A Uber anunciou hoje no Brasil o lançamento de um recurso que dará a pais e responsáveis a possibilidade de monitorar por vídeo as corridas solicitadas por adolescentes, segundo informações do Tecnoblog.
Disponível nos Estados Unidos desde o mês passado, a novidade será disponibilizada gradualmente na modalidade Uber conta Teens, que é feita para usuários entre 12 e 17 anos de idade.
Assim que a corrida for solicitada, pais e responsáveis serão notificados sobre a possibilidade de acompanhar uma transmissão ao vivo, que é encerrada automaticamente ao final do trajeto. As imagens capturadas também ficarão disponíveis na forma de uma gravação criptografada.
Divulgação/Uber
Há, no entanto, uma limitação importante: a disponibilidade da transmissão dependerá das condições técnicas do celular do motorista, o que dá a entender que o recurso não poderá ser ativado em certas situações mesmo que o usuário já o tenha configurado (outro requisito da novidade).
A Uber também aproveitou o anúncio para reforçar que as viagens solicitadas por adolescentes são oferecidas apenas para motoristas experientes, além de contar com todos os recursos disponíveis nas corridas para adultos (U-Áudio, U-Ajuda e U-Acompanha). Adolescentes do sexo feminino, inclusive, podem solicitar viagens apenas com motoristas mulheres (U-Mulheres) — algo já disponível para usuárias adultas.
As corridas para adolescentes passam a ficar disponíveis depois que o usuário configura um perfil familiar no app da Uber — algo que pode ser feito em Conta » Família.
Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone flights.
On August 19, Amazon announced it would soon launch Prime Air in the metropolitan areas of Chicago; Cleveland; Atlanta; Syracuse, New York; and Boise, Idaho, with more to come later in the year. Each Prime Air site offers delivery drone service within an area of about 175 square miles, with delivery times ranging from half an hour to an hour.
Prime Air already operates out of Amazon warehouses in 10 cities across seven states. Those include primarily suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix; Tampa; Kansas City; Omaha, Nebraska; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Detroit; Houston; and San Antonio, Dallas, and Waco, Texas.
Waymo has sharply increased its lobbying spending as it seeks to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services, intensifying its battle with rival Uber over the future of robotaxis.
The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.
The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.
Uma novo estudo da CashNetUSA revelou que a Apple é a segunda Big Tech estadunidense com mais vagas de emprego de nível inicial abertas no LinkedIn, ficando atrás apenas da Tesla.
Mais precisamente, 57,4% das vagas publicadas pela gigante de Cupertino são de baixa senioridade — um ponto percentual a menos que a montadora do bilionário Elon Musk. Fecham o Top 5 a IBM (32,4%), a Intel (20,9%) e a NVIDIA, que aparece com 5,3% — o mesmo número da Uber, com a qual divide a quinta posição.
Divulgação/CashNetUSA
Isso, no entanto, não quer dizer que entrar para o quadro de funcionários da Apple é fácil — já que, apesar da abundância de vagas de nível inicial (54, para ser mais preciso), ela ainda tem uma relação candidato-vaga de 55:1. Em primeiro lugar no ranking supracitado, a Tesla conta com uma proporção de “apenas” 23,5:1 — a menor entre as Big Techs analisadas no estudo.
Quando consideramos todo o mercado (e não apenas empresas de tecnologia), a Maçã fica na quinta posição entre as empresas mais competitivas dos EUA. Na frente dela, temos a NVIDIA (68,4:1), a IBM (88,4:1), a The Walt Disney Company (164,8:1) e o Morgan Stanley (180,9:1).
Divulgação/CashNetUSA
Para montar seu estudo, a CashNetUSA analisou, como dito, dados de vagas do LinkedIn referentes a “13 grandes empresas de tecnologia dos EUA reconhecidas mundialmente”. A firma de pesquisa também classificou cada empresa com base no número de candidatos que se inscreveram para cada vaga disponível.
Uber has partnered with — and in some cases made direct investments in — about 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past two years. Here's the list and the latest on the partnerships.
Baidu’s Apollo Go started robotaxi road testing in London today, and it’s doing it with both of ride-hailing’s biggest names at once — Uber and Freenow by Lyft.
The launch lands days after Apollo Go ran the first fully driverless trial in any right-hand-drive market, in Hong Kong. Two milestones in one week, on opposite ends of the world.
Siri Wolfram Alpha integration helped create one of the defining moments in the early history of consumer artificial intelligence. When Apple introduced Siri with iPhone 4S in October 2011, users were not merely given another form of voice control. They could ask a spoken question and receive a calculated answer rather than a page of search results.
Questions involving mathematics, measurements, dates, nutrition, astronomy and factual comparisons could be routed to Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine launched in 2009. Siri handled the conversation, while Wolfram Alpha supplied structured information and calculations behind many of the responses.
The experience could feel remarkably advanced for its time. Asking how many days remained before a holiday, comparing the populations of two cities or converting miles into kilometers no longer required opening Safari, entering a query and selecting a website.
That direct path from natural language to a useful answer established an expectation that continues shaping AI products today.
Its technological roots extend to research conducted at SRI International, including work associated with the DARPA-funded CALO project. The objective was to develop systems capable of learning, organizing information and helping people complete everyday tasks.
