Tech News Digest Week 24: Spotify joins Social Audio race

Hello and welcome to your weekly catch up on news from the tech landscape and here are the top tech news for Week 24 of 2021

Facebook Podcast

Facebook is planning to start rolling out its podcast product next week, on June 22nd, and, eventually, add a feature that’ll allow listeners to create clips from their favourite shows. With podcasts, Facebook is seemingly banking on the fact that podcasters already use the platform to foster conversation with their listeners and to promote their shows. Directly publishing to the platform using the podcast feature will make it easier for them to accomplish those goals while also giving people a reason to never leave the Facebook app and Facebook sees potential in podcast advertising.

Facebook to detect deepfakes

In more Facebook news, the company is also developing a new method to reverse-engineer deepfakes and track their source. The work is useful as it could help Facebook track down bad actors spreading deepfakes on its various social networks especially for content that might include misinformation and the common application of deepfake technology in non-consensual pornography. Right now, the work is still in the research stage and isn’t ready to be deployed. Even if and when it does get deployed it will be a cat and mouse game where deepfakes detection will have to keep up growing use of this technology.

Google goes Retail

After years of pop-up experiments, Google is finally opening its first store, located underneath its offices in New York City. It will primarily feature Google’s own hardware products, including Pixel phones, Nest smarthome gadgets, Fitbits, and assorted other devices. There will also be a selection of third party accessories and Google-branded swag like hats or T-shirts. Google says that it will offer on-site repair for Pixel phones and product support for all of its hardware devices. It will offer some software support as well for its consumer products.

Spotify Greenroom

Every tech company now seems to be interested in social audio, a thing that did not widely exist until March 2020, when Clubhouse launched on iOS. Since then, Twitter has launched Spaces, Facebook has hosted its first Live Rooms, and other companies, like Slack, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Discord have started building similar products. Spotify is the latest addition to the mix with its live audio app, Greenroom that was formally launches last week on iOS and Android, marking the company’s first real attempt at creating a social media platform. The social audio app, which is similar to Clubhouse, allows users to host live conversations about sports, music, and culture. Spotify might have the best chance of making social audio a real part of its business, simply because audio is already its full-time thing. But getting people to join an app and spend time in it, is a difficult sell, and one that will require top-tier programming, especially as it competes with all the other apps out there.

Sony and Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 was released in December last year. Even though the game started off with strong sales, severe technical problems where the game struggled to run on last-generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles lead to a lot of backlash from the gaming community. Players faced numerous (and frequently hilarious) bugs on every platform. So Microsoft and Sony both offered refunds for the game for all the initial purchases. While Microsoft added a warning label for Xbox One owners on its Xbox store, Sony took the more drastic step of pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from its PlayStation Store entirely. After months of updates to fix these bugs, there has been a recent development, CD Projekt has confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 will be coming to Sony’s Playstation Store on June 21st. While Sony did confirm the news, it still does not recommend playing the game on PS4 as users will continue to experience performance issues and recommends playing the title on PS4 Pro or PS5 for best experience.