London-based startup RentersUnion has created what it’s hoping will be a socially useful chatbot, pitching their web-based bot as a robot replacement for (expensive) housing lawyers. The intended user is anyone not on the London property ladder, and thus at the mercy of landlords, tenancy agreements and (apparently ever-inflating) rents.
Not that the chatbot can do much about the latter problem, sadly. But it does offer a little automated help with parsing wordy tenancy agreements to, for example, extract salient details such as fees in an effort to empower a downtrodden section of society.
Visitors to the bot are offered a selection of topics it can help with — from issues with their energy bills to problems with repairs or questions around fees.
Ask the AI for help about fees, for example, and the bot will ask you to upload your tenancy agreement and then pull out any relevant portions, providing a handy PDF overview of what it finds.
You can also ask about repairs — with options to get the bot to review your tenancy agreement in light of a particular problem (e.g. damp/mould, plumbing etc), to see what your rights are and flag up relevant sections of UK law. The bot can also be employed to compose a letter about the issue on your behalf.
For letters, users are asked to provide a few key details before the bot generates a letter on their behalf. There’s an option to ‘make it stronger’, in terms of tone/forcefulness, in case a first draft/s aren’t appropriately irate enough.
It’s a neat use of natural language processing to quickly surface and handle relevant info for users who may not have the time or money to figure it out on their own. Instead they just need to upload their tenancy agreement or input a few key details to get some help or advice.
While the team is focused on helping renters in just one UK city for now, co-founder Faisal Khalid tells TechCrunch the eventual aim is to scale the product to “every big city across Europe”.
“Ultimately, if this works, we could actually end up becoming the largest housing lawyer in all of Europe — which creates a lot of interesting opportunities beyond just ‘giving advice’,” he adds.
He also confirms the bot should work for any England tenancy, though the structure of tenancies in other parts of the UK can vary owing to variation in legislation — hence keeping their focus narrow for now.
“The reason for limiting it to London only is just that we haven’t had a chance to test with non London based tenancy agreements yet,” he says, adding: “Also, data is a limiting factor — its easy to get tenancy agreements for London, a bit harder as we move out.”
Given it’s early days the team is also still training their AI, having only launched the bot earlier this month — and only starting on building the tech last September. And while the goal is full AI-powered automation, some manual human input is needed to fix the AI’s mistakes.
“I still need to go into the production log and see what kinds of mistakes its making and keep rewriting the natural language processor to improve results with every mistake that’s made. The more data the AI gets, the better it gets.”
The team includes two London based lawyers to assist on the legal side, adds Khalid.
“Our goal is to do one new city a month, starting March. The initial focus — for the next six weeks — will remain on London as it’s easier to learn and fix mistakes when we are limited to just one city vs doing multiple cities.”
The bot is free to use — with only a suggested donation to help the bootstrapping startup fund the project. They’re getting between 50 and 100 users per day, at this early stage. How will the team be getting the word out and growing usage?
“We’re joining the renters power project, which is a consortium of non profit activist groups working together to create London’s first renters union by fall 2017,” he says. “Members of the renters power project include Generation Rent, Digs (Hackney Renters), Take Back The City, Advice4Renters and Radical Housing Network. these groups already have a significant following which we will be building off of.”
He adds they are also looking at creating an API service/widget in future for relevant entities — such as housing charities — could embed in their own sites.
“In England, organizations like Shelter are already doing amazing work in defending renters rights, but they are constrained by the fact that everything they do is done by a human. We aren’t. We use natural language processing to read and interpret tenancy agreements, and there’s very little ‘human’ input to our work. So we can scale much faster, cheaper and more efficiently than ‘brick and mortar’ organisations like Shelter can.”

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As Amazon , Apple and others tee up smart home strategies with apps, hubs and new devices , Google is also turning up the temperature, so to speak, on its own ambitions. Today, Nest — the smart home business that Google acquired for $3.2 billion a few years ago — announced at DLD in Munich that it would be expanding sales of its thermostat, camera and smoke alarm products in four more countries in Europe — Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain.
