Jan 05
Prince Harry Claims William, Kate Middleton Urged Him To Wear Nazi Costume: Report
Posted in: Today's Chili“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought,” wrote Harry. “Nazi uniform, they said.”
Jan 05
The Year Ahead in Star Wars
Posted in: Today's Chili
James Whitbrook is the Deputy Editor of io9, with an expertise in covering Stars of the Wars and Trek varieties, as well as anime, games, and collectibles. You can follow his coverage here, and email tips to james.whitbrook@gizmodo.com.
Jan 05
When you browse Apple Books for your next audiobook, you might come across a few titles with a note that says they were “Narrated by Apple Books.” That’s because the tech giant has released a catalogue of titles that make use of its new AI-powered digital narration service. The company said the service uses the advanced speech synthesis technology it developed “to produce high-quality audiobooks from an ebook file.”
According to The Guardian, Apple approached independent publishers who may be interested in teaming up for the project’s launch in recent months. Authors were reportedly told that the company behind the technology would shoulder the costs of turning their books into audiobooks and that they would be earning royalties. Apple, as secretive as ever, apparently remained unnamed at that point of the process and required partners to sign non-disclosure agreements.
In its announcement, Apple touched on how commissioning voice actors and producing audiobooks could cost writers and publishers thousands of dollars. For independent authors, especially those just starting out, it’s not always possible to spare that much money. But thing is, the audiobook market has grown tremendously in recent years — it earned $1.6 billion in sales in 2021, and experts reportedly believe the market could be worth over $35 billion by 2030. Authors wouldn’t only be missing out on potential income by not creating audiobook versions of their titles, but also the opportunity to build their brand and following while the market is still growing.
The tech giant said its digital narration technology will make audiobook creation more accessible. There is truth in that, and if the project turns out to be successful, it could change the future of audiobooks. Books narrated by a digital voice aren’t exactly new, though, and they’re typically hard to listen to due to how robotic they sound. David Caron, a co-producer at a large audiobook publisher in Canada, also raised an important point in his statement to The Guardian: “The narrator brings a whole new range of art in creating audiobook… They’re creating something that is different from the print book, but that adds value as an art form.”
At the moment, Apple offers authors two digital voices to choose from: One soprano and one baritone. They sound pretty human, based on the samples the company shared, but the sound clips were short and might not be a genuine representation of the whole audiobook’s quality. Apple is only accepting books in the romance and a limited number of other fiction genres for now. The books must already be available on Apple Books, must be in English and must pass and editorial review. It’s working to expand AI narration’s availability, however, and will soon offer it to nonfiction and self-development authors. The company will also launch two more digital voices for those genres. For now, you can listen to audiobooks that use Apple’s AI by searching for “AI narration” in Apple Books.
Jan 05
Gary Kelly steered Southwest away from its founding “culture and principles,” the union’s vice president wrote in a scathing letter.
Jan 05
The Year Ahead in Spaceflight
Posted in: Today's Chili
George Dvorsky is a senior reporter covering spaceflight, space exploration, and space policy. You can follow his coverage here, and email story ideas and tips to george.dvorsky@gizmodo.com.
Jan 05
One of the fun things about CES is a completely different approach to established tech norms. Displace’s 55-inch OLED TV not only runs on batteries and has a pop-out camera but also attaches itself with a vacuum seal to most walls and windows. There are even handles on the frame. Is this the end of wall mounts? Probably not.
It apparently keeps itself in place through multiple vacuum loops on the back. When the display detects a surface, the vacuums kick in, sucking the device to the surface of your choice. Displace TV can also do without a power cord because it doesn’t do much image processing onboard. It’s basically streaming media from a base station that performs the rendering. So no wires and no ports on the OLED TV itself.
There are more quirks. You could watch roughly six hours of content before swapping out batteries, and there’s no remote, so you’ll have to suffer the erratic method of hand gestures – which I don’t think anyone truly likes. At $3,000, though, the Displace TV is predictably pricey. Only 100 units are available for pre-order at the moment, and the company said shipping starts in December. And if you get four of them, apparently you can put them together to create a 110-inch 8K TV.
– Mat Smith
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Sony Honda Mobility’s first concept car is the Afeela EV
The Vision-S 02 is now the Afeela.
In March 2022, Honda and Sony announced they were teaming up to build a battery-electric SUV. By June, the project was its own company. Less than a year after being announced, Sony Honda Mobility took to the CES 2023 stage to officially unveil its first prototype, the Afeela. Sony executives shared a few details about the upcoming vehicle: It has 14 exterior cameras – 45 in total – and a grille-mounted Media Bar to display vehicle information. Expect more details when the show floor opens later today and we get to take a closer look.
Roku is finally building its own TVs
The Roku TV Select and Premium Series lines range from 24 to 75 inches.
At CES 2023, the streaming device company announced it’ll build its own smart TVs for the first time. When the Roku TV program debuted in 2014, the company was cramming its streaming software into TVs built by partners like TCL and Hisense. The TVs will range from $119 to $999, so don’t expect OLED panels or insane brightness levels. Roku also announced an OLED Roku TV reference design for its TV partners. So, there’s not going to be any shortage of options if you want a TV with Roku’s streaming capabilities.
Tesla’s Model Y might miss out on new EV tax credit rules
Too light to be classified as SUVs and too expensive to qualify as cars.
Certain variants of Tesla’s Model Y may not qualify for the $7,500 federal EV tax credit based on the IRS’s latest guidelines, in a situation Elon Musk called “messed up.” It looks as though the five-seat Long Range version of the hatchback is too expensive as a car and not considered an SUV, so it falls outside the current guidelines. Only the seven-seat variants of the Model Y qualify as SUVs in the category up to $80,000, while the five-seat vehicles (Long Range, AWD and Performance) should be in the $55,000 section. However, all the five-seaters exceed that price, so they don’t qualify.
Louisiana residents now need a government ID to access porn online
PornHub is already on it.
A new Louisiana state law went into effect on January 1st, requiring websites containing “a substantial portion” of “material harmful to minors” to ask users to prove they’re 18 or older. “Substantial portion,” according to the new law, is more than 33.3 percent of a website’s content. Websites that host adult content have to implement “reasonable age verification methods,” including asking users to present a government-issued ID or a digitized form of it. Major sites including PornHub, YouPorn and RedTube ask visitors to prove their age by using their LA Wallet app, which is the state’s digital wallet app for drivers’ licenses.
Track Ember’s heated Travel Mug 2+ in Apple’s Find My app
The new model won’t cost more than the current version.
Engadget
A new version of Ember’s heated travel mug, dubbed the Travel Mug 2+, is on the way, with an upgrade that makes it appear in Apple’s Find My app. The Travel Mug 2+ also has a speaker, so if you lose it, you can make it play a sound – as you would for lost AirPods. Ember’s current model, the Travel Mug 2, with a 12-ounce capacity, is available for $199.95 and keeps beverages hot for up to three hours. The company says this upgraded version will stay at this price and eventually replace the Travel Mug 2.
AMD’s Ryzen 7000 mobile CPUs feature up to 16 cores and 5.4GHz speeds
Powerful laptops are incoming.
AMD is confronting Intel’s powerful HX laptop CPUs head-on and, once again, they’re called “HX.” That won’t be confusing. The company’s new Ryzen 9 7945HX processor is its premium mobile offering, with 16 cores and 32 threads, as well as speeds between 2.5GHz and 5.4GHz. The Ryzen HX CPUs will run at 55 watts and above (also like Intel’s), meaning they’ll focus more on raw power than battery life. AMD claims the 7945HX is 78 percent faster than the previous top-end Ryzen chip in Cinebench’s multithreaded benchmark, and 18 percent faster in the single-threaded test. Compared to Intel’s 12900HX, its high-end chip from last year, the 7945HX is 169 percent faster in Handbrake encoding and 75 percent faster with Blender rendering.
Jan 05
Author Steve Almond came to discuss Damar Hamlin and football safety, but he got in the Fox News host’s face instead.
Jan 05
Robot delivery firm Ottonomy has unveiled a new Ottobot model called the Yeti with a new automated package delivery mechanism. That could allow it to do last mile drop-offs directly to a locker or remove the need for someone to receive a package, TechCrunch has reported.
As shown at the end of Ottonomy’s latest video, the Yeti uses a simple tilting mechanism and rollers to dispense the packages. That would allow it to drop packages onto a doorstep or transfer them to a locker, making it fully independent from humans. It may also allow for easy returns, as TechCrunch noted.
The Brooklyn-based firm operates in multiple cities including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Oslo and Madrid, with plans to expand across north America and Asia. It recently unveiled the Ottobot 2.0 with modular delivery bins, a navigation engine that merges data from lidar and cameras, and a new four-wheel drive “crab mode” system for extra maneuverability in tight spaces. The company works in partnership with Verizon in the US.
Jan 05
“That’s a pretty mild way to assess the worst day of his political career,” the “Late Show” host quipped.
Jan 05
Amazon is cutting more jobs than it had previously planned, CEO Andy Jassy has admitted in a blog post. Back in November, reports came out that the e-commerce giant was eliminating 10,000 jobs, just as other companies in the tech sector had announced layoffs of their own. Now, the company is expanding its job cuts, and between the employees who’d already lost their jobs and the ones losing theirs in the near future, Amazon will be eliminating over 18,000 roles in the company.
Jassy said majority of the upcoming layoffs would be from its retail and recruiting divisions. As The Wall Street Journal notes, Amazon benefited from the COVID lockdowns over the past few years, since people had to shop online more often than before. The company reportedly added hundreds of thousands of employees to keep up with the surge in demand — and then launched cost-cutting reviews to see which units weren’t making profit. It then froze hiring, closed brick-and-mortar stores and shut down business units.
When news broke that Amazon was planning sweeping layoffs, Meta had also just revealed that it was letting more than 11,000 of its employees go. Like Amazon’s executives, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg significantly increased Meta’s investments following a large revenue growth due to the pandemic. However, people’s spending habits eventually went back to pre-pandemic trends, leading to a smaller revenue for the company. More recently, Slack owner Salesforce revealed that it’s cutting 10 percent of its workforce and closing down offices. The company also grew rapidly during the pandemic and can’t sustain its bloated workforce in the current economy.
Amazon will be cutting more jobs than Meta did by the time it’s done. Jassy said the company will reach out to impacted employees starting on January 18th, so the layoffs will likely take place over the coming weeks. He added that Amazon will offer them packages that include a “separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits and external job placement support.”
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