Bose is expanding its smart speaker offerings with the aptly named Bose Portable Home Speaker, which includes Bluetooth connectivity, voice control and virtual assistant integration into a 7.5-inch by 4-inch package. The 2.3-pound speaker is made for on-the-go activities, with 12 hours of battery life, an IPX4 water-resistance rating and — of course — a handle.
The Bose Portable Home…
Gmail AI will automatically correct your spelling slip-ups
August 21, 2019
Google Docs’ AI corrections are spreading to Gmail. Google is rolling out a feature in G Suite that will autocorrect “common” spelling errors while you write Gmail messages. It won’t catch every mistake, but it should save you the embarrassment of…
YouTube AI thought robot fighting was animal cruelty
August 21, 2019
In the latest example of the need for further human moderation, YouTube’s automated system took down several videos after mistaking robot fighting matches as animal cruelty. Those affected, including some BattleBots contestants, received a message stating…
Hitting the Books: How big tech might monopolize AI
August 17, 2019
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we’ve done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
Our modern world wouldn’t exist if not for machine learning. From…
Robotic devices have been used to help people walk or run in rehabilitation settings, but until now, they’ve been tethered and limited to a single action, like walking or running. In a paper published in Science today, a team of researchers explain how they’re…
Setting reminders for yourself is easy, but not so much when you want to remind someone else of their responsibilities. You often have to resort to old-fashioned techniques like text messages and Post-it notes, which are easily lost and forgotten. Google, however, has come…
AI avatars of Chinese authors could soon narrate audiobooks
August 13, 2019
The Chinese search engine Sogou isn’t stopping at AI news anchors. The company has created “lifelike” avatars of two Chinese authors, and it plans to have them narrate audiobooks in video recordings. According to the BBC, Sogou used AI, text-to-speech technology and video clips from the China Online Literature+ conference to create avatars of authors Yue Guan and Bu Xin Tian…
Can an open-source AI take on Amazon and Google?
August 9, 2019
It’s only been a few years since Amazon unveiled the Alexa-powered Echo, but since then, smart speakers have become a major consumer-electronics category. Key to its success is the notion of the always-on virtual assistant, which other companies like Apple and Google…
The Morning After: VAIO's new laptop has all the ports
August 9, 2019
Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.
Welcome to Friday morning! Google is refunding the difference if your flight price drops after you book it with them, VAIO has an epic laptop with every port imaginable and Apple suggests you don’t replace your iPhone battery with…
DeepMind uses AI to track Serengeti wildlife with photos
August 8, 2019
DeepMind has joined the ranks of those using AI to save fragile wildlife populations, and it’s doing that on a grand scale. The company is partnering with conservationists and ecologists on a project that uses machine learning to speedily detect and count animals in “millions” of photos taken over the past nine years in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. Where it…