Nest Learning Thermostat’s will retail for €249. The Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm will see for €119. The Nest Cam Indoor will cost €199; and the Nest Cam Outdoor will sell for €199, all including taxes. P re-orders start today with a targeted delivery date of mid-February, the company said.
The expansion is a long time coming for Nest, whose smart thermostats, cameras and smoke alarms are used in some 190 countries, but (up to now) have been only sold and supported officially in seven. (And even that rollout has been slow: the last country expansion, also in Europe, happened in September 2014 .)
Lionel Paillet, Nest’s GM for Europe, explained that the delay was deliberate — not the result of any clouds or controversy related to Google’s ownership.
(There is some backstory here: Nest has been the subject of some controversy over what, exactly, its future would be as part of the search and Android giant as it also looked to make its own-branded moves into the area of the connected home, specifically via its Google Home hub that competes with the Echo from Amazon. More immediately, in Germany, after the Google acquisition, Nest was targeted by German activists who created a spoof site that acted as a criticism of Google’s privacy policies. The site was taken down after legal threats.)
“The main reason for waiting to launch is that we’ve been busy to bring scale to business,” Paillet said in an interview. “Contrary to some launching everything everywhere and hoping for the best, we had a specific strategy. Several years into our UK and Netherlands businesses, for example, we’ve been selling extremely well and are now in millions of homes globally, growing 50% year-on-year. The smart home is still a new concept, and we really wanted to get that base before going to our next countries.”
Despite this, Paillet does not have details on what the roadmap will be for future launches, including when we can expect to see Nest’s first official launches in Asia.
Matt Rogers, the co-founder of Nest who is the company’s head of product, said that he thinks the smart home market is still “three to five years” away from being more ubiquitous and unified.
Part of the challenge in adding the most recent four countries was to make sure that the products could be localised correctly. In the case of Germany, for example, there was not only making sure that voice recognition worked correctly in German, but that the hardware itself would be usable in the country. The screws for the smoke detectors, he noted, had to be tested and adjusted to work on the materials typically used in ceilings in the country, since these devices cannot be mounted on walls in the country.
Although a group of Nest employees migrated out of Nest to work on Google’s bigger IoT platform last year, and co-founder Tony Fadell notably parted ways with the company, Paillet says that Nest will continue to develop as a business. He said that the Nest API has picked up 26,000 developers in the last two years and that there is no plans to retire Nest. “I think it’s looking great for Nest as a brand,” he said.
One key point is that while Google has been building Nest as an extension that will interoperate with whatever home hub you might have in place, be it Google’s own or the Echo from Amazon. “It’s about giving a choice to consumers,” Paillet said. Rogers added that Amazon Echo is actually the most popular integration for Nest today — no surprise considering that Echo has far and away been the most popular home hub to date.
As with previous launches, there are several local partners being named at the same time as the new market expansions. In Germany and Austria, Nest Protect smoke + carbon monoxide alarm, Nest Cam Indoor, and Nest Cam Outdoor will be sold through Amazon, Media Markt and Conrad. The Nest Learning Thermostat will be available later this year.
In Italy, Nest Learning Thermostat, Nest Cam Indoor, and Nest Cam Outdoor is available from Amazon, Media World and ePrice for pre-order.
In Spain, Nest Learning Thermostat, Nest Cam Indoor, and Nest Cam Outdoor is available from Amazon, Media Markt and El Corte Inglés for pre-order from today.
Other partners that will help with installations include Baxi in Spain; Engie Italy and Wind Tre in Italy; and the Generali Group via CosmosDirekt in Germany.
Updated with more detail from Roger’s interview at DLD.

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When we reviewed Bragi’s fully wireless earbuds back in November, we wrote, “using them feels a little like you’ve finally arrived” – turns out it was a bit of unintentionally ironic foreshadowing, as the headphones encountered a few snags along the way.
Just ahead of the holidays, the startup sent a note to customers with the unfortunate news that the simply named The Headphone weren’t likely to arrive before Christmas for pre-orders. The devices had already been pushed back from a month before, owing to production delays.
To help cushion the blow, the company offered up an extended warranty for loyal pre-orderers, along with an apologetic card the company recommended users ball up and toss like a snowball , for a bit of placeholder fun before the things actually shipped.
The headphones have since begun shipping out to those who got in early, and now, as the Verge notes , they’re available to the rest of us through the company’s site for $149, with an estimated ship date of around two weeks.
Of course, competition for the fully wireless earbud market has gotten even stiffer in recent months, including the (itself delayed) arrival of Apple’s own well-received offerings.

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Nvidia’s Shield line of devices is now more than six years old, and the latest member of the family is the new Shield TV, an update of Nvidia’s first set-top streaming box from 2015. The 2017 version slims down the console to a remarkably portable rectangle, adds a redesigned controller with a built-in ambient microphone, and includes a more traditional wand-like remote in the box.
The $199 device (or $299 for a larger version with a built-in 500GB hard drive) has big ambitions: Nvidia wants Shield TV to be not only the only streaming TV box you need, but also a gaming console, a smart home device and a personal digital assistant all in one. Yet it’s also virtually unchanged in terms of internal hardware from what Nvidia first released in 2015. Software makes it feel like a completely new device, however – and that’s going to benefit both existing users and those new to the Shield platform.
Under the hood powering Shield’s operating system is Android TV, in perhaps its most successful iteration. The new Shield brings an Android TV 5.0 upgrade, along with Android 7.0 Nougat, which Nvidia has used to improve its own custom navigation interface. There’s a much less confusing games section that groups all content under one broad “Games” category, for instance, which replaces the Shield Hub app.
More generally enjoyable additions with this software update include the ability to adopt external storage as native, which means you can plug in external flash drives via the two USB ports on the back and have those act as fully accessible storage space for games and media. This means buying the entry-level $199 model makes a lot more sense; if you ever find you need more space, it’s a fairly easy and inexpensive upgrade to pick up a high-capacity 128GB flash drive, like the one included in the review kit sent by Nvidia for testing. That’s a big advantage over other streaming devices like Apple TV, too, which have hard limits on internal storage capacity.
Other improvements with the software update include a built-in Amazon Video app which allows you to stream content, and access Prime Video if you’re a member. This also provides access to 4K HDR Prime video content, which is a significant upgrade for those who have the requisite TV or display hardware.
Android TV still also offers a wealth of media apps from the Play Store, meaning you’ll likely be able to find what you’re looking for in a streaming service provider. If you haven’t looked at Android TV since its launch, there’s a lot on offer now, and cord cutters are unlikely to feel a content pinch.
Voice control and cross-service search means you can press the mic button on your controller and use voice queries to find content across Google Play Movies, Hulu, YouTube, Plex and more, you can search once and find anywhere – even in your existing media library via Plex, which is again not something you’ll find with Apple TV.
On the new Nvidia Shield, the company has changed the way it serves up games with an eye to creating a device that’s truly capable of replacing your home consoles and gaming PCs. It does this with changes and improvements to both GameStream the service Nvidia offers to stream games locally from your Nvidia-powered gaming PCs, and GeForce Now, the $7.99 per month subscription game streaming service that runs titles on Nvidia’s own servers but lets you play them as if they were being run locally.
The updates to GameStream mean you can now stream at up to 4K HDR resolution, providing the game supports both, and you’ll also get haptic feedback to the new controller from the game. It is indeed a much-improved experience, and one that basically means your gaming PC can follow you around the house wherever you happen to have a display and the desire to play.
GeForce Now’s upgrades, however, are the really big deal here. The new backed means that games are running on servers with Pascal-powered graphics output, with either GTX 1070 or 1080 GPU power behind them. The quality is amazing, and combined with a 4K display, will beat just about anything you can get from your home console, as I verified playing titles like The Witcher 3 and Homefront, as well as The Division and Far Cry Primal, titles now available through Nvidia’s new day-and-date release partnership with Ubisoft to put all their games on GeForce Now.
I tested GeForce Now in a variety of conditions, using both wired and wireless connections. A wired Ethernet connection direct to my home modem worked best, with a connection that effectively gets about 6 Mbps consistently at max speeds. Using this set up, I could not tell that I was playing the game remotely. With a wireless connection, there were some tiny hiccups, but the experience was still very playable, and graphics still exceeded what I can get out of PS4 and Xbox One locally.
Brand new games still cost a lot (what you’d expect to pay for new releases), on top of the GeForce Now subscription, but the subscription comes with a decent back catalog included, and you don’t need to buy or maintain expensive PC equipment. It’s probably the defining factor of why you’d want a Shield instead of anything else right now, and it’s a powerful motivator for anyone interested in gaming – and even some who aren’t. My dad, who hasn’t played a video game since Super Mario Bros. 3 on original Nintendo, got caught up in Far Cry Primal and now is considering a shield for his next streaming device.
A lot of what the Shield brings to the table is still in hibernation – Nvidia has teamed up with both Google Assistant and SmartThings to turn the console into a full-fledged Amazon Echo competitor. The SmartThings integration will let users turn it into a smart home control hub for an additional $25 when it arrives, providing control over connected lights, appliances and more. The Assistant integration, also coming later on, will enable the ambient microphone in the Shield controller and let you use “Ok Google” commands to control smart home, check weather and more.
Nvidia’s also bringing something called the Nvidia Spot to market later on, which are plug-in microphones you can spread across your house to issue voice commands to your Shield and Assistant from wherever you happen to be. These connect over Wi-Fi and will retail for around $50 apiece.
The fact that these features aren’t yet available is a bit of a problem, but not as much as you might think. Nvidia’s pricing for the Shield is the same as it has been, starting at $199, and there are other improvements beyond the availability of Assistant. These latent feature promises just mean that the Shield’s value proposition will only increase over time. Think about it this way: it’s like buying an Apple TV now, and getting a Google Home pushed to your device later as a free over-the-air software update.
The other big reason to pick up a Shield over other streamers is its extensive 4K and HDR support. I actually picked up an LG 4K HDR LED television in part because I wanted to see what the Shield was truly capable of, in fact. The results were indeed impressive, and made one thing very clear: If you’re looking for 4K HDR content, this is the best streaming device you can get.
It includes Amazon Video 4K HDR streaming, including Prime shows like The Grand Tour, out of the box. Even Amazon’s own Fire TV devices don’t offer HDR from Amazon Prime. It also has 4K HDR for Netflix, 4K YouTube and 4K for Google Play Movies. Games streamed from your local PCs can access 4K resolution, too.
Basically if 4K HDR is a priority, this is the way to go. Nvidia takes graphics to heart, and it shows on the new Shield.
Maybe the most impressive thing about the new Shield is that you don’t actually have to buy one to experience the new features; all of the software updates described above, including 4K HDR and streaming improvements, are available to existing Shield TV device owners via a software update just pushed out on Monday. If you pick up one of the new, redesigned Shield controllers for $59.99, which will be used for the ambient Google Assistant features later on, you’ve got the new console (minus the slim new design).
Nvidia says it left the Tegra X1 processor and other internal components the same because it was already 3x more powerful than the competition in areas where it counts, and the price maintenance means new Shield buyers are basically getting everything they would’ve gotten before, plus the Shield Remote in the box.
If you’re looking for a device that can replace as many of your home theater components as possible, the Shield TV is it. Support for live TV via USB tuners with the new Live Channels app means if you have an antenna, it’s also everything you need for getting and navigating traditional over-the-air TV, too. Some companies try to be everything and end up compromising all experiences, but Nvidia’s Shield TV is a true all-in-one that suits the needs of most people.

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