Good morning! Okay, my penultimate day is here in the newsletter! No tears! One new thing I’ll be working with TechAltar on is its YouTube tech videos, mainly targeting the Friday Checkout channel. Exciting!
hearing voices
At Amazon’s re: Mars conference (Mars stands for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, Space), innovation and robots and so on have been discussed for a few days. The latest headline came from Alexa’s senior vice president Rohit Prasad, who showed off a new voice assistant: the ability to mimic voices. Especially dead voices. Prasad, who is presenting at the conference, points out that empathy is a big part of Alexa, saying, “So many of us have lost someone we love. While AI can’t take that pain of loss,” he said, it can memories will last.” A video then plays where Alexa reads to a youngster, apparently in his grandmother’s voice, who says, “Can Grandma finish reading The Wizard of Oz?” After saying, “Okay.” Alexa continues with the voice of the child’s grandmother, and the sequence unfolds at this point in the conference.
Hmm:
So Amazon may have just popped an idea. No timeline is provided. But an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget that the new skill “can create a synthetic voiceprint after being trained on just a minute of audio.” Engadget also helpfully points out that deep fake audio tools are problematic for things like… Scams! Speech cloning software has enabled several crimes, such as a 2020 incident in the United Arab Emirates where fraudsters tricked a bank manager into transferring $35 million after posing as a company director. But serious fake audio crimes are still relatively uncommon, and the tools available to scammers are rratherprimitive.” And remember when that documentary about the life of chef Anthony Bourdain used AI to clone his voice when reading emails, he sent? Not many people liked that.
Could be?
Look, there are humane, interesting, possibly kind ways that this can be done to help people. There are legitimately interesting use cases that might help some people in general and many problematic issues that bubble up. I don’t think anyone wants their deceased relative to tell you when it is or set the alarm. But maybe for some people who seek comfowithuations, it’s nice. Of course, there are also scary things, and a lot of technology faces the same problem: interesting ideas with major potential drawbacks. Another example is that Microsoft will stop selling technology that can accurately guess someone’s emotion based on a facial image.
To round up
Amazon’s new feature allows Alexa to mimic a dead person’s voice with just a minute of audio. If you want that, Amazon says it’s for keeping memories (Android Authority). Samsung’s latest 200MP sensor is smaller than the Pixel 6’s 50MP camera: it will make the camera modules smaller, but there will probably be some compromises in performance (Android Authority). Apple Macbook Pro 13 (2022) review: Apple put a 2022 CPU in a 2016 computer, including the tired old webcam. The key point is that the Apple-submitted review unit costs $1,899, “while a 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro model with those RAM and storage specs would be $2,199,” That 14-inch is the much better MacBook Pro. Plus, the new MacBook Air is coming soon! (The edge).
Oh hey, I think this might be the last dedicated Throwback Thursday! I nominated “Thursday Thing” to give some freedom to what’s cool: Good things! After about four years of throwbacks, we’ve reached a limit where something of the past like Tetris, Pac-Man, Gameboys, the first iPods, iPhones, Galaxy phones, the first mouse, patents, etc., and several wonderful inventions that we now take for granted have all been revised. So new ideas are needed. With the Daily Authority getting new hands, Thursday’s special newsletter may take a unique shape. Cheers, and see you tomorrow with some final thoughts before I go, Tristan Rayner, editor-in-chief.
