automation

As powerful and as smart at our smartphones are, they’re still pretty much like any other computer in our possession. We have to tell it what we want it to do and, most of the time, we do it manually and step by step. That’s definitely a great waste of time and a waste of the smartphone’s power. That’s where automation platforms come in. iOS has Workflow, now owned by Apple itself, and Android has Tasker, which is now on a surprise 70% discount for only $0.99. But what makes Tasker more than just a geek’s toy? Here are ten of the best ways you can use Tasker to remove the chore out of using your phone.

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Pizza company Domino's has yet again tapped modern technology to improve the pizza-ordering process, this time announcing a new partnership with IFTTT, making it the first-ever restaurant brand to get on the platform. To kick things off, Domino's has announced some IFTTT Applets able to work with the company's Pizza Tracker to adjust smart homes in optimal ways (for pizza delivery). Do you have sprinklers on outside, for example? They'll automatically be turned off when Tracker says the delivery is underway.

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The mobile app market looks so easy to get into but staying in the business is a whole different game. Never mind competing with rivals, sometimes you even end up competing with the very makers of the platform you're building upon. Many a popular app ended up that way (hello, Night Shift), so perhaps you can count yourself lucky when you're actually acquired by said platform makers. In that sense, the developers of Workflow are probably on Cloud 9 now that they have been bought up by Apple, though the long-term implications of the acquisition has yet to be seen.

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The folks at UPS said this week that they'd completed their first test of a drone launched from a truck. Of course this isn't the first time any drone has been launched from a truck, but it is the first time that a UPS drone has launched from a UPS truck with a delivery. This same drone delivered said package and returned to the truck while the driver continued on with their daily route.

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The brand new company Piaggio Fast Forward have introduced their first product: Gita, an autonomous miniature vehicle for luggage. At least, that's what the folks at Piaggio Fast Forward suggest Gita is, a vehicle - but it might be easier to understand as a suitcase that's able to follow its user around an airport. This suitcase is also able to move autonomously in a mapped environment, avoiding obstacles as they appear.

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Taiwan's Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant that builds Apple's iPhone along with dozens of other devices, has recently revealed its plans to eventually replace all the human workers in its Chinese factories with automated robots. This goal is to be accomplished over three phases, with 40,000 robots already in place on production lines, and a reduction of over half the company's workforce since the release of the iPhone 6 in 2014.

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The era of AI-driven automation is coming, and it'll bring great benefits for some and big drawbacks for others. The White House is expecting major economic impacts as artificial intelligence and automation become more ubiquitous, and today, it's outlining something of a plan of attack. Specifically, the White House has listed what it believes will be five economic impacts of AI-based automation, and three strategies policymakers can implement to address them.

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Apple is working with home builders like Brookfield Residents Properties to create showroom homes filled with Internet-of-Things gadgets, the end result being an automated home that shows potential homeowners the extent of what smart technology can do for them. These smart gadgets, as you'd expect, all work with Apple's HomeKit, and could prove a fruitful way for Apple to draw in new customers to iOS.

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IFTTT, short for IF-This-Then-That, is one of those "Web 2.0" things that power users love but regular Joes and Janes can't fully grasp. At the same time, it has created a new culture of automation, be it desktops or smartphones, and could even help the fledgling IoT industry to truly take off and expand beyond its limited borders. Microsoft, who already launched its own take on automation with Flow, is taking another stab at it via its Microsoft Research arm. Curiously and tragically named "CAP", short for Conditional Action Programmer", the still experimental platform puts a different twist to the idea by letting users type in their tasks in a more natural English language form.

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Anyone and everyone has their own take on the car of the future, whether that future means fully automated self-driving vehicles or simply AI-assisted ones. So it shouldn't be surprising to hear Toyota announcing the test car that will drive its technology to the land of tomorrow. Dubbed the Highway Teammate, the test car will be the model on which Toyota's AI-driven cars will be based on, which the car maker hopes to take place by 2020. But Toyota isn't just trying to sell you a smart car. It's trying to sell you a new friend.

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While the Almond 2015 and Almond+ have been bringing some smart functionality to the router game for some time now, today they get a big bump with home automation. The Almond 2015 has been out on the market for a couple of weeks and the Almond+ has been out for months now, but both will be getting this update from their makers at Securifi, giving them connectivity to both ZigBee and Z-Wave devices. This device doesn't work with IFTTT (at the moment), but it doesn't need to - all automation here is local.

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Here’s an interesting question the folks at Google probably asked themselves not too long ago: how do you pair a human passenger with a driverless car? Aside form looping routes, much like public transportation, the automated car and its human riders have no real way to interact with one another. A new rumor suggests Google is preparing an app, much like Uber, which will likely find a home with their driverless car fleet. Of special interest here is that Google is an Uber investor.

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