Amazon wants Alexa to feel normal, Google wants its assistant to feel nostalgic

Happy Friday — the Super Bowl is this weekend and some of the ads have begun to be released. The two that have struck me the most are from Google and Amazon, each taking a different tack to sell you on their respective intelligent assistants.

They are very different. Amazon got Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi leading off the joke about what life was like before Alexa, then people asking other people throughout history things they’d normally ask Alexa. I was with it until there was a joke about refusing to erase the Nixon tapes which maybe was a little too on the nose given this past year’s voice-recording scandals.

In any case, the motive is clear: make Alexa seem like an integral part of our lives now, like electricity or running...

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Nintendo Switch Online reaches more than 100 retro games

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nintendo has hit a milestone with the ever-growing library of retro games included in its Nintendo Switch Online service. The next batch will take the number of available games past 100, with five new titles resulting in a total of 104. In keeping with recent form , the latest additions are, well, not necessarily blockbuster releases. Here’s the list: Caveman Ninja: Joe & Mac , a prehistoric action game released in arcades and ported to the SNES by Data East in 1991 Magical Drop 2 , a 1996 Data East puzzle game for the SNES that was originally on the Neo Geo but never previously got a Western release Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 , a SNES baseball game released by Culture Brain in 1991 Spanky’s Quest , a 1991 SNES action game by Natsume... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/3eXBE7D

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