SRI later spun the technology into Siri Inc., founded by a team including Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber. The company released a standalone Siri app for iPhone in early 2010.
The original product was designed around actions rather than ordinary web search. A user could ask for a restaurant reservation, request a taxi, check entertainment listings or search for local services. Siri attempted to understand the intent and connect the request with an appropriate online provider.
This approach was ambitious because the assistant needed to coordinate several different systems. Speech had to be converted into text, the request had to be interpreted, context had to be considered and an external service had to return something useful.
Apple acquired Siri in April 2010. Steve Jobs had personally recognized the potential of moving beyond a collection of apps toward a conversational layer capable of reaching them on behalf of the user.
When the assistant returned as an integrated feature of iPhone 4S, Apple had narrowed some aspects of the original startup vision while making the technology accessible to a much larger audience.
Siri could send messages, create reminders, place calls, manage calendar events, check weather conditions and answer questions. Apple initially labeled the feature as a beta, an unusual decision for a prominent part of a new iPhone launch.
The beta label acknowledged that natural-language interaction remained unpredictable. Accents, ambiguous phrasing, network conditions and external data providers could all influence whether a request succeeded.
Image Source: Google
Siri Wolfram Alpha Made Answers Feel Immediate
Siri Wolfram Alpha became especially memorable because it showed the difference between retrieving information and computing an answer.
A conventional search engine could locate pages containing a formula. Wolfram Alpha could apply that formula to the values supplied by the user. It could interpret units, compare quantities, calculate probabilities and organize factual data into a structured response.
That distinction allowed Siri to appear more knowledgeable than a voice interface simply reading search results aloud.
A request such as “What is 15% of $86?” could return the calculation directly. A question about the distance between planets could produce a value without requiring the user to inspect several websites. Wolfram Alpha could also answer unusually specific requests, including information about aircraft flying overhead when the necessary location and aviation data were available.
The system was not a large language model. It did not generate open-ended prose in the way current AI assistants do. Wolfram Alpha relied on curated data, symbolic computation, algorithms and formal representations of knowledge.
That structure provided an advantage that remains relevant: many answers could be calculated and traced through defined information rather than improvised statistically.
Early Siri combined several specialized capabilities instead of depending on one system to do everything. One provider might supply restaurant information, another could handle maps and Wolfram Alpha could process computational questions.
The assistant acted as the conversational coordinator.
This architecture made Siri seem like one intelligence even though the response could come from a network of separate services. Modern AI platforms have returned to a similar idea through tools, agents and external data connections. A language model may manage the conversation while calling a calculator, calendar, search engine or business system when a task requires reliable external action.
Siri demonstrated that model on a consumer smartphone more than a decade earlier.
A Small Integration Created a Large Expectation
The Wolfram Alpha partnership influenced how people began judging digital assistants.
Before Siri, voice features on phones were commonly associated with rigid commands such as calling a contact or selecting music. Siri invited users to speak more naturally and attempt questions that would previously have been typed into a browser.
The results were inconsistent, but successful interactions changed perceptions immediately. The iPhone appeared capable of understanding intent, reaching into a knowledge system and returning a concise answer through one conversational interface.
That apparent simplicity concealed substantial infrastructure. Speech recognition, language interpretation, location, personal context and external databases all had to work together quickly enough to preserve the feeling of a conversation.
Wolfram Alpha also gave Apple access to expertise that would have taken years to reproduce internally. Stephen Wolfram had spent decades building Mathematica and computational systems before launching the public knowledge engine.
Following the Siri announcement, Wolfram described the integration as a characteristically direct Steve Jobs decision: users wanted access to knowledge and actions without unnecessary intermediate steps.
That idea became more influential than any individual answer Siri provided.
The assistant did not need to show how many services had participated. It needed to understand the request and return the result.
Early Siri Also Revealed the Limits of the Model
The first version of Siri could feel futuristic one moment and frustrating the next.
Some questions reached Wolfram Alpha correctly, while similar wording could trigger a web search or an unrelated response. Siri occasionally struggled to determine whether the user wanted a calculation, a local result or an action inside the phone.
Wolfram Alpha responses were also better suited to some subjects than others. Mathematical and scientific questions matched its computational structure, while casual conversation, current events and subjective requests required different sources.
Network dependence created another weakness. Early Siri processing relied heavily on remote servers, so delays or outages could make a basic request fail even when the iPhone itself was functioning normally.
Those limitations foreshadowed the central challenge surrounding modern assistants. A convincing interface encourages people to ask almost anything, but no single technical system performs equally well across every type of request.
Current generative AI can produce more natural language and handle a wider range of topics. It can also create confident errors when factual grounding is weak. The computational approach represented by Wolfram Alpha remains valuable precisely because some questions require verified data and exact calculation rather than fluent speculation.
The story behind the first Siri steps is therefore not only about an old iPhone feature. It shows that a powerful assistant needs more than a conversational personality. It requires access to dependable tools, structured knowledge and the ability to recognize when another system should provide the answer.
Siri Wolfram Alpha offered that lesson in 2011, long before AI assistants became capable of writing essays, interpreting screens and acting across apps.
The lawsuit, led by a Detroit pension fund, alleges Uber's board and management has cut too many compliance corners, resulting in thousands of lawsuits.
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