37 Burst results for "Alexa"
Demo 1 - NaviLens
A highlight from Your-Weekly-Tech-Update-EP-133
"Hello, everyone. Welcome to your weekly tech update, the show that explores the newest, coolest, and sometimes mind -boggling side of tech available on the interwebs. I am your host, Ray McNeil. Coming up on the program today, we're talking Skype. They're rolling out their new Meet Now calls, and you don't need to sign up or to install it to use it. Amazon's new Blink Mini is a small indoor camera that allows for two -way audio, motion detection, HD video, and it's only 35 bucks, and will take your mind off of the world and put a smile on your face with this week's moment of joy. That and a whole lot more coming up on today's edition of your weekly tech update, next. There are more video calls going on now more than ever. However, a significant chunk of that action has gone to Zoom, which honestly I had never heard of before a couple of months ago, and not necessarily Skype, who has been the mainstay video chatting service for many years now. Microsoft's product that has been at the center of online voice and video chat since well before smartphones were commonplace is now coming out with a new feature that's rivaling Zoom and the market share that Zoom has captured in its short time. Perhaps too easy with some security and privacy compromises, but Skype is finally ready to fight back with Meet Now. With Meet Now, hosts can create and share free meetings with just three simple clicks. That's according to the company. Even the host doesn't need to have Skype installed. It's all ran from your web browser. You can start the process from its website and then invite people either using a simple link or the share button that's available on the page. If the person you're inviting has Skype installed, then it will automatically open up in the app directly, and if not, then it will open up a new app. We've long waited for the successor to Sony's awesome noise -canceling WH -1000XM3 headphones, which earned a CNET Editor's Choice Award back in 2019. Credible photos of headphones that appeared to be the Sony WH -1000XM4 appeared on Twitter earlier last month, but it looks like they're a no -show for the time being anyway. While we're waiting, however, the company recently announced that it's bringing out two new wireless headphones. The WF -XB700 is a true wireless headphone in the company's extra bass line. It'll cost $130, while the WH -CH710N, a new noise -canceling over -ear headphone, will cost $200. Both are set to be available for pre -order in April. WF -XB700 extra bass true wireless earbuds with Sony's extra bass technology hold structure. It creates a comfortable ergonomic fit with up to get this nine hours of battery life and an optional charging case delivers an additional nine hours. You can even do a quick charge with it. Ten minutes on the quick charge provides about 60 minutes of music playback. Available in April for pre -order in black and blue, and then of course we have the WH -CH710N. They come with 30 millimeter drivers, artificial intelligence noise canceling, and it can automatically select the most effective noise canceling mode for user surroundings. It also includes dual microphones. It'll kind of help you catch more ambient sounds, up to 35 hours of audio on a single charge, and it automatically selects the most effective noise canceling mode for the user's surroundings. You can get up to 35 hours of audio on a single charge and again it has the quick charge feature that provides 60 minutes of music playback via a 10 minute charge. Bluetooth 5 .0 is included with this as well as the standard USB -C charging. This has 30 millimeter drivers, support for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, one touch button access to those digital assistants by the way, and it's going to be available in April for pre -order as well, this one only coming in black for the time being anyway. Having AI agents learn how to play simple video games is an ideal way to test their effectiveness thanks to the ability to measure success via a score. Alphabet's DeepMind designed 57 particular Atari games to serve as a litmus test for its artificial intelligence and established a benchmark for the skills of an average human player. The company's latest system, Agent 57, made a huge leap over previous systems and is the first version of the AI that outperforms the human baseline. In particular, Agent 57 has proven its superhuman skills in Pitfall, Montezuma's Revenge, Solaris, and Skiing, all those games that have been major challenges for other AIs. Now according to MIT's Technology Review, Pitfall and Montezuma's Revenge require the AI to experiment more than usual in order to figure out how to get a better score. Meanwhile, Solaris and Skiing are difficult for AI because there aren't as many indications of success. The AI doesn't know if it's making its right moves for long stretches of time. DeepMind built upon its older AI agents so that Agent 57 could make better decisions regarding exploration and score exploration as well as to optimize the trade -off between short -term and long -term performance in games like Skiing. Technology Review notes that while these results are impressive, AI still has a long way to go. These systems can only figure out one game at a time right now, which it says is at odds with the skills of a human. True versatility, which comes so easily to a human infant, is still far beyond AI's reach. That said, AI is already in use across industries. The lessons learned from Agent 57 could help improve performance even if human -level skills aren't achievable for now.
Mark Levin
Fresh update on "alexa" discussed on Mark Levin
"Lunches and dinners averaging over 2 ,000 calories per day get at least one food kit for each family member for a limited time save 25 percent plus get free shipping and all their three -month emergency food kits go to my patriotsupply .com today order by 3 p .m. and your items shipped the same day it's time to prepare for what's coming my patriotsupply .com listen to talk radio 77 WABC on your Echo device tell tell Alexa to play 77 WABC 77 WABC takes America's original butcher he's passionate just pathetic he's funny get off the phone you big dope and you always learn something Mark Levin is on the radio and and music playing music America's most powerful conservative voice the Mark Levin show dial in now 877 -381 13811 anarchists are not conservatives people who can easily embrace break bread with and make deals with Marxists who are destroying your lives your country your children's brains are sovereignty conservatives Now clearly there's a faction within the Republican Party who are not conservatives. They're not establishment Republicans. What are they? They're arsonists. They're anarchists. That's not you. That's not me. That's not the framers of the Constitution. That's not the politicians of the nation. That's them. As I posted earlier today let's cut to the chase. Gates lied repeatedly to the American people on the floor of the house yesterday and then of course simultaneously was fundraising
The Voicebot Podcast
A highlight from Soapbox Labs Founder and Ireland's AI Ambassador Patricia Scanlon - Voicebot Podcast Ep 351
"This is episode 351 of the Voicebot Podcast. My guest today is Patricia Scanlon, founder of Soapbox Labs and Ireland's AI ambassador. Welcome back, Voicebot Nation. This is Brett Kinsella, your host of the Voicebot Podcast. Each week for over six years, I brought you conversations with the innovators shaping the future of conversational AI, generative AI, and synthetic media. Today, I have the privilege of welcoming back to the podcast, Patricia Scanlon, for the third time. Scanlon first joined me in 2019 for episode 129 and then returned in April 2021 for episode 206. She is back for 2023, so I guess we're on a two -year cycle. Soapbox Labs is the leader in automated speech recognition for children, and this has made the company an important source of enabling technologies. Speech recognition systems are almost exclusively trained on data from adult speakers, and they just don't work very well with children's voices due to the different timbre, immaturity, prosody, different speech patterns. Scanlon was a university professor and researcher when she first recognized this problem and that it would hold children back from adopting voice assistants, and she set out to fill the technology gap. It's a great story. It's really become important work as well. The technology is now powering applications to help children learn to read, speak, comprehend better, and to assist teachers in assessment and developing customized learning plans. Scanlon and I break this all down, how it's evolving and accelerating as educators rush to adopt new tools to better serve students in our post -pandemic world. We also chat about Scanlon's role as Ireland's AI ambassador, the EUAI Act, in educating the public about AI. I know you're really going to like this one. Next up, speech recognition for kids. It's the transformation of learning and AI in the public sphere. Let's get started. Chris Scanlon, welcome to the VoiceBot podcast. Thanks, Brett. Thanks for being here. I should say welcome back. I think it's been like almost four, three or four years since you've been here. Pre -pandemic. That's all I remember. Yes, it was. So like 2019. So it's got to be four years now. A lot has happened in the world since then. Not the least of which, the pandemic, but lots happened in your business, too. And I really felt like in 2019, your business was really taking off and it's only accelerated since then. So why don't we start there? Actually, I think this would be really good to level set. I mean, we're friends. We've known each other a long time, but I'm not sure everybody knows the story. And you started working on this issue of speech recognition for children a long time ago, and that led to the founding of Soapbox Labs. So why don't you give people just sort of a quick summary of that? Yeah, sure. So I'm an engineer. I have a Ph .D. in speech recognition, AI, as you know, the voice AI space we're now calling it. So I've been in space a very long time and I'd worked across academia, I'd worked across industry, I'd worked at big tech where, you know, we were doing speech recognition for years and I was back in 2013 when I was actually observing my own daughter interacting with, you know, apps. It was the iPad era, you know, app millionaires, do you remember that? And noticing, you know, I was giving my daughter educational apps and services and getting her to play like pre -literacy stuff. She wasn't even four at the time. And I really just noticed that, one, they had no way of assessing whether she was actually able to recall or pronounce sounds and words. And then when I dug into it, it was like, oh, it's no speech tech for kids. It's actually, okay, here's speech tech, let's see if it works for kids. And the more I dug into it, it's like, it really doesn't work for kids, therefore there's nothing available for education and literacy and language learning. And it was kind of like that light bulb moment ago and I'd spent my whole career working in the area of adult speech recognition. And I still had all my colleagues and none of us, you know, that we'd focus very solely on a problem and just viewed kids as just, I don't know, they're slightly different, and voices a little squeaky or something. And then the more you dug in, go, oh no, they're fundamentally very different physically, behaviorally, language wise, and all of this culminated into something that required a bespoke proprietary solution for kids. So that was the path I went on from 2013 onwards. Well, and I think it's super interesting too, because you think about it, it's sometimes it's the thing right in front of you that's the hardest to recognize. And didn't you see it until you had this sort of unique moment because of the iPad, because children were using it, because there are all these apps coming out. And if we think about speech recognition, part of it too is reinforced by the fact that all the corpora, all the data was adult human voices. There really wasn't anything for kids that ended at scale, correct? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the whole adage of, you know, don't work with children and animals. It's like, you know, it's kind of like this joke we often use inside because it's really difficult. You know, it's so easy to accumulate large volumes of data from adults in any application field. But, you know, there are difficulties, challenges. You can't incentivize children the same way as you can incentivize an adult. You can't, you know, these days there are more data protections around COPPA in the EU and elsewhere in the world. You know, and it was just a case of, you know, that's not easy to come by. It's really, really hard to build this. Kids are different. It was just, there were so many challenges. And to be honest, if I'd known all the challenges ahead of us, I don't know if I would have wandered in there as confidently as I did in 2013, you know. But it has been really rewarding because, you know, it took a lot of learning and patience on all our parts to get this right. Okay. And I do want to get into sort of like the business and sort of the use cases and the value and stuff like that in just a minute. But I think it might be interesting just to like talk about this idea of speech recognition and like what is state of the art for speech recognition? We've seen a lot of changes in that space over the last couple of years. I mean, and you just think about, you know, whisper coming out and seamless from meta, OpenAI's whisper and seamless from meta. But like, maybe just break down very simply the fundamental elements of speech recognition when you're thinking about this as a researcher and building a system for recognition, and then maybe differentiate between the adults and children, because I'm wondering, is it really just, you just swap out the data set? Because I think it's more than that. Yeah, it's more than that. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you think about it, you know, the old approach for speech recognition was like you had an acoustic model, you build models of what the sounds, the small components make up speech, right? And they're called phonemes. There's like 40, 50 of them depending on your dialect. And then once you figured out what the speech kind of sounds like, then you'd feed it into a language model, which kind of uses the language structures and the prediction of what was most likely said, right? The expectation of what was said. And we hear a lot about language models now. As people are beginning to understand what a language, it predicts what you most likely said based on what the population usually says. And that's kind of like the older approach. The newer approach is this end to end approach where you put in the audio and then, you know, it does the whole thing in one go and you have the transcriptions of what was said and it does this end to end matching. That's more the newer version of it. And that's what most people are employing now. And that's fine. And that works great. And again, it's always interesting to me when, you know, engineers and technology and scientists never go about something, you know, sometimes you've got to think about the use case and work back to whether that's the right solution or not. When you think about it, kids, you know, they probably, their language is more like Yoda than it is another adult, you know, especially in the early, you know, they literally flip sound, you know, sounds and then they lisp and they underpronounce and they over punctuate and they elongate and they literally just don't follow the line. And they change their behavior rapidly, even the same child every couple of months is changing their language, right, as they learn. And all that kind of, you know, compounds a lot when you think about how traditional speech recognition systems are built. Even the new approach, right, end to end, it has an expectation of what is being said and it leans quite heavily on that prediction. And that was the big difference in speech technology from 15, 10, 15 years ago versus what we've seen in the last seven or eight years versus what we're seeing now, right, is that language modeling really took off in the last 10 years. And that's where a lot of the acceleration and performance happened. It wasn't really around the acoustics and what it was just, and that's when we started seeing Google Home and Alexa and all those start to perform pretty well because they were beginning to predict what was most somebody in their room, their kitchen was most likely trying to, what music they were trying to play or whatever. And then same with the end to end systems, we're leaning quite heavily and then large language models, we're going to scrape the entire internet, we're going to start predicting what's most likely said, and then you get a five -year -old who just like blurts out something all muddled up and just starts messing with the system that was never designed for that. And you think about people with English as a second language kind of struggle with these things too. You often hear people saying that, it doesn't work as well for them because they're not speaking in a very predictable, predicted way, and therefore it starts to break down. So we had to come at this not just from a data problem, but also in how we build it to get the best response for children. Right, because the prediction model being very important there, if children are using a slightly different speech pattern, maybe not following the grammatical rules as strictly as I'd say adult humans are conditioned to do. That's interesting. Now you've mentioned end to end a couple of times, and maybe it'd be useful for people to understand that, the ASR, NLU being separate together and how you think about that. And also how you think about that changes it because this whole idea of actually having additional context before you make the transcription prediction.
Stephanie Miller
Fresh update on "alexa" discussed on Stephanie Miller
"You know, when Roe v Wade was kicked to the curb, it was like, oh, we know we're just going to let the states make these decisions. But then all of a sudden we heard people saying, well, you know, we should go after gay rights next and let's do total abortion bans. And oh, by the way, rethink no fault divorce. And it's like, what else can we do to take this country back to the 50s? If they had just done one or two things here or there, they wouldn't have created this backlash that they are experiencing now, but they just can't stop themselves. Oh, wait a minute. We're not doing abortions. Yes, but they might go out of state. Oh, let's figure out a way to go get them and make their lives miserable. They can't help themselves. Keep listening to WCPT Alexa play WCPT Okay.
VUX World
A highlight from Why messaging should be part of your content strategy, with Nick Martin
"Yeah, I would probably first just say I don't know that those are binary, and I don't know that they're black and white. It's one or the other. But forced to choose, I think we're much closer to the former than the latter in the sense of the experiences that we power and that we're continuing to invest in being able to build out are always starting from a place of how do we best take advantage of our publishers content, which is written by humans. And then we think that's a really important ingredient here and leverage what's happening around AI and make it really easy for the publisher to maybe convert their content, maybe augment their content, but in one form or another enhance it, make the experience more interactive, more user -friendly, more personalized, more relevant through chat as the interface that we're building around. And so in that sense, content is the core of it. It's about the stories you've written, the things your journalists have researched, the articles you're publishing, and the topics that your readers are already on your site for. You already have this audience, and certainly a big part of what we do is getting you a new audience by distributing these chatbots in other platforms where maybe you didn't have a presence before because these are chat endemic environments like this one. Again, things are moving so quickly here, and the opportunities are so broad. There is sort of a spectrum, I think, between example A and then this companion assistant version of my AI or Chashi BT or what like the promise I think of Siri and Alexa was back in the day. And I do think things can move that direction even for content companies. And we've assisted for their content a librarian that's personalized to every reader. We've gotten those analogies in sort of private meetings from publishers that we're working with and talking to, and there's ways to take advantage of our platform to deliver that experience. I do think it's still different than what you would see from my AI on Snap where it's more or less, and not to diminish it, I think they've done tremendously well despite some of the challenges that you alluded to. It's more or less the Chashi BT experience, right? It's a wrapper on an LOM. It's broad and horizontal. It's anything that was made available in training data from the public internet. We refine what we do to the publisher's content so it's specific and targeted and accurate. But we're also not trying to drive the I'm your best friend, tell me about your problems, let me recommend a restaurant to you. If you're chatting with a sports publisher, you're not going to ask them for where to go get pizza Friday night, right? But you can imagine over time, maybe that sports publisher does help you find the best sports bars to watch the game, and maybe there's a commercial opportunity underneath that by way of referral or advertising or otherwise. And so it'll continue to evolve. I think if you look at what's happening in the very, very early days around the agent behavior, that also becomes quite compelling and might put a task underneath it, which they're going to be able to do pretty quickly here. But that's not ready for prime time for all types of publishers, the world's biggest, most reputable brands just yet. Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of your publishers, the large publishers, they've got lots of different ways of monetizing what they do. Some of them are subscription based. You mentioned like ESPN and so they've got like TV channels and subscriptions and all kinds of stuff going on.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: A Rant | The Labyrinth of Digital Feudalisms Grip and the Quest for Intentionality
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. This week, it's Sheila and I just doing what we do from time to time just to sort of do a bit of a roundup of what's going on and like get in each other's heads a bit. We are, of course, available. We can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you've enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, we would really like to hear from you. If you didn't like our episode, you could also talk to us and you could email us to do so at podcasts .coindesk .com with the subject line of Money Reimagined. As always, there's just lots going on, Sheila. Maybe we can talk a little bit later about the ongoing saga that is Sam Bankman free. He's in jail now, of course, but he's now pled not guilty to his latest indictment. We had some news of Coinbase acquiring a stake in Circle, which has got people intrigued. Markets aren't looking so great. A bit of a weird, wild collapse in Bitcoin. And that's, obviously, a determinant of all sorts of other things. But look, you came on, I don't know, saw text messages from me before we started this. You were obviously in a bit of a mood, a bit angry about a few things. You just want to rant about a few things. And you talked about comparing the United States to Japan and maybe the regulatory framework in each country. I thought we can get you under that. But it got me thinking that maybe we should, and if we do these two -way things, the one -on -ones, that we should just have a section just called Sheila's Rant. And I'm trying to think about what - The Rant of the Week. The Rant of the Week. The Rant of the Week. There's always something to rant about. I could just like a now. I could bring a now BBC voice. It's time for Sheila Warren's rant. Sheila, rant away. She's like, over to you. Over to you. Please rant away, Sheila. But your rant, actually, I thought you were going to rant about, you know, the US v Japan. I was. But then you joined us and you started talking about problems with your Google connection on things that was actually undermining your ability to actually do things, which got me thinking that this is a perfectly good rant because it is a way to speak about the whole dependency on centralized platforms. Yes. Yeah. Let me let me just walk our listeners through the last hour of my life. So I have a new laptop. Yay me. Hooray. That's very exciting. And I was trying to do what I thought would be a fairly simple task of pairing my Bluetooth mouse with my new laptop, which you would think would just be a very simple click a couple of times and things are done. No, apparently not. So in the course of this, I restarted my laptop and now I don't have access to Google Chrome. I literally cannot use Google Chrome. I can't download it unless it comes from someplace, whatever this that bottom line is without Google Chrome. What the realization I was late to our recording today because without Google Chrome on my machine, I have to use my laptop, not my phone, because I have a mic and I have to plug it in whatever for a variety of reasons. I'm dependent on my laptop for our particular from any reimagined to record this podcast and between Apple and Google and their willingness to interface in some ways and not others, etc. And then throw in Zoom, which is where we do our recordings for the podcast. I wasn't able to access my Zoom account. So then I had to like back into my Zoom in a different way. And then I had to like reset a password. It was just like, you've got to be kidding me with this. But all of that, I think, Michael, just it's just emblematic of the problem that I think we talk about, even not as pointedly as this, but more generally on this show, which is we are beholden in ways we don't even realize. Like I'm at a point now where, thank goodness, I've got people on the back end working on figuring out how to get me Chrome. Yeah, you've got an army of people trying to. Well, I wish I had one person, but regardless, I've got someone helping me with this and it's going to figure it out on our IT support side. But without access to Chrome, I basically can't really do my job unless I'm on my phone, in which case if I work on my phone for too long, I'm just going to like lose my eyesight, which is a whole other issue. You know, it's just it's just we're beholden in ways we don't even understand, because when these things function, the point is that when these things function, we don't even realize how connected they are. I don't know that I deliberately set my Zoom account up to run through Google, but at some point I did that or someone did it for me is probably more likely what happened, to be very honest. But regardless, the whole thing just kind of falls apart. And yes, you can very deliberately choose. I'm very conscious about data person, right? I mean, we've talked about this many times. So I do tend to use different kinds of browsers for other things, this and that. But when it comes to kind of hyper efficient work product oriented things, like we just default to the big platforms because everyone else is on there. It's a lot easier. You can make different kinds of connections. We work in Google Docs, whatever it is, right? If those things don't function, the integrations are somewhat default. And if those don't function, your productivity takes a massive hit. But your ability, I think, to engage is really complicated. So this isn't so much about data capture and control. It's about the ability to actually engage online, engage digitally in a meaningful way, which is is not it's just it's so beholden to these gigantic entities. And I find that today I find it deeply irritating and annoying and frustrating. I want to throw my machine out the window. But as a general matter, it's highly problematic. Well, the two are related, right? Like it's not just that there's data capture going on. It's that they create such a level of dependency. Yes. And such an integration of all these other elements of your life that the data is all the more rich from their point of view and therefore valuable from their point of view. Right. So, I mean, it is all related. But yeah, there is this convenience of the network effect of everything tied together. The one that I often think about lately is what's happened to email. So we often talk about how, oh, at least email, right? SMTP, it's this independent protocol. And you can send an email to anybody on any email server anywhere. And then whatever client you're using, you're fine, right? Well, I'm not so sure about that anymore because everybody has Gmail, right? So many corporate accounts are now just Gmail accounts. It is so big that Gmail's spam filtering system will, if you happen to be from a smaller server, I mean, there's not really not many left. People have ProtonMail for privacy and there's a few Yahoo and a few others that are still there. But any of the little guys, any independent email provider, you're going to be interpreted by Gmail's spam server as spam and just pushed out into the... You're not going to get your stuff read because you're not using... So there's this backdoor way in which Google has created control of what we thought was at least an architecturally far more decentralized system. And that is problematic in addition to all of the other ways in which Google just sits there in the middle of our lives. When you're using Waze in your car, it's Google. If you've got Google Home, it's Google. And of course, we can say the same about Amazon with Alexa and Prime and AWS and everything else, but this is the reality. We've built these dependencies. In fact, as anybody who listened to last week's episode will now know, I'm actually in the middle of writing a book with Frank McCourt, as I said then. More information will come about what it's really going to be about, but maybe it's going to come out in a drip form because I'll just offer this little tidbit. I mean, I'm just in the process of working on a chapter to try to give it a little bit more context to what we mean in the book by this concept of being a subject or a vassal in a new modern form of feudalism, as opposed to being a citizen in a kind of a republic and a democracy. Given that our information system is fundamental to who we are as a society, like it's critical to democracy, it's critical to a free market. If that information system is so controlled by these powerful platforms and that they are using that data to then actually feed back on you to direct you to what to read and what to say and how to behave and all that behavior modification stuff, which by now is very well documented, by the way, then in effect, we've lost agency. We've lost our citizenship, right? So this goes into digital feudalism. And I think one of the ways to describe it is this, right? It's the same way that like, oh, you can't actually go to this part of the country unless the king lets you go there or this dependency on the say so of some powerful lord is very similar to, I think, what we're at here right now. And that's a cause for great concern. I completely agree. And I think what's really even more disturbing about it is unlike physical feudalism, right, where there are boundaries and markers and you physically could not cross. Here, it's very invisible. And so to your point about Gmail's ubiquity, I think most people know this, but I don't think people really realize that your domain name does not say anything about the corporate master behind the email account, right? So most companies, to your point in tech, do use a Google interface. And so they have their own domain name of their own company. It's going to be whatever .com or whatever .org or whatever it is. But that's all run on the back end by Google. It's a Google account. It's all a Google workspace. And that's very common in tech. And unless you're a competitor of Google, in which case you have your own interface that you're using, right? Microsoft being a great example of this. But regardless, I mean, there is almost complete capture of many parts of the ecosystem through that functionality, not to mention servers. AWS servers come up with some regularity. But the idea is that most companies are back ended into an AWS server. AWS is actually a bigger portion of Amazon's profit than Amazon, than the brick and mortar kind of the retail facing part. And you can imagine, given how often the frequency of how people use amazon .com to buy things, you can imagine if that's like a drop in the bucket compared to what AWS is making in terms of gross profit. It's pretty wild to think about that. But our entire digital infrastructure is really dependent in ways that when they break down, it's like, you have a day like I'm having today, it's really abundantly in your face and obvious how problematic that is. When it functions well, it's something that is pretty invisible in ways that I think regular feudalism, if you will, was pretty in people's faces. It was a pretty obvious system. This is invisible to a lot of people. You don't think about it until it breaks down. And when it breaks down, you're just annoyed about it and you're frustrated because you can't, like I'm a person who's incapable of not contextualizing things. But I think most people in my position today would just be very irritated and want to just fix it and move on without the reflection necessarily on what it means, right? Right. We were talking before about how this is actually very different from, say, a regular tool breaking down, right? This is not just getting a flat tire on your car and being annoyed with that. But I think most people will see it that way. They'll just go, oh, damn it. Yeah, it's a temporary problem. The dishwasher's got some problem with the detergent rinsing function and that's it, right? But no, it's actually a very clear reflection of the dependencies that we're talking about. I'm glad you mentioned Amazon because we should recognize this is not just one company, there are a few of them that have these particularly powerful roles. But I'm going to go back to Google because I was thinking as you were saying this, one of the ones that, like back in January, of course, there was the ruling from the Department of Justice that sued Google successfully for monopolizing digital advertising technologies. Right. And like, yes, now there's been a response to that, thankfully. But it's just the very fact that we've managed to create this system, I think is one of the most clearest reflections of this power, right? So, again, Google controls Chrome, Google is control search. And so every aspect of how we actually find things and therefore all of the ways in which every single website is incentivized through search engine optimization, which is a buzz word that we journalists have to deal with every single freaking day, SEO is designed to keep that Google algorithm happy. So we are shaping the way we design our content and curate our content specifically to keep Google happy. So that's on the content side. But how is our content monetized? Well, regardless of whether or not it is on Google, it's like, you know, like it's not just Google ads, but our own ads themselves have to really play through the sort of the big Google network. So our content enter ads because there's the Google ad exchange, which has a sort of a combination ad of network technology to actually broker that the amount of space that's taken up inside the whole real estate of the Internet by bringing the sell side components together with the buy side, right? You've got folks who are publishers trying to sell that space and you've got folks who want to buy media space. Google sits right in the middle of it because it's engineered this perfect ecosystem in which you have no choice but to sit in the middle of it. Why this isn't looked upon as something that is, I don't know, 10, 20 times worse than Standard Oil was or rubber barons and the thing that led to the antitrust movement and Teddy Roosevelt's very important laws at the turn of the century. It baffles me. We've never seen anything like this level of monopolistic control over our economy. Well, I think it is in part because a lot of it is, as we were discussing, it's somewhat invisible. People don't really realize the interconnections and the way that it kind of reminds me of this show 30 Rock, which probably most of us are familiar with. And there was this running joke of like the corporate map, right, of 30 Rock and who owned the studio and the fact that they owned like it was a microwave or whatever it was, but all rolled up to this one central company. And Alex Baldwin character, Jack Donaghy was his character, which joke a lot about the fact that everything rolled up to this one company and there are all these different things and they were all in the do product placement of the other kinds of parts of the company and whatnot. But when it comes to our online world, people just don't really they don't even understand the different things that go into making these services possible. Right. And how they all interconnect. And I also think that there is an element of just sort of embarrassment, like I think most people like I am beyond this in my personal life, but I'd say probably a decade ago when everything failed on my laptop like this morning, I would have been like, oh, my God, it's user error. I did something wrong. I messed it up. Now I'm like, no, no, it's not me because I'm sophisticated as an Internet user at this point. And I know what is me and what is a pepcak issue, as they say, problem exists between keyboard and computer. Right. And what is not. And I know this is not. But in many cases, people feel a level of tech illiteracy or embarrassment around it because they don't understand it. They don't they know they don't understand it. They don't really get it. There's nothing visual about it that you can really process. You just know it's not working and you feel an immediate. It's part of partially the addiction of it. You feel stress. You feel a tremendous amount of stress that you're not able to get this thing to function. And then you feel, I think, according with that embarrassment and shame. And this has been documented by many sociologists that when people's tech is not working, they feel shame and embarrassment in ways they don't feel when their microwave fails or they get a flat tire or whatever. They don't have that level of anxiety and shame around it, which they do. Right. Which they have when their online tools aren't working. It's another form of control in terms of like the trust us. We got this because we know don't get this. That differentiation is dividing divide. You don't understand this. You don't. And you can't trust. And you can't. Right. So we build up that even if you could easily just by building up that expectation that you can't by holding out these tech geniuses as sort of the lords of everything you can only only once you can get it. We build that expectation and therefore we ultimately lock ourselves into again, more dependency. I think that that's what I find even more challenging about this. Right. Just to take this out, go out even one more layer is when we think about how this is affecting a lot of the ways that elites think about education and not just elites, but really, but the way that the focus on technical mastery, being a coder, all this stuff is now considered the pinnacle of educational achievement in many ways. And there's some backlash against this around liberal arts education. You need to have other kinds of skills and talents and creativity, all these kinds of things that really matter. I think anyone who's been in tech for a long time will tell you that the EQ component is the thing that really makes or breaks a career in tech, not so much your technical ability or capacity to do things like code. Nevertheless, the emphasis on that, I think on the one hand, it's important to be competitive in the global economy. That is certainly an important thing. But the overemphasis I would say on it, it reinforces this concept. So as demographics get older, there's a sense that, well, I'm too old to understand this is too complicated for me. My oldest kid and I are watching the show called Avid Elementary. Highly recommend. It's phenomenal. I'm Avid rewatching Elementary. It's fantastic. 110 billion. I mean, we're going back and rewatching season one, and it's really funny. But there's an older teacher who's been teaching for many, many years. And there's an episode we just watched last night that's called something like tech or whatnot, new tech or something like that. And they bring in this tablets, right? And they're like, this is how you're going to teach the kids to read. They're going to use these tablets and you're going to do all this stuff. And the older teacher who's probably in her 40s or whatnot, she's not that old, but relatively speaking, she is like, I don't know how to do this. She just kind of like does an end run around the technology and winds up coding in that her kindergartners are reading it like fourth grade level. Okay. So of course there's an assembly and they want to pre it's really funny. It's a great episode. But part of it, I think she talks about having a hot male account, all this stuff. Right. But I was watching that and I was thinking about this idea that we have basically created a generation of people. We've kind of told them and shamed them into thinking that they are just not capable of understanding these technologies. And in countries, I think where you're getting older and older versus younger and younger, there's this kind of flip, right? This flip has happened where not only do we prize youth and vigor and all that kind of thing, but we also think there's something about their brains that makes them more capable of understanding how a computer works or how an online, which is just absolute nonsense. That's just completely untrue. It makes no sense whatsoever. If anything, the logic that underlies how a lot of these systems work is something that age and experience actually are helpful in comprehending, right? Because you understand systems, you can be a systems thinker, the older that you get. So I find all of this kind of cultural framing of tech and our dependence on tech equally challenging to how complicated tech itself is, which is not to say that tech is not complicated. It is to some extent, but it's not, it's not unparsable by anyone, frankly. We hit on something there that I think is really, and I do want to get to another quick rant before we go, because I got to run this out, but a different topic. But you said systems thinking, which I think is really important here because to me, the biggest insight that I think I've had, and I really do believe that being in the blockchain space has allowed me to think about these things, about what is wrong with this web two world, these centralized platforms is the business model, right? Is the idea that there are literally incentives amongst everybody to keep drilling down on this model and building out essentially a system of data extraction, this abusive manipulative system that we have, because it pays, because everybody's locked into that system. And I think one of the things that I find talking to my daughter sometimes about this is that she knows there's something big, bad, and wrong about this. And yeah, she gets tech as well, and she's comfortable using a whole range of technology, but she doesn't have that economic understanding. I don't think of business models of thinking through what's driving Wall Street. What's driving capital? Where is the actual profit motive that's driving all this? That is definitely something that you acquire as an older person. Right. And so in some respects, what you're talking about as well is a system that prevented those of us who have that knowledge, that EQ, that broader knowledge of systems from being able to then apply it to this model. Oh, it's tech. I can't. I couldn't. You know what? How could I possibly? You would see the same old stuff that we've seen for years that drives business decisions that leads to these extractive, broken systems. That's kind of where the book's going to be all about, by the way. Anyway, look, the segue I'll try to pull off here is, of course, I thoroughly believe we need not just blockchain technology, but a range of other decentralizing mechanisms that will require perhaps some centralization as well, but to redesign this whole thing. And that's where the policy challenges come into place because we really need to be thinking creatively about enabling these technologies to develop in the right environment to emphasize what's leading centralization. And of course, you've been looking at different models around the world and the U .S. is really lagging. And I keep writing about it. And so now we've got Japan somehow strangely leading the way over here. Well, that was my original rant. So I just got back from family vacation in Japan, 11 out of 10 recommend. Phenomenal. It was really amazing, even with the really little kids. And part of the reason it was so incredible is just the infrastructure. And so not only I immediately noticed a couple of things since my last trip, which was in 2019, which is a work trip. A, the transit system has gotten even more efficient and effective, which is remarkable considering in the United States, our transit is just, I mean, infrastructure bill and all that, but that's a long time coming. And oh, my God, that's a whole battle. It's going to be fought and how that all gets implemented. But, you know, grateful for at least a step in the right direction. But also the accessibility, just the way that accessibility is modeled into urban design is something I just found remarkable. And I live in San Francisco, and we're pretty thoughtful about these things here. But it is my kids were asking, like, oh, why is there this thing there? Why is this thing over here? Why is there the sound or why is there this bumpy thing in the road or whatever it is? I was like, that's all for people who are visually impaired. And it's just built into urban design in a way that I found remarkable. I don't think I've seen that as prominently a feature of urban design anywhere else. My co -author Frank McCourt will be loving, I mean, he's going to get into this next episode. He'd be loving to hear this because this is this idea about building architecture with people in mind. Right. As opposed to the company that runs things. It's truly human centered. Right. And part of that look is the demographics in Japan. We talked about demographics. And the Internet was built for machines, not humans. This is one of the problems. That's exactly right. So looking at AI, for that matter, is built as a tool to help make machine learning. Right. So just put there, leave it there and say what you will. I think, though, that there is a demographic thing there. There are older people in Japan. It's an older demographic. There are fewer and fewer children being born in Japan to the point that the government's providing incentives for people to actually have more children to kind of try to alter and adjust the demographics. So there's a real practical need for this. But imagine if this were the default in everywhere in the world. It should be. There's really no reason. And I looked a little bit, because I'm a nerd, into the kind of cost structure behind all of that. And it's marginal. It's negligible if you do it from the beginning and do it intentionally. So I've always loved Japan. I used to run an office in Japan and have major Japanese colleagues in my last role. And we, of course, have engaged in Japan at CCI as well, because to your point that you were making earlier, it is quite robust and thoughtful in how it's thinking about crypto regulation in ways that I find very impressive, especially around NFTs and stablecoin as well. But regardless, I hadn't been there as a tourist and as a regular person in quite some time. And it was just a remarkable experience. And I can't say that I came back overly impressed by the American offerings in these areas like infrastructure and accessibility, which I have not been historically, but I was even more deeply unimpressed when I was faced with the parallel option of what could be, with a little bit of imagination, a little bit of political... I'd love to really understand some of the aspects of Japanese culture that makes this sort of instinctive recognition of building for use and for humans so automatic almost, because there's one little example that I just thought was so fascinating. If you walk through the streets of Tokyo and look down, I don't know if it's right across the city, but certainly in a number of them, you'll see manhole covers sometimes in the city, which one has its own little design with colors and artwork in it. Somebody decided that it would be of interest to the society to have artwork that was differentiated across each of the manhole covers. That's a unique thing to decide to do. And it's a lovely thing to decide to do. It brings a whole new experience to being walking outside and looking down and being part of the environment that you're in, right? It's fascinating. It's something really quite magical about that capacity. Look, Japan's got lots of problems as well. Yeah, no culture, no countries, but on an infrastructure level, it was really hard to argue with the manifestation of a vision that really did put people and their needs at the center of the plot. You know, there's a place called the Shibuya Crossing, which is the biggest intersection in the entire world. It's got the most foot traffic of any intersection, apparently, in the entire world. And so we, of course, my kids wanted to see that and they wanted to cross it multiple times and whatnot. It just functions. It just functions. And you look across a city like that and you think about what that would look like in many other cities in the world. And suffice to say, it's not the same experience. Just not the same experience, right? It's organized. Part of that's cultural. Part of that is a cultural politeness, which has its own challenges, right? I'm not here to say that. I'm not here to laud any particular aspect of that or anything else. I think there's individualism is not as highly prioritized that has its own challenges. But nevertheless, just from a straight up urban infrastructure perspective, it was pretty hard to argue with how it functioned, how it was maintained, how efficient it was. All of those things I found not only admirable, but really compelling. And so coming back, I have to say, you know, I'll be in D .C., New York and San Francisco and none of those cities, I'm sorry to say, have anything to compete with that with what you've got on offer. So there you have it. That was actually less of a rant and more of a kind of a bit of a wistful observation. Yeah. And a little bit of an acknowledgement, a love song, if you like, almost to Japan, which is I mustn't say I love the place, the food. I love going to those little cocktail bars where the guy will spend like, you know, 10 minutes gently stirring you a martini. There's something very, really unique about it. All right. I'll wrap up there. Hopefully, this meandering conversation has actually landed in a place that our listeners found useful. Hopefully, it'll lead to people thinking a little bit more about intentionality. When I think about Japanese culture, the number one thing that comes up to me is intentionality and intentionality and how we engage online, intentionality and how we engage with each other, intentionality and how we build in our infrastructure, both digitally and physical. All of those things, I think, can only benefit us as a society. And I just don't know that that is a, I think the intentionality is there in our digital environment based out of the US, but it is intentionality to your point around a particular business model, which is not one that necessarily puts people and their needs and their desires at the center of anything. Well, the connection between the two ideas is the physical infrastructure into Japan being built with its intentionality to humans. And we need to really start to think heavily about the infrastructure of the internet, our infrastructure digital being built with humans in mind. And that is a major challenge that every one of us needs to be confronting right now. Okay. Let's leave it at that. We didn't get to talk about Stan Bankman Friedman, talk about Bitcoin price. Those of you who are looking for that, read Coindesk. There's loads of great material on that, as always, because it's the one stop shop for all of this vital employment information. A little bit of a housekeeping note for everybody, since I am writing a book, just so you all know, those of you who are subscribers to my newsletter that comes to the same name, Money Reimagined, thank you for doing so. Unfortunately, I'm putting on a hiatus for a little while. So if you're not getting in there wondering where it is, it will be back. But I need to kind of get this book project done. The podcast will continue every week. Don't worry. This is Sheila and I doing this. We're never going to stop, Sheila. This will go on to where like, I don't know, 105 years old. I'll be dialing in from, you know, wherever I need to dial in from when I'm 80. We're hopefully not a Google Chrome problem at that time. But otherwise, yes, just stick with us. It's great to have you around. And if you do have anything to say about this episode or any other ones, of course, you can reach us at podcasts at coindesk .com. Subject line Money Reimagined and certainly, you know, tell it to all your friends, subscribe. You can listen to us weekly here on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now. Bye. Bye.
The Voicebot Podcast
A highlight from Generative AI News - GPTBot Debut, Amazon's Gen AI Strategy, W&B Becomes a Unicorn, Tome, NVIDIA, Cohere, Zoom & More - Voicebot Podcast 344
"This is episode 344 of the Voicebot Podcast. It's the 27th edition of the Generative AI News Rundown. Top stories this week include GPTbot, Amazon's Generative AI strategy, NVIDIA, weights and biases, and more. Welcome back, Voicebot Nation and all you synthetians out there. This is Brett Kinsella. I'm your host of the Voicebot Podcast. Sometimes that involves in -depth conversations with AI innovators, and sometimes it is person in the street interviews from a conference or big industry event, and sometimes that involves the news like this week. In fact, the past three podcast episodes, including this one, have all been news because, well, we've been busy and I'm doing a little catch up. But hey, it's summer. You can cram three weeks of generative AI news into a car ride to the in -laws or maybe during a visit to your in -laws. You decide. We will be back with some other great episodes from the Unharmed Conference, Telefonica, an amazing new startup in the interactive character space. Those will all hit later this month. I look forward to bringing those to you. I guess we're also officially over half a year of weekly podcasts now on generative AI news and over six years of podcast interviews in general. The journey continues this week. If you get a lot out of these news podcasts in particular, please drop us a five -star review or comment in Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcast player. You can also do it on LinkedIn. I was just hoping we could get some comments around it. I'd like to get your feedback, both positive. If you've got things you think we could do better, I definitely would appreciate that and just would appreciate not just the feedback, but also just a little bit of recognition in the market so that we can generate more awareness. That's it. I'd appreciate it. This week's show was co -hosted by Eric Schwartz and me and we had a special guest, James Poulter from Vixen Labs, dropped in to talk about the first four stories, including GPT Bot and Amazon's strategy. As always, you know you can listen or watch. You can listen here or you can watch the show on VoiceBot's YouTube channel. If you want to see us and our bright, shining faces, do that. Otherwise, let's kick back and you will get the full rundown. Some of the top stories this week include GPT Bot and OpenAI's plans to politely crawl the web, Amazon's generative AI strategy, its three -tier model and the market positioning and the significance of Alexa's top executive shifting to generative AI. We also have funding stories from Weights & Biases and Tome, NVIDIA, Cohere, Hugging Face, Google, Zoom, interesting TOS story there, Apple. Hey, we got it all this week. Eric and I wrap up the show with generative AI winners and losers of the week. Let's see if you agree with our decisions on that. Next up, GPT Bot, Amazon's generative AI strategy, Weights & Biases, NVIDIA, Cohere, Zoom and more. Let's get started.
The Voicebot Podcast
A highlight from Generative AI News - GPT-5 Rumors, G3PO from OpenAI, Generative Google Assistant, Inworld, Meta, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 343
"This is episode 343 of the Voicebot Podcast. It's the 26th edition of the Generative AI News Rundown. Top stories this week include OpenAI's GPT -5 rumors, G3PO, the open source model, nWorld's big funding round, Apple, Google, Stack Overflow, and more. Hello there to all my friends in Voicebot Nation and the mythical realm of Synthidia. I'm Brett Kinsella, your host of the Voicebot Podcast. Today marks a milestone that we didn't anticipate and weren't actually tracking until a couple weeks ago. Since this is the 26th edition of the Generative AI News Rundown, it marks exactly one half a year of weekly news shows. We began this as an experiment on YouTube and then added it here in the podcast each week as a companion option for people to listen as opposed to watch. I wasn't sure how long we would do it as a weekly series, but here we are after you're down and the news just keeps coming. If value you these weekly news podcasts, please drop into Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. Please give us a five -star review and a comment, let us know there or on LinkedIn what you'd like about Gain. Also, I'd welcome any comments about how to improve the show, I'd like to know what people think about it. I know a lot of people are listening or watching, but the more feedback we can get, and of course, we always like five -star reviews and endorsements. That's always great. Just let more people know that we're out here doing this every week. So thanks in advance for giving us a review or a shout out. I definitely appreciate it. If you would do that, you have my gratitude. This week's show was hosted by Eric Schwartz and me, you can listen here or on Voiced By's YouTube channel as I think you know. Also, if you ever want quick access to the story links, you can go into the description for the podcast or you can go to bit .ly forward slash synthetia and just find the latest game posts there in the list. This week's top stories include open AI rumors spread for GPT -5 and the open source G3PO model. Is this a response to Meta's Llama 2? We'll talk about that today. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are both expected to add generative AI capabilities in 2023. Could this finally lead to the blending of doing and knowing assistance? And if you don't know what that is, definitely listen. Really interesting developments on that front. The generative AI funding fountain continues to flow with news from InWorld. They raised a lot of money on a very large valuation. That'll be interesting to hear about. We also have stories from Meta, Texas sound generation, Apple, removing iOS apps in the Chinese app store, Google DeepMind with a new instruction model for robots, Stack Overflow, tentative steps. We'll see about what we think about that. News mobile app artifact has some celebrity voice clones and a bit more. Eric and I conclude the show with our weekly assessment of generative AI winners and losers of the week. Next up, open source LLMs, GPT -5 rumors, InWorld becomes a half a corn, Meta, Apple, Google, Stack Overflow, and more. Let's get started. All right, folks, we're back at Gain. We have GPT -5 on the docket today. We're talking about open source, open AI. We've got Meta with new text audio generation, Google DeepMind, Stack Overflow finally gets in the game, InWorld, a half a corn. Just so much going on. I'm Brett Kinsella, host of the Gain show. Gain stands for generative AI news. We do this every week and we've done this every week for 26 weeks, which I believe, if I do the math correctly, is one half of a year every week. And my colleague, Eric Schwartz, has actually appeared on this show more times than I have. Hey, Eric. Hey, yeah. It's been, yeah, I think we've each had one or two times away, but it's added up pretty quickly. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I know that I missed two very early on because I was in Europe, like one heading to Europe and the other because, of course, my flight was canceled and I have to stay an extra day. And then I just missed last week because, again, I was in Europe and my flight was canceled and I was on a plane during Gain. So it sounded like it was a really fun show last week. And I will tell people if you like to follow up with Gain, if you've missed them. So first of all, you can go to the YouTube channel and watch all of them. Just go into the live tab or go to the generative AI news playlist and you'll find all of them there. And normally I put these on Synthedia every week as well. But last week, because of travel and all sorts of other things, the real world got in the way. I actually did not post in Synthedia, our daily newsletter, the Gain show. So tomorrow I'm going to have both this week's and last week's in there. So you'll get two weeks. And what people like about Synthedia, a lot of people love to watch us here, which is great. We love you being here too. But a lot of people just like it because we put all the links to all the stories. So they just like have that as a resource. So you definitely check that out. If you're not signed up for Synthedia, just go to bit .ly forward slash Synthedia and join the newsletter. It's free. Sometimes it's pretty awesome. Sometimes stuff you won't find anywhere else, including some analysis we did this week. And if you are out there in LinkedIn land or YouTube land, give us a shout out and comment. Let us know you're here. We really appreciate that. And please give us a like on whatever platform you're on. Subscribe if you're on YouTube because that helps us for those crazy algorithms. Eric, we've had another really interesting week this week. It's August and we just came out of July, usually slow news, but not at all. So let's start out with the top story of the week. And that is GPT -5. Yes. You wrote about this. It's imminent. It's coming next week. Why do, why is there even a story here about GPT -5? We're just observing GPT -4, which is maybe the most competent, but the slowest of all generative AI chatbots. Yeah. It's kind of funny because GPT -4 came out early on, early this year and fairly soon after where people were already asking about, oh, is GPT -5 also coming? Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI said they are not training it. He said there's no plans at the moment for training it. So people weren't sure what was going to, what sort of timeline there might be for the next iteration. But lo and behold, a couple of weeks ago, OpenAI went ahead and trademarked GPT -5 with the US Patent and Trademark Office for this file, the claim they haven't officially received the trademark yet. And suddenly there's a renewed interest and speculation. There's speculation that the training has actually begun and that it's going to be finished by the end of the year, that GPT -5 may be arriving sooner than anyone might've thought. And with the huge leaps in capacity and functionality from GPT -2 to GPT -3, GPT -3 to GPT -4, there's a lot of excitement slash broad rumor monitoring about what GPT -5 might mean and what it might do to what has already been a very fast moving industry. I like James Poulter's comment that it'll be GPT -4 .2673. Nice call there, James. Appreciate you being here. Shout out to Chris McManus, Michael Novak. Yeah, well, there is a little echo, but hopefully not too bad for most of the folks, particularly those who are listening after because this shows up on the VoiceBot podcast most weeks as well. OK, so GPT -5, great stuff. I don't expect any time soon. All the prognosticators said that GPT -4 was going to come earlier than it wound up coming. We got GPT, we got chat GPT instead, and then GPT -4 came later. They don't need to roll these things out more than once a year. People are still absorbing that. There's barely anybody using the large context window GPT -4, GPT -3 .5 turbo, really popular in the chat applications. I don't see this. I think really the thing that would make me believe that they're going to roll out GPT -5 sooner is if they needed a new foundation model in order to fix the GPT -4 latency problems. Way too slow in response times. Yeah, and it's worth saying that when OpenAI announced that they would start phasing out some of the very old models from their API and in favor of the more recent ones, and there was a bit of an outcry against that. So there's reluctance to let go of older models, let alone jump into something new. So they may not need to move quite as quickly as they might have thought in terms of making sure that their customers are happy with the models available to them. Yeah, and another reason why they might not be focused 100 percent on GPT -5 is apparently they're focused on G3PO. Thanks, Eric, for making some amazing generative AI art here for the Synthetia newsletter. But, you know, if you think about it, we had the memo of the Google, the very famous Google internal memo about Google has no moat. And essentially what that was is about an internal Google researcher talking about that Google OpenAI and don't have any technical moat and that the open source was going to take over because it could be cheaper, it's going to be more performant, all these other types of things.
InTouch - Think STEAM Careers, Podcast with Dr. Olufade
How Important Is Coding and Programming in Today's Job Market?
"So because you're a network engineer and I know when you were in college you did coding and you have a lot of programming knowledge. So how important is coding and programming knowledge in today's job market? What is the potential? How important is it in today's job market? And what advice do you have for young people who want to improve their coding skill? Please. Well, thank you, professor. So in the world of coding itself, I think most of the time the name comes or explains itself, especially to me. With coding, it actually speeds up the process and the scalability of things. For example, now looking at fast forward to 2023, there's Amazon Web Service, AWS, there's Google Cloud and all sorts of different type of like cloud technologies that came about. All of these actually kind of like grew from people that did a lot of programming and coding just because they just wanted to speed up the process. For example, in Amazon, Amazon hasn't been able to come up with a certain set of codes that instead of manually creating accounts for 2000 new employees that you hired last month, there's a set of code that you can actually put in there. All you have to do is get all the employees names listed, feed it to the program or the code that you wrote and then just hit enter. Wow. You could just walk away, come back an hour or two, however long it takes. You are sure that it's always going to be faster than actually sitting down manually creating users. So on that side, we're saving money, we're saving too much longer hours of labor and what have you. Everybody wins at the end of the day. The engineer gets to go home early. The company is actually creating and being efficient and at the end of the day, it's like overall, there's kind of like the efficiency for people to do jobs faster than we used to be. And coding has always been one of the reasons why there's so many technologies that have been innovative. Talk of Tesla, talk of Alexa, all of that technology, you could say the backbone of it was originated from people coding and creating programs.
AP News Radio
Zelenskyy to join G7 at Hiroshima summit as leaders prepare to unveil new Russia sanctions
"G 7 leaders meet to discuss new ways to punish Russia for its 15 month invasion of Ukraine, days before Ukraine president volodymyr zelensky arrives at the summit in person. Zelensky will join leaders of the world's most powerful democracies in Hiroshima, Japan, making his furthest trip from his war torn country, as leaders are set to unveil new sanctions on Russia for its invasion. Alexa danilov, the secretary of Ukraine's national security and defense council confirmed on national television that zelensky would attend to the summit, then in love, said zelensky would be wherever Ukraine needs him, and that important matters will be decided at the summit in Japan. I'm Charles De Ledesma.
The Thrifty Marketer Podcast
Sound Makes You Care: The Power of Audio Branding With Jodi Krangle
"What is audio branding? And is why it important today for business and content creators? Well, it's a good question, but I'm going to give you the definition that the International Sound Awards gives for the definition of audio branding. They've been doing an award show based on this, based on making the world sound better since about 2009, I think. And they define it as a brand sound that represents the identity and values of a brand in a distinctive manner. So, the audio logo or sonic logo, branded functional sounds. So, maybe if your kettle makes a specific sound when it boils or, you know, your washing machine makes a specific sound when it's done, those are branded sounds. Or a brand voice, so a voiceover, you know, the type of music that you use, all of that are characteristic elements of audio branding. So, it's a big umbrella. It's all about the sound that you have to differentiate your company from another one. And the reason that this is so important right now is because a lot of us have, you know, Google Home and Alexa and all of these things in our houses. And we are, we have very busy lives. We're multitasking. We're doing many different things while we're supposedly watching television or watching a stream online or, you know, whatever. A lot of the stuff that we experience right now is only in sound. And if it's only in sound, how do you sound different from your competitor? You kind of need to. Absolutely. Absolutely. Some of our childhood memories are also connected with this jingles or brands. Yes. I remember some in my childhood. Fantastic. Right. So, straightforward question. How can a brand even create a unique and memorable sonic identity? I think that, first of all, if you have the ability, you should work with an audio branding company because that's what they do all day, every day. So, if someone wants a list of some of the ones you can reach out to, I definitely have some ones that I can suggest. But if you're working on a budget and you just want to try and do something on your own, I would say that experiment with sound. I mean, this is all about how things make you feel, how sounds make you feel. So, think about who you are and who your audience is. Who are you trying to reach? And kind of meld those two and figure out if you can show who you are sound -wise to the people who will get you. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's a lot that goes into that and every audio branding company has their own process for doing it, so far be it from me to step on their toes. But the reason that you might want to do this, I mean, there are a lot of reasons that you should be doing this in some aspect, especially if you're a company that expects to make it into the next decade, because this is coming up really fast. Like AI, like all of that synthetic stuff, it's all part and parcel of all of this. And to be unique, you need your own sound. So, it is about differentiating from your competitor. It's about reaching the heart of your audience really quickly because sound does that in an instant and it makes you feel. So, looking at something, you get an idea of what it's about. You don't really, like it doesn't make you care. Do you know what I mean? So, sound makes you care.
The Dan Bongino Show
Kash Patel: Nevada Officials Chose to Delay Vote Counts
"I think a lot of people listening are just wondering what the heck's going on Well listen I'm in Nevada my home state I'm in Vegas I've been out here for Nevada and Arizona a lot on behalf of president Trump's candidates And here's the rundown What most people don't realize about Nevada is it's only a three and a half million vote count And Florida in places like Missouri who are two X three X that plus were able to count their ballots the same day And it's not that Nevada doesn't have that capability or Arizona which is even worse doesn't have it It's the elected officials chose to make it so They chose to have a two week run into the election for mail in ballots They chose to have an extended deadline And what Nevada was specifically problematic for us is a registrar's office in washoe and Clark county those are the two most heavily populated counties in Nevada 85% of the population Called the Alexa campaign on election day and said we are understaffed Literally they said we are understaffed As if they didn't expect the election day to come it's because of these rules that they make up and the current governor just lacking the current state AG and company have allowed these election type scenarios to play out So the mainstream media can perform their disinformation campaigns But where in a really good spot with the numbers and we can get into those if you'd like for lax law
The Voicebot Podcast
"alexa" Discussed on The Voicebot Podcast
"And do you think that part of that part of the reason they can say that is not just the SDK, but because even if it's not, well, because they have Alexa custom assistant, let's just put it on the table. Because they actually have a solution that's designed for other people to customize a voice experience within another environment. I don't know what it is to be honest. I don't know how much of that it's using Alexa customer system. I don't know how much of that is just leveraging the Alexa API, but it's not like Google didn't have that either. Yeah, well, Google doesn't definitely doesn't have that right now. You're angling to get in here. Yeah, I think my tickets, I think it has nothing to do with the Alexa custom assistant. Actually, because everything that I saw was a little Alexa pop up at the bottom of your app, then you could talk to. So I think it's an Alexa widget that you put into your mobile app and they download that with TikTok when was that two years ago, Eric? Yes, yes. So but I think that that predated Alexa custom assistant. I think it's the same tech. I think it's the same stack in order to do what they were doing in the SDK for TikTok or for any mobile app provider was essentially the same thing that they had to do to create custom assistant because you're basically you just abstracting it and you're allowing people to run it in a different environment. Yeah, it'll be interesting because I've kind of had an inside look at a custom assistant and it's not. And you're saying you're saying I'm wrong. So I'm reserving judgment until I get more information. Well, you're an Alexa champion. You probably have the hotline. Well, it was more through work than it was through. Because rain, obviously, building custom assistance for Tesla's workers, member of voice interoperability initiative, you're in. We're definitely looking at custom assistance in a bigger way. Okay, cool. All right, what do you have? Something you'd like to point out or that they talked about or they didn't talk about. Okay, so I'll do one of each really quickly. So one thing that they did talk about that we need to check out more is voice forward account linking. Before it was only log in with Amazon and now you can use custom OAuth providers. Yes. So that will be interesting. What my understanding is is that you will not have to go to your Alexa app to do the account linking, it's voice forward, but I think they're still going to be send a code to your phone and then you're still going to pick up the demo showed a pin sent to your phone, yeah. But that is so much better than account linking. So well, I would just say, okay, fine. But I'd say the voice for it account linking was very painful to watch. It looked like because of the use case. It's like, the guy's like, turn on sleep sounds. Like he wants to take a nap. And then it's like, would you like to do an account links? I don't have to bother you again. Oh, sure. And then it was like 5 routines later. But I think I'm hopefully if it's like a count linking is that you only have to do it once. So that is absolutely true, but that guy lost his opportunity to have a now. Yeah. I feel bad for him. But his next nap is going to be better. I just have a feeling that if they would do it more like slack does the magic links. And they just say, you want this? Pop a magic link up is an SMS to you. You hit it. You just two taps you're done. Why have a conversation about that? That is a perfect example. If you're already sending something to the phone, then why don't you just send a link that would go in. So the thing that they didn't talk about, that in the past, well, with the echo show 15, there is a concept of widgets and there hasn't been anything talked about widgets in this one. So that would be interesting to see what happens with that coming. Ellen doesn't care about widgets. Right now, I will. I think it depends. I'm more interested in the output form of widgets than the input form of widgets. You're a widget zealot from what I can.
"You're In Charge: Conversation that Spark Change" with Glenn Pasch
"alexa" Discussed on "You're In Charge: Conversation that Spark Change" with Glenn Pasch
"So that idea of whatever your personal beliefs are. And I think that's such a great point to, as we wrap this up, is whatever your personal point of view is, that's yours. That's your personal thing, but your employed by someone, and you're trying to market your product and service to who your audience is. So know your audience, have a message. But again, where we started was make sure that everyone's included. You know, make your content accessible, not just accessible, like you're saying in reading or an image, think beyond that. What if somebody can't see this? What if the font is too small? What if captions are better than audio? Well, you know, all of these different things versus just more content more content more content. I'd rather see great content for everyone. Less of it than more and more that is cutting out a certain portion of the population. Yes, I totally agree. It's quality over quantity. And it takes time, and that's one of the things that, as I said earlier, I think a lot of people forget, I, though, would challenge to say that it probably doesn't take any more time if it's part of your process and you just say, well, I'm going to take care of it. As you said, I don't need to write a novel for the image unless it dictates that, but very few images need all of these things. It's just very clear. Okay, so listen, first off, I want to thank you for being here. This is great conversation. And I love the fact that you shared some really tactical things. And as I said, we're going to set it up in the show notes, but I highly recommend Alexa's book on accessible social. It's easy read, but it's tactical. It's great. I showed it to a couple of people and they were quotes, I didn't realize that I was not doing this because they were still stuck in the let me just all tag it.
"You're In Charge: Conversation that Spark Change" with Glenn Pasch
"alexa" Discussed on "You're In Charge: Conversation that Spark Change" with Glenn Pasch
"What is accessible social media? Now for many of you, you're saying, well, I see social media all the time. So I have access to it. But what if you really thought about those people that may have a disability? Maybe they're visually impaired. Maybe they're using a device to read the content by using an E reader pen or maybe captions or maybe the descriptions on your pictures aren't rich enough so that they understand what that content is. So some of your marketing is missing. Its audience because you haven't thought of how to create the content for those devices or for those individuals. So today, I brought Alexa Heinrich. She is a digital marketing, manager, a
Fresh Perspective
What is going on?: The Ultimatum S1 - burst 02
"Yeah, I think it was that she wanted to wait until they were engaged to move in and he was like, I think not on the same page and that one. I think he wanted to live in. Which I think not wanting to move in before your engage is the one time I felt like Alexis said anything semi reasonable, purely because I think it would be so messy to move in with a boyfriend and then we break up, you know? If you've already put a ring on it, it's a lot cleaner. You probably won't be moving out. So I agreed with Alexis on that. Everything else she said, I was like, I might be a misogynist. Women hating women. I don't know what's happening to me. So I was talking to someone about this show and they brought up a really good point about Alexis. That Netflix has the same archetype of person on every season. So like, love is blind like Shana. Yeah. Like they're very similar. Season one had a Shana too who's also an Alexis of love is blind. No, it's just like the same person over and over again. Their goal in having a machine or a Lexus worked a lot better than love is blind since trainers until the very end. Right. But I mean, in Alexa, this case, she was out of there episode two, basically.
Fresh Perspective
What is going on?: The Ultimatum S1 - burst 02
"Which I think not wanting to move in before your engage is the one time I felt like Alexis said anything semi reasonable, purely because I think it would be so messy to move in with a boyfriend and then we break up, you know? If you've already put a ring on it, it's a lot cleaner. You probably won't be moving out. So I agreed with Alexis on that. Everything else she said, I was like, I might be a misogynist. Women hating women. I don't know what's happening to me. So I was talking to someone about this show and they brought up a really good point about Alexis. That Netflix has the same archetype of person on every season. So like, love is blind like Shana. Yeah. Like they're very similar. Season one had a Shana too who's also an Alexis of love is blind. No, it's just like the same person over and over again. Their goal in having a machine or a Lexus worked a lot better than love is blind since trainers until the very end. Right. But I mean, in Alexa, this case, she was out of there episode two, basically.
Fresh Perspective
What is going on?: The Ultimatum S1 - burst 02
"Oh, and that was another thing with them, that they hadn't moved in together, and he was like offering that or something. She wanted to wait until they were engaged, I think, right? Okay. I don't remember exactly if it was what it was, but there was an issue with them not living together. Yeah, I think it was that she wanted to wait until they were engaged to move in and he was like, I think not on the same page and that one. I think he wanted to live in. Which I think not wanting to move in before your engage is the one time I felt like Alexis said anything semi reasonable, purely because I think it would be so messy to move in with a boyfriend and then we break up, you know? If you've already put a ring on it, it's a lot cleaner. You probably won't be moving out. So I agreed with Alexis on that. Everything else she said, I was like, I might be a misogynist. Women hating women. I don't know what's happening to me. So I was talking to someone about this show and they brought up a really good point about Alexis. That Netflix has the same archetype of person on every season. So like, love is blind like Shana. Yeah. Like they're very similar. Season one had a Shana too who's also an Alexis of love is blind. No, it's just like the same person over and over again. Their goal in having a machine or a Lexus worked a lot better than love is blind since trainers until the very end. Right. But I mean, in Alexa, this case, she was out of there episode two,
DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"alexa" Discussed on DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"Honor. We have root in the room. Cape Calvert of here, he said, asphalt. Cascading. You're intangible as bring people here. Well, you told me to kick him. So I did. Come on. Don't follow the roots of the balls, man. Come on, I said you were my friend. Mercy, please. Come on, bob. Come on, Bobby. Oh no, you're not, you're safe. Oh no, you're not saying you're a Steven. Oh no, you're I'm Zoe. Ouch. Alexa, I'm sorry. Okay, let me invite some people to the party. Have you had some drinks? Because this might be interesting. No, I actually just went to the grocery store, I'm driving home and I'm probably have some drinks when I get home though. Okay, yeah, I should go buy a Corona and then show you the part. And I need to get it by the way. Why are these old people so shy that they don't request a microphone? This is interesting. Come on don't be shy. If not a taboo. Maybe it's the cybersecurity and cyber sex that makes them, you know, wonder. That came in here. I don't know. Well, if I mean, keep the horror minds open. Never say never. You never know. I'm sorry, but I can't keep doing that. Alexa, what is cyber sex? It's okay. So at the. End. So the couple. Did you say Pete? Alexa, what is cyber sex? Announce cyber sex is usually defined as any sexual activity, display, or discussion engaged in by means of a computer. Hello. Nice to meet you. Are you got the voice cover thing that's hello? Hello, hello. Here we go. They were. Hello, baby. We take it to the top again. And. So are you using are you using the voice modulator that's in the thingy? Do you know KPop? I do know KPop. Oh, what's your what is your.
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Hey, hope you're doing well. It's Terry here. I think it was last week or the week before I mentioned that there was a job open for a developer with the Lexi team in Vancouver. Well, I want to tell you about another job that I came across. The title of this job is software development engineer Lexi, ALEXA games engineering. And this is also going to be based out of Vancouver. The job description, I want to read this out to you. Do you love games? Do you like working in the startup environment? Do you want to be on the cutting edge of voice first games and entertainment? Join us and you'll have the power of Amazon's tools and technology, including Lexi, fire TV, AWS and more to shape the future of gaming. So there you go. If you are a developer and you're interested in Lexi and games, then this looks like a great opportunity. A little bit more. It says that the Lexi games team mission is to bring the best gaming experiences to Lexi customers on all Lexi enabled devices. You'll join a small early stage team for a new strategic strategic initiative focused on the intersection of Lexi video games and gaming consoles, which is actually very interesting to me. I wonder how the gaming console is going to come into play. Anyway, if you are interested in that, I found this job on LinkedIn. But if you search for software development engineer, ALEXA gains engineering, you will certainly find it. And good luck to you. If you are applying for this job, sounds like a lot of fun. And by the way, if you do grab one of these jobs, or if you get one of these jobs and I'd love to hear about it, just hit me up on Twitter. Doctor Terry Fisher, DR, TE, RI, FISH, ER. All right, have a great day..
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Hey Terry here, happy Monday. Hope you're a week is off to a great start. I want to tell you about a new feature that I discovered in the Lexi app today. And this is the ability to text Lexi now. So you don't have to speak to if you'd rather text her. And there might be various reasons for that, perhaps you are somewhere where you don't want to speak out loud and you just want to type in a question and get a quick answer. You can now do that. And the way that you do that is you go into your Lexi app and you assume you have the latest version of the app. So you do have to download the latest version of the app. And once you've done that, when you go into the app, you'll see in the top left corner a little keyboard icon. You click on that. And then you can see that it says, at least for mine, it says hi, Lexie here. Happy to help ask me anything or search the app. So you can start to type in things. You can say, for example, what time is sunrise? And she'll give you the response. You can say things like cancel Mike timer. And then she will tell you if there are no timer set or which timer she cancels. And it also takes you to other areas of the app. So for example, a box came up that said to view the timers when I asked about canceling a timer. So there you go. Interesting. I guess we'll have to see how this plays out and what the use cases are for. But nevertheless, you can now talk or text to Lexi and get your responses right in the app. So give it a shot, see what you think. And there we are. All right, I'll be back again tomorrow with.
The Mason Minute
Internet Of Things (MM #3925)
"The NASA minute. With Kevin mason. We hear people talk about the Internet of Things all the time, but most people still don't know what it means or what we're talking about. Basically the Internet of Things is what connects our smart devices, if you will, with the Internet in the cloud, usually by a service from Amazon called AWS. You may have heard about AWS recently because a lot of websites were down because AWS was having problems on the West Coast. That also meant some of your Internet services, some of your connected technology was down as well, and that's a problem. Not only for some of the work I do, some of those services that we use web based cloud based services, they were down for a day and a half, but all of my smart devices were down as well. And when you're connected with a garage door, with a front door lock, with smart plugs, with your smart devices, like Alexa, and like Google. And all those things that are connected to it, they're down, you have major problems. The Internet of Things is something that people have been talking about for years, and we're getting closer and closer to having it work. But when it doesn't, you're literally hobbled.
The Mason Minute
Internet Of Things (MM #3925)
"The NASA minute. With Kevin mason. We hear people talk about the Internet of Things all the time, but most people still don't know what it means or what we're talking about. Basically the Internet of Things is what connects our smart devices, if you will, with the Internet in the cloud, usually by a service from Amazon called AWS. You may have heard about AWS recently because a lot of websites were down because AWS was having problems on the West Coast. That also meant some of your Internet services, some of your connected technology was down as well, and that's a problem. Not only for some of the work I do, some of those services that we use web based cloud based services, they were down for a day and a half, but all of my smart devices were down as well. And when you're connected with a garage door, with a front door lock, with smart plugs, with your smart devices, like Alexa, and like Google. And all those things that are connected to it, they're down, you have major problems. The Internet of Things is something that people have been talking about for years, and we're getting closer and closer to having it work. But when it doesn't, you're literally hobbled.
VUX World
"alexa" Discussed on VUX World
"So we have these black boxes and we have many of them, but we still have to understand what's behind. Yeah. Interesting. So when you saw during the Alexa prize then you don't get any access to any additional tooling that you actually got access to confidence scores. So when you do these speech recognition, the last step of speech recognition is estimating the right sentence and for every I would simplify the explanation for every word in a sentence you have a list of candidates and dependents have certain confidence score. So you can play with these confidence scores to select slightly different exchange to three words in a sentence instead of using the top ranking sentence the speech or is returning you and I believe that also the model the ASR model was fine tuned for organization instead of fine tuning it for question answering. I don't know the exact details because this is something what we had actually Amazon was helping us. We during the development, we have every week a call during that call. We spoke with people who are in the process of developing Alex applications and we were exchanging views, they were helping us with onshore certain questions. We are in doubts and certainly many teams are very happy with getting help, how to run AWS also Amazon at four OD participants. They are own system, which was different and would customers get and this system was wrapping up various algorithms from developed in Amazon, which on these algorithms are working people from research. We have not used almost anything out of it because we have been running it completely on our own platform. We have developed this is the technology base and the office is running home based technology based, which certainly was also running in AW and own AWS servers. Interesting. So that'll be floor storm, honestly, which is correct. So we'll get to flos down we'll try about that in a second, but before we go to that, I just wanted to kind of round up on this process because as we mentioned, Amazon Alexa was already fairly good and Siri and Google and actually getting better all the time..
VUX World
"alexa" Discussed on VUX World
"So this is not a goal oriented application like for a bank that goal is to figure out what is on your banking account or do some transfer or whatever and then that's it you are finished. Our board is both where we don't know what the user wants to talk about ahead because there are lots of topics like sports celebrities politics, joke of the day and you name it. The spread of topics is N plus. So we have to be able to handle everything as simply we don't handle everything because if you start the discussion asking about parachuting or crocodiles, you can imagine that this is giving us hard time but these days we have in our system already these generate out transformer base neural networks and we handle even these very tricky questions or very tricky opening sentences and we somehow get away reasonably well. Interesting. So the end from Amazon's point of view, I can see what the trajectory is for them. Chandra was mentioned in that a lot of things that came out of the Alexa prize have actually ended up being incorporated into some of the car technology in the Alexa platform, like Alexa conversations, apparently came out of the Alexa prize. And so it's definitely aligned with Amazon's, I suppose, goal of having Alexa be yes, your assistant, but also your kind of companion, I suppose, a thing that you build trust in and over time if you trust it, you'll end up ultimately shopping on it, but more than that as well. Absolutely. That is Alexa and the other one is Google Home or harp or whatever they call some strange name. I don't know why hop. And basically both of these on each of these team has a slightly different target because obviously Amazon is ecommerce and they'd like to sell. And Google wants to have as many customers as possible..
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Hey there, Terry here. I've got some really interesting news for you today, particularly for all of you PC users. How would you like it if you could turn your entire PC display into an echo device and talk to Lexi? Well, you can now just brand new. It was just announced a couple of weeks ago on November 11th to be exact. Amazon announced the expansion of show mode, which is a voice first interactive Lexi experience for compatible Windows 10 and 11 PCs. What you do is you download the specific app if you don't have it built into your PC already. And then once you've done that, you say Lexi open show mode. And you can watch it magically turn into a smart display. Just like an echo show when it is idle. Now, in addition to launching it when you say that command, you can also customize and choose a specific PC idle time to automatically launch show mode, almost like a screensaver. And that can be chosen when you're enabling the feature or through the app settings at a later time. So here's what you need to know. You need to go to this website. Amazon.com slash ALEXA four PC. I don't want to say the works. I don't want to trigger your device. But Amazon.com slash and then all one word, ALEXA for PC, then you download the app and you can use your PC as an echo device. I think it's fantastic. I don't have a PC. So I would love love to get feedback from the community when you try this and tell me what it's like. Hit me up on Twitter. As always, doctor Terry Fisher, DR TE, FIS ATR, and I would love to hear about how you're using your PC as an echo device. All right, enjoy have fun with that and.
The Mason Minute
Alter Ego (MM #3888)
"The mason minute. With Kevin mason yesterday I was talking about avatars. If you've seen the new Fox TV show called alter ego, you get some sense of what avatars are. Now, in this case, it's not your normal business avatar where you walk into McDonald's and it takes your order. It's about somebody becoming somebody else. Somebody who sings in the background and thanks to technology can become something else on the screen. Alter ego is a good look into what AI based avatar technology is about to become. AI powered avatars are about to take over many tasks that most people don't want to do anymore. Most people don't want to handle how easy is it to find a banker, a real estate agent in the middle of the night, getting somebody to help you with just menial things. The menial service industry task that nobody wants to pay for, nobody wants to do if you can have a smartphone or a computer screen, or a jumbotron at a concert, you can see AI happening. Imagine Siri or Alexa or even Google Assistant with a face that can talk back to you and interact with you. It's coming, and alter ego the TV show on Fox is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Mason Minute
Alter Ego (MM #3888)
"The mason minute. With Kevin mason yesterday I was talking about avatars. If you've seen the new Fox TV show called alter ego, you get some sense of what avatars are. Now, in this case, it's not your normal business avatar where you walk into McDonald's and it takes your order. It's about somebody becoming somebody else. Somebody who sings in the background and thanks to technology can become something else on the screen. Alter ego is a good look into what AI based avatar technology is about to become. AI powered avatars are about to take over many tasks that most people don't want to do anymore. Most people don't want to handle how easy is it to find a banker, a real estate agent in the middle of the night, getting somebody to help you with just menial things. The menial service industry task that nobody wants to pay for, nobody wants to do if you can have a smartphone or a computer screen, or a jumbotron at a concert, you can see AI happening. Imagine Siri or Alexa or even Google Assistant with a face that can talk back to you and interact with you. It's coming, and alter ego the TV show on Fox is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Mason Minute
Please And Thank You (MM #3884)
"The mason minute. With Kevin mason. I was reading an interesting story the other day about people suggesting we say please and thank you when talking with our personal assistants. You know our Google Assistant are Amazon Alexa because it teaches good manners especially to children. I'll be honest with you, I'd never thought about it. It's a machine. I'm not talking to a human being. There's nothing to be courteous too. It's a machine. It doesn't know any better. I don't use please and thank you. Never even thought of using please and thank you. And it's very interesting to think about, do we need to start doing that? Especially when around kids because manners and courtesy are very important and obviously our world has a problem with that right now. About being courteous about respecting others, I guess Google and Amazon could have suggested we do that. They could have rewarded us for doing that, but they don't. I don't think they ever thought about it either. But it's an interesting thought process. It came out of England first and it's starting to spread across the world. Should we start saying please and thank you to our personal assistants, even though they're just machines, something definitely worth thinking about, because manners are sorely lacking these days
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Biggest thing from that standpoint. And then in terms of also once the once the setup is done, being able to kind of evolve and learn from it from that standpoint. So we do a lot of bookmarking and saving history and those sort of things when we're actually dealing with devices and stuff. But the fact that you can be told can ask me about the weather or things like that and it allows for encourages experimentation. I think I should say, because it's easier to experiment as compared to some of the other devices where suddenly you've done something and now your backgrounds turned on black or your icons have become really large and you don't know how to move back. It's a lot easier to experiment or to encourage experimentation with their voice enabled device. Oh, that's great. That's great. And Emily? Yeah, I think on my end, the biggest revelation I thought was just sort of our user use cases, the personas of the folks that we were giving these two because I think we realized in the pilot that the seniors that maybe had a lot of devices already, they weren't necessarily the best candidates for this one. Some of them were the ones who truly understood the purpose of it. But we had folks who had never had a device before who were like, wow, you know, this opens my world. And I can do all these kinds of things. So I think it was just sort of the context setting and being able to explain why this device will help you do better things than do things better than another device because obviously, you know, you're not getting an Alexa to help you write emails or those types of tasks. And so if you don't really articulate exactly the things that it's going to make their life better, how it's going to make their life better. It just doesn't, they're like, you know, why are you giving me this random thing? It has to be very clearly explained and when you give them the full context of why this is useful, all of a sudden it all clicks and it becomes a marvelous gift as opposed to something that's kind of vaguely confusing and not necessarily useful. Well, that's great. I mean, this is so exciting as you can guess and if your listeners know, I mean, I'm just such a huge performer for voice technology and this is just such a great example of it. Where are we at now? So I'm sure a lot of listeners viewers are thinking, wow, this sounds this sounds great. Can I get involved? What's the deal? So can you maybe just kind of give us the status? What's the deal right now with the program and can they get involved? Where are you at? Emily? Yeah, so we've awarded nearly all of the batches. I think we might have one batch left to give out to a senior organization..
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Used some images and mobile device management software that we can then reconfigure devices, whether they be tablets, or laptops, but we can all of the pre installed setup already be there. And sometimes that also allows us to when you want a particular application or program be installed. We can begin then remotely push that. With Amazon Alexa, we are not there yet, but we've kind of we do train the trainer as Emily had mentioned. And given the fact that it's quite simple to set up as compared to a tablet, it makes it it makes it a lot easier to then operationalize that delivery model. And go ahead. Definitely are, oh, sorry. Can you hear me okay? Yes, please, please go ahead, yes. Okay. Yeah, I was going to say to our mentors have so much experience at explaining things to people over the phone that even for our pilot part of this program, we worked with 14 seniors to start. Our mentors pretty much had it down so that they could help, even if the senior didn't have access to zoom or another video conferencing platform, they knew things so well that they could just help them on their landline or whatever it was that they were working with. So I think that that's something that we always try to make sure that our mentors are so comfortable with it that they can pretty much do it in their sleep. Go at it, right. No, that's great. So I would love to hear some stories about people that are using these devices. How is it affecting their lives? Emily, can you share some stories about now like the results of this program and the way people are using these equi devices? For sure, yeah. So we're right at the we're kind of at the end of the pilot right now and starting the big part of the program, the mass deployment part. So I know we're going to have a whole ton more stories, but even from the pilot, there were some things that really touched me. One of our recipients was a long-term care home. And one of the seniors in the long-term care home, they reported back that senior was using Alexa to change the music to match the culture of the PSW who would come in in the morning and help the senior get ready..
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Hey there carrie fisher here with your flash briefing. And this isn't very interesting story. That i came across and it is sort of indirectly related to like. But i want to tell you that because it's fascinating. I'd love to hear your take on this if you're not connected with me on twitter then encouraged to do so and share your thoughts. My twitter handle is Dr terry fisher d. r. t. e. r. i. Fisher here's the here's the deal. I'm just gonna read the headline here. That i found on the internet and the headline says lax. Lexi ghost bond could let relatives speak to their dead loved ones by using artificial intelligence to create realistic replies using their old letters social media posts and videos. So what are the first things that come to mind with that. That is fascinating. Basically the story goes on to say that microsoft has applied for a patent that would basically as they put it in the article digitally reincarnate deceased people and would allow living relatives to interact with loved ones from beyond the grave. And why this is relevant to lexi is that it says that the technology could work with smart speakers such as lexi or google nest. So what do you think of that. Previously interviewed james who's This co founder of hereafter. Who is helping to digitally Record stories told by a person who is alive so that those stories can later be called back wants. That person has deceased but this is different. This is talking about creating an avatar if you will of a deceased person based on stuff on the internet about them so will see we'll see what happens with i would love to hear your feedback on this. Let me know. Dr terry fisher. Dart r. i f. i. s. h. e. r. on twitter. And i look forward to hearing from you. Okay have a good day tomorrow. Recast dot fm..
KTOK
"alexa" Discussed on KTOK
"Alexa, a shooting at a nightclub has left one person dead. Six other people are hurt. That's according to authorities in Phoenix. The shooting took place early this morning. The injured were rushed to the hospital. There's no word on any suspects. Sometime. Big Tech has been accused of silencing conservative voices, most notably President Trump, who's been banned by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. House Republican Devin Nunes tells Fox is Waters World the big tech firms Service arms of the Democratic Party. This is not new to them. They've been doing this not just to people like me for many years and other members of Congress. They've been nuking people left and right over the last few years, people that ultimately that they can get away with it. Twitter has defended its ban of the president. The company says it faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance following the capital riot. Another new find in our solar system. NASA has discovered an FM signal emanating from one of Jupiter's moons, as part of the Juno mission would have to planetary discovery missions, with scientists saying that Judah was traveling across the polar region of Jupiter into magnetic field lines when it crossed the radio source That's similar to what we know here on Earth is WiFi Scientist City signal Well, fascinating is more of a natural function and not an indication of extraterrestrial life. If scientists have known about radio waves on Jupiter's since the mid 19 fifties, though this is the first time the phenomenon has ever been emanating from one of the planet's moons. Jeff Manasso Fox News, a setback for NASA and its efforts to bring astronauts back to the moon yesterday during a critical test of a new rocket. The four engines fired up but then abruptly shut down. What's being called a major component failure was detected, but it's unclear exactly what went wrong. I'm camp yourself. And this is Fox News..
Alexa in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Alexa in Canada
"The <Speech_Male> <Silence> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Male> <Advertisement> white house <Speech_Male> or <Speech_Male> the <Speech_Male> stanford university involved <Silence> however <Speech_Male> if that <Speech_Male> was for you <Speech_Male> a game changer <Speech_Male> like if this individual <Speech_Male> this organization got <Speech_Male> involved with us <Speech_Male> than we could accelerate <Speech_Male> by three <Speech_Male> months or three years <Speech_Male> our end goal <Speech_Male> of developing standards <Speech_Male> and things of that <Speech_Male> nature. 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This is the future <Speech_Male> and we need <Speech_Male> to have it open <Speech_Male> and inclusive <Speech_Male> and <Speech_Male> enabling choice <Silence> and <SpeakerChange> trustworthy. <Speech_Male> Because <Speech_Male> that's where we <Speech_Male> need to be <Speech_Male> to help a step <Speech_Male> up to its <Speech_Male> basic bookseller <Speech_Male> at the research <Silence> <Speech_Male> and then <Speech_Male> good people. <Speech_Male> Many of whom. I mentioned <Speech_Male> the great people like usa. <Speech_Male> Hey <Speech_Male> work <Speech_Male> we lend a hand <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> Let's talk about this <Speech_Male> whole issue <Speech_Male> of making <Speech_Male> voice worthy of user. <Speech_Male> Trust so <Speech_Male> terry in. Thank <Speech_Male> you probably at the end of <Speech_Male> my time but <Speech_Male> really <SpeakerChange> appreciate <Speech_Male> this. 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That website <Speech_Male> will list up <Speech_Male> committees and the communities <Silence> that we've got <Speech_Male> going <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> Or <Speech_Male> just reach out to <Silence> me directly linked in <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> email <Speech_Male> phone call. I'm <Speech_Male> all it's <Speech_Male> all all the details <Silence> on linked <SpeakerChange> in <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> We're looking for the best <Speech_Male> people. We're looking for the <Speech_Male> best brains. We're looking <Speech_Male> committed people <Speech_Male> and if <Speech_Male> that fits your <Speech_Male> profile. <Silence> I want <SpeakerChange> to hear from you <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> wonderful. <Speech_Male> Well thank you. So <Speech_Male> much. John <Speech_Music_Male> for
Alexa in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Alexa in Canada
"What should they tell their corporate counsel when they're thinking about this. These are the guidelines we could or should follow. Is there a neutral platform. Agnostic approach again with great respect what the platforms have done and again applause learning from them but the future world of independent voice assistance independent conversational agents will need a neutral third party guidance. And we've been told us repeatedly from other standards bodies Talking with some calling is a genus one on you know them as the standards body or convert a longtime friends advisors and. They said john if you address one issue. It's the issue of privacy from in neutral third party perspective learn from the platforms. Learn from all understand what you have to respect in gdp are cpa etc of course but with them. There's also then the trust. An enterprise user is my brand protected. Critical you know critical is my brand protected. Kenner register my brand somewhere in. No it's protected worldwide or certainly across. Us and western europe. So we're looking at you know. Can we create a kind of a destination registry right explicit requests locals. You know again. That's part of trust helping figure out some of the common very basic processes of transactions. Do we all know how to transact over boys. Well if everyone's doing it differently there's a lack of trust. I feel stupid. I'm not going to do so. Trust is multifaceted thing. I've touched on just a few. I'm talking too much. You're terry in. I'm sorry but you know it's a multifaceted effort and we're trying to approach from a liberal percents. Yeah absolutely one i'd i. I'm just looking at the time. I wanna be respectful of your time. And so i wanna i wanna i know that We've got a certain amount of time here. And i really doesn't do it. Justice what i'm trying to say is i mean there's so much that we could be speaking about here and the bottom line is going to have to have you back on shows and interviews my podcast. That sort of stuff because we're just scraping the surface here. I know in with that in mind that we are running a little bit short on time. Any sort of final comments or questions for john. Well i guess the final question i would ask is if you could have any individual or organization involved. That is not involved today. Who might that be. And the reason. I'm asking that question is there's probably not a lot of people watching us live. But there's the ability for people to watch the archive and so there's an unlimited audience that we could have for this brief conversation. You may not have access to get mark. Cuban or gary bainer chuck involved you not have access to get.
Alexa in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Alexa in Canada
"You doing such incredible work and for those that. I'm a a lot of people voice. You're very familiar with the work that you're doing but can we kinda just kind of take backwards here and just for the moment for those you know are keen voice enthusiasts but maybe don't realize this whole open voice network in an incredible team assembled what is the open voice network. What what what is the mission. And how did this begin. We'll let me answer it on several several levels -tarian and thanks for the great question at a very tactical level. We are a nonprofit world directly fund of the lyrics foundation. We use their shared services. And we're a neutral body. That's dedicated developing standards in use at guts. So that's at the tactical level. You know the kind of thing that's going to be on corporation charged at the larger. I think most important it's answering. It's a it's a group a group of volunteers. Hey and you're all welcome. Hey come on in. Because there's a lot of room in the pond here. This is a group taking a look at an asking the big question. What kind of voice industry we want here in three to five years. There's an awful lot of change on. There's an awful lot of technology development. There's an awful lot of this as an awful lot of that. There's governments and regulation and new usage and all that but really truly. What world of voice do we want in three to five years and it's the individuals in the voice world. Those of you listening you. It's your future customers and clients individuals who may not even be thinking about voice today but down the road. They're going to need to interact with their customers. Their clients or patients in those people want to use voice. It's the platforms. it's the innovators. Its developers the designers strategists. What world want a voice and terry and in i think it's you can talk about standards and i could talk about standards for days probably or usage guidelines but ultimately. I think it comes down to this very important. Very important vision for the open voice network. Can we make voice. Can we make voice worthy of user trust users those who consumed voice those who use voice those who seem voice as a tool for their business. Those who are developing voice those who are driving voice in platforms. Can we make voice worthy of user. Trust it's a loaded question with a lot of answers. Goes well beyond privacy. But that's what we're aiming toward. That's the vision.
Voice in Canada
"alexa" Discussed on Voice in Canada
"Help you learn more about your lexi devices. And the quickest way to get you to what they're calling the lexi hub or the l. e. x. A hub is to simply go to voice in canada dot ca slash a. l. e. x. A hub a. l. e. x. ahe b. and when you type that in you'll be taken directly to an to an amazon site where they have assembled some really great resources when it comes to learning how to use your your your lexi device so i encourage you to check that out. I will also be bringing some of the best tips and tricks that i find on that on that site to you through this flash briefing so if you don't get a chance to that website or you preferred to listen to the forest briefing then having fear. I will do that here as well. But if you wanna have a look then like. I say the best way to go with that hub is voice candidate dot ca slash a. l. e. x. eight gb for the word hub. All right. i want to finish off today with a shoutout to another person. Left a review for this flash briefing. This one is from lorne sutherland. and lauren. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. It is really appreciated. gives it five stars in short and sweet daily briefing. Listen to the briefing daily to stay informed and it is usually very helpful. Thanks hey lauren. I appreciate that. I'm going to try to work on the part in. Try to make it always helpful. But i nevertheless of course i really really appreciate you leaving this review so thank you so much. Lauren and I know it's always fun to To give up these shots and to recognize the people that take the time to review so again thanks so much lorne if anybody else would love to lee review then i appreciate that very much as well. It helps to be found. And the way you do that is simply go to voice in canada dot ca slash review and it takes you right to their view all right. I think that's it for today. Have a wonderful rest of your day. And i will talk to you again. Tomorrow take care..