was back in 2018 that Facebook first introduced a machine learning-based 3D photo feature that allowed users to generate an immersive 3D image from normal 2D pictures. Leveraging the dual-lens "portrait mode" capabilities that had recently become available in smartphones, the feature quickly gained traction and began evolving. This June, a research team from Virginia Tech, National Tsing Hua University and Facebook designed an algorithm that generates even more immersive 3D photos from a single RGB-D (colour and depth) image. And in August, Facebook democratized the technique with a novel system able to generate 3D photos even on low-end mobile phones or without an Internet connection. Facebook isn't the only tech giant using AI to generate 3D photos -- in recent months, Google has introduced its own AI techniques for generating 3D photos from 2D images.

The Pixel 4a is a return to form for Google's smartphone efforts: a lower-cost, mid-range phone that is high quality, long-lasting and fairly small, with a great camera. The £349 Pixel 4a is very much an attempt to boil down a smartphone to only the essentials and then make them all work really well. It slots under the higher-priced £669-and-up Pixel 4 series, replacing last year's Pixel 3a and 3a XL with only one size of phone, taking the design of the 3a and expanding the screen to fill the front of the device. A 5G version is coming later in the year but for now the Pixel 4a is 4G only. The body is high-quality, soft-touch polycarbonate and feels surprisingly nice.

Google's next Pixel phone may do away with one of its predecessor's key features. According to 9to5Google, which cited sources from Google in a recent podcast, the tech giant may forego the inclusion of its Soli radar chip in its upcoming Pixel 5. Using radar, the chip enables features like hand gestures that allow users to control their device from a distance. In yesterday's show, we also touched on some things we're hearing about Pixel 5 from sources -- specifically that it will likely leave behind hobbies like Soli Specifically Soli-enabled users are able to wave a hand over phones to change music, take a call, interact with digital avatars and more. The chip will also be used to predict certain actions before users even tell the phone to carry them out. For instance, if the Pixel 4's alarm is going off, the phone will automatically quiet the ring once it senses a hand coming to shut it off.

In a major about-face in public health policy, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, and state and local health officials around the country recently began urging people to wear homemade face masks when they're out in public. The directive is not meant to replace social distancing, but to reduce the spread of infection and ensure the most effective personal protective equipment goes to health care workers on the front line. But it could also throw a wrench in a number of facial recognition applications, including those used to unlock smartphones. Less than a year old, Google's facial recognition system on Pixel 4 smartphones is built to recognize a person even if they've shaved their beard or are wearing sunglasses, but Face Unlock for Pixel 4 is rendered virtually useless by homemade face masks. A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat that Face Unlock isn't made to recognize people wearing face masks and declined to say whether the company is working to add that capability to its system.

While neural network hardware accelerators provide a substantial amount of raw compute throughput, the models deployed on them must be co-designed for the underlying hardware architecture to obtain the optimal system performance. We present a class of computer vision models designed using hardware-aware neural architecture search and customized to run on the Edge TPU, Google's neural network hardware accelerator for low-power, edge devices. For the Edge TPU in Coral devices, these models enable real-time image classification performance while achieving accuracy typically seen only with larger, compute-heavy models running in data centers. On Pixel 4's Edge TPU, these models improve the accuracy-latency tradeoff over existing SoTA mobile models.

The next version of Google's Chrome OS will support a limited number of touchscreen gestures to control laptops or tablets that use the operating system, something that should be familiar to most smartphone and tablet users. The new gesture system will be included as a standard part of Chrome OS 80, which is currently in beta testing in advance of a public release on February 11, 2020. Chrome OS 80 will support four new gestures, including swiping from left to right to take users back to a previous screen, and a short upward swipe will bring up the app shelf menu at the bottom of the screen. A long swipe upward from the bottom of the screen will clear all currently open apps and take users back to the home screen. Finally, swiping upward from the bottom of the screen and leaving your finger pressed on the screen will bring up an overview screen showing all currently open app windows.