Gadgets
Truecaller Brings Guardians Personal Safety App With a Focus on Women
You will be able to sign up on the Guardians app using your existing Truecaller account or by entering your phone number. A missed call or one-time password (OTP) will be generated to verify your phone number before signing up if you aren’t a Truecaller user. Truecaller also noted that the app requires only three permissions: your location, contacts, and phone permission.
The Guardians app is a free-to-use experience, without any ads or premium tiers, Truecaller says. In the coming days, a shortcut to download the Guardians app will be provided through the regular Truecaller app to bring new users on board.
“Guardians was born out of a simple question – how can we crowdsource personal safety, just like the way we crowdsource protection against spam, scams and frauds with Truecaller?” said Alan Mamedi, CEO and Co-founder of Truecaller parent True Software Scandinavia AB, in a prepared statement. “We also believe that we have the right tools and the conviction to make Guardians happen.”
How will Truecaller’s Guardians work?
The Guardians app allows users to select personal guardians from their contact list, choose when to stop or start sharing location, and can even set up permanent sharing with selected contacts. Users can also share their location during a particular trip, and the app will keep working in the background. It also comes with the ability to notify selected guardians to let them precisely follow the user’s location in case of an emergency.
In a normal scenario the Guardians app shares location intermittently to preserve battery life. It, however, shares precise location once switched to the emergency mode. Aside from location sharing, the app shares the users’ phone status, along with its battery life and network strength. It supports interoperability and is claimed to be device agnostic. This means that the app will provide location tracking even if the user has an Android phone and their selected contacts have the iPhone, or vice versa.
Once the details are shared, Guardians allows the contacts to call or message users with one tap. The selected contacts can also look at the particular location of the users once it’s shared through the app.
Guardians will also work with the police
Truecaller also plans to share your location with community Guardians who may be in your vicinity – but only once the emergency mode is enabled. This will bring crowdsourced personal safety and will be helpful especially for women travelling out. Truecaller told Gadgets 360 that it first has to scale up to a certain number of users to let the Community Guardians feature kick in. Community Guardians on the app will also be able to receive support from their contacts or other Guardians.
Truecaller also has plans to enable support within the app for getting help from local law enforcement. It is also actively looking for law enforcement agencies and first responders to partner with for providing support to the users.
Although Guardians is primarily focussed on women users and Mamedi told reporters during a virtual briefing that Truecaller’s user base comprises 40-45 percent of women users, the app can be used by others as well.
“We believe that this is a service that can be used by everyone,” said Mamedi.
No data sharing in Guardians app
On data sharing, Truecaller claims that it doesn’t share any user data and can’t even access the location data for any commercial purposes.
“We don’t store it,” stated Mamedi. “”It’s being streamed live directly to the client, so it will never actually touch our infrastructure.””
The Guardians app is currently available for free through Google Play. It will also soon be available through the App Store.
Truecaller already has a strong user base of 270 million globally — over 200 million in India alone. This could help the company to stay distinct against other developers offering similar personal safety apps.
However, instead of going by integrating location sharing into the Truecaller app, the company decided to go with a separate offering to solely solve the purpose of personal safety.
“We believe that this [Guardians] deserves something bigger, and it deserves to be an independent product that you have on your phone that is lightweight, that only has one purpose,” said Mamedi. “And that also means that we we have a dedicated team that thinks about this every single day, how do we improve the service? How do we make it better? How do we make it faster and so forth.”
Truecaller does have plans to use its existing channels to bring users to Guardians in the coming days. There are, however, no plans to commercialise the app once it becomes successful.
“Our promise is that the app will remain free forever. We’re not planning to monetise on it,” said Mamedi.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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