• For Immediate Release #187

The September episode of “The Hobson and Holtz Report” features Shel and Neville discussing these topics:

• Voice assistants have reached critical mass (and adoption of smart speakers is soaring)
• Thieves are using AI deepfakes to trick employees into sending them money
• Electric car owners could be able to choose fake sounds their cars make
• Not one PR agency was willing to take on the Hong Kong government as a client
• A new podcasting tool makes it easy to fix recorded flubs without needing to re-record
• Neville and Shel have a face-to-face chat in Winchester—and you can listen in
• Dan York reports on Google’s new algorithm, the low rate of Google search clickthroughs, the private Web Google wants to build (and the one developers want), the search for alternatives to advertising to monetize web content, and news from the WordPress world.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog.

The next episode of For Immediate Release will be posted on Monday, September 23 (we think).

Links from This Week’s Episode

• Descript, the new podcast editing tool
• 33% of People Are Now Using Voice Assistants Regularly
• The Smart Audio Report, Spring 2019 (PDF)
• Thieves are now using AI deepfakes to trick companies into sending them money
• Electric car owners could choose which fake sounds their cars make under new proposal
• Here’s the fake noise the Jaguar I-Pace makes when you hit the throttle
• Hong Kong protests: government fails to find PR firm to rescue battered image

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

• Elevating original reporting in Search
• Google now gives more preference to original reporting in search
• Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
• Sooner or later, the shark gets jumped
• Building a more private web
• Web feature developers told to dial up attention on privacy and security
• In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default
• ‘I can’t see how my ads work if I can’t target people’: Confessions of a marketer
• Grant for the Web
• Automattic Raises $300 Million at $3-Billion Valuation From Salesforce Ventures