Posts Tagged: beyond

MediaTek’s RedCap solution aims to bring 5G speeds to IoT devices in the home and beyond

Connected devices in the home are great for convenience and adding ways to make life both more confortable and feature rich. IoT devices, as they are called, is in the process of benefiting from a huge boost in performance thanks to MediaTek’s new RedCap T300 and M60 5G Modem IP solution which brings 5G speeds […]

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12 podcasts to listen to during Black History Month and beyond

Take a deep dive into racial disparity, adversity, empowerment, and Black history and culture with our pick of podcasts to listen to for Black History Month.
Digital Trends

Amazon’s new pitch: let Alexa speak as your relatives from beyond the grave

At Amazon’s Re:Mars conference, Alexa’s senior vice-president Rohit Prasad exhibited a startling new voice assistant capability: the supposed ability to mimic voices. So far, there's no timeline whatsoever as to when or if this feature will be released to the public.

Stranger still, Amazon framed this copycatting ability as a way to commemorate lost loved ones. It played a demonstration video in which Alexa read to a child in the voice of his recently deceased grandmother. Prasad stressed that the company was seeking ways to make AI as personal as possible. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, he said, "it can definitely make the memories last.” An Amazon spokesperson told Engadget that the new skill can create a synthetic voiceprint after being trained on as little as a minute of audio of the individual it's supposed to be replicating.

Security experts have long held concerns that deep fake audio tools, which use text-to-speech technology to create synthetic voices, would pave the way for a flood of new scams. Voice cloning software has enabled a number of crimes, such as a 2020 incident in the United Arab Emirates where fraudsters fooled a bank manager into transferring $ 35 million after they impersonated a company director. But deep fake audio crimes are still relatively unusual, and the tools available to scammers are, for now, relatively primitive.

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Google will expand the usefulness of voice commands beyond Android phones

Google has helped app creators make better use of Assistant voice commands over time, but its longstanding Conversational Actions framework for those commands has had its limits. It's primarily meant for conventional Android mobile devices, and it's voice-only — the technology won't help much on your smartwatch, or when you need some on-screen interaction. The company is taking steps to make voice control more useful across all its platforms, though. It's expanding the App Actions framework to be more helpful for the entire Android ecosystem, and it's phasing out the old system in the process.

The company is in the midst of integrating App Actions across all Android-based platforms, including automotive platforms and wearables. Assistant can now point you to the relevant apps for a given command even when you don't mention an app's name, or when you're looking for the right software in "All Apps" on a Pixel 6. And if you don't have the app necessary for a command, you'll be taken to the appropriate Play Store page. These will help developers by boosting demand for their apps, of course, but they'll also help you focus on accomplishing tasks rather than crafting the exact phrase you need.

Developers will have a strong incentive to embrace the newer technology. Google is sunsetting Conversational Actions in June 2023, and plans to "turn down" features like console analytics at that point. The extra year will give app producers the time to learn App Actions and otherwise transition away from the earlier approach.

You might have seen this shift coming. Conversational Actions was introduced five years ago, only to be supplemented by App Actions (in an initially limited form) in 2019 — Google has been priming itself for a handover like this for a while. And with Google committing to major expansions of platforms like Android Auto and Wear OS, upgraded voice functionality is that much more important for the company.

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Google’s Phone app expanding support beyond Nexus and Pixel devices

Google has begun allowing select devices from other OEMs to install their Phone dialer app from the Play Store, the latest service they have slowly started opening up. At this point the release cadence for new smart services that Google develops seems pretty clear – they announce and typically launch their new Assistant feature, or […]

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‘PUBG’ moves beyond battle royale with War Mode

The PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds team is now clearer about their plans to add game modes beyond the signature battle royale and zombie games. The developer has revealed that it's experimenting with a War Mode that behaves more like the conventional…
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The Galaxy S9+ vs. the competition: Beyond the dual cameras

This year's bigger Galaxy handset focuses on its picture-taking capabilities: The S9+ is Samsung's first flagship with a dual camera, which brings it in line with competing phones like the Pixel 2 XL as well as its sibling Galaxy Note 8. There's also…
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BioLite’s FirePit goes beyond the camping grill

Relaxing and staring at fire is a primordial pleasure, but one that's often isolated to camping trips. It also inevitably leads to burger and hot dog cravings. While your average campfire — a flaming stack of logs surrounded by rocks or rusty metal…
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Microsoft’s design rules push Windows ‘beyond mere rectangles’

Microsoft's Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 might have an ironically uncreative name, but the upgrade itself is flush with artistic potential and useful features. It will give users a timeline to manage complex work sessions, APIs that tie all of…
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Weekly Rewind: Insane stunt pilot lady, life beyond Earth, $700 self-driving car

In the tech world, a lot happens in a week. So much news goes on that it’s almost impossible for mere mortals with real lives to keep track of it. That’s why we’ve compiled a quick and dirty list of the top 10 tech stories from this week.

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Wearables–Digital Trends