A Southern California school board had voted against an elementary school curriculum that included materials about gay rights leader Harvey Milk.
Tired of being stuck at home, Google’s Bard AI chatbot is finally leaving its parent’s basement and going abroad on a worldwide backpacking adventure. The AI system is now fully and officially available in several long-sought countries, including most of the European Union. To get access to some of those wary nations,…
Calm is making a play for some of your time spent listening to songs and podcasts. The popular meditation app is teaming up with Spotify to offer content via the streaming service. Select Calm meditations will be available alongside existing podcasts on Spotify — no additional app required. The partnership is part of Spotify Open Access, an initiative started in 2021 that allows companies to offer their paid content on Spotify at different subscriber tiers.
In this case, Calm provides a sampling of its different offers, from Sleep Stories that can help you drop off to an entire section tailored to anyone who has never meditated before. The second, Calm for Beginners, offers the company’s most popular introductory meditation and gives you a few five-minute or less options to test the waters. You can access Sleep Stories through Calm for Sleep (with narrations by Harry Styles and other celebrities) and try Calm for Stress & Anxiety when you need to decompress during difficult moments. If you want to learn about how singer Camila Cabello got into mindfulness, there’s an option for that too.
Spotify is also hosting Calm for Kids, so you can see if your child will focus on a meditation tailored to their age group. It also has a few Sleep Stories for kids narrated by the likes of Jennifer Garner and Wanda Sykes. Existing Calm users can also benefit from the partnership, with additional content available on Spotify.
Calm bills itself as the number one meditation app — in October 2022, it claimed to have over 100 million downloads and more than four million paying subscribers. But, with a range of competitors like Headspace and InsightTimer, partnerships like this one can continue to grow its reach.
Enjoying the available content might not be the only reason Calm sees more subscribers come in. While some of the content is free for Spotify users, others will require you to start a Calm free trial or buy a subscription. Trials last seven days and a Calm Premium membership costs $69