The Daily Crunch 07/26/16 Microsoft Office takes its first step towards sentience, Amazon happily loses its delivery drones in the fog and Tesla's most visible self-driving supplier relationship ends. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for July 26, 2016. Remember to thank your email robots for prompt delivery of this message. 1. Is Microsoft Office your next writing teacher? Microsoft has been investing time and attention into machine learning, and talking about it a lot, too, but it's still a bit surprising to see Office get some of the benefit of that work so quickly. The company revealed upcoming updates to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook that susses out the subject of whatever you're writing, and then draws in info from reliable sources including journals and websites, complete with formatted citations. It also provides edit notes designed to help you improve as a writer with a new Editor feature. Welp, it was nice having a job while it lasted. I guess I'll just... show myself out. 2. UK proves more drone-friendly for Amazon testing Speaking of robots replacing people, Amazon is continuing its plans to delivery via drone, and the UK is now signed up to help. Amazon got the green light from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (FAA equivalent) to fly drones "beyond-line-of-sight" in both rural and suburban areas, while monitored by a single pilot. It's a key step forward, since practical use of drones of delivery would not involve human operators watching them constantly in person. The US still doesn't allow this, by the way, hence the need to cross the pond. 3. Startup unironically uses tagline "API for Human Labor" Here's a reversal of today's theme: New startup Scale wants to make human work as easy to code into products as off-the-shelf algorithms. The company is creating an API for tasks like scheduling appointments, reviewing content for potential harassment flags, or transcribing audio, which still often require human attention in place of automatic processes. It's actually a cool idea, and a way to remove yet another level of complexity vs. comparable offerings like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, but the company's tagline is unfortunately something you could lift from dystopian cyber-futurist fiction. Perhaps "An API for the means of production" was already trademarked? 4. Tesla's future driverless tech won't rely on Mobileye Phew, back to the normal order of things, where bots replace people and not the other way around. Tesla's future self-driving tech will rely on different components than it currently employs, according to supplier Mobileye today. On an investor call, the autonomous driving tech company revealed that following EyeQ3, the generation of processor used in the Model S and Model X currently, Tesla won't be using its tech in their cars. The company was a bit cagey about how exactly the partnership ended, but Tesla is on the record saying they'll do whatever it takes to provide the best self-driving experience possible, in-house or otherwise. 5. Nintendo's new console could be a game-changer I know that pun hurts, but Nintendo's new NX console sounds like it could genuinely shake up the mostly boring console world. New info suggests it'll be primarily a mobile gaming device, with its own screen, and removable hardware controllers on either side. But it also does double duty as a living room gaming device, thanks to a TV-connected dock. It's rumored to have a powerful Nvidia processor, but probably won't match other top-tier consoles in terms of pure power. Nintendo hasn't needed to do that to succeed in the past, but the big question remains whether or not the NX, if it looks as described, can avoid the death by a thousand compromises suffered by the Wii U. 6. European ride-on-demand space shrinks Uber rivals continue to huddle together in hopes of survival: London-based Hailo will merge with MyTaxi in a deal that includes Hailo selling 60 percent of the company to Daimler, which also acquired MyTaxi via a subsidiary in 2014. Hailo had originally shown some potential as third alternative to Lyft and Uber, and even launched in major urban markets across North America before shutting down entirely in the continent in 2014. A soft landing under Daimler is probably one of the better outcomes it could've hoped for, in the end. 7. Oculus readies room-scale while a startup zooms in on the virtual face Oculus is paving the way for room-scale VR with an update to its Oculus Home software that adds in support for multiple camera sensors tracking the location of a single user and headset. That, combined with Touch controllers, which the company now says are coming in Q4, will let it match HTC and Steam with VR experiences that let users walk around – albeit in a relatively small space, and still tethered to a PC. While Oculus shoots for table stakes, though, startup Veeso is working on tech that can track your subtle facial movements, and then replicate your expression on a virtual avatar within a VR environment. That's going to be key to the long-term success of multi-user VR, so watch Veeso and others dabbling in that era as potential acquisition targets for the bigger fish in the pond. | 
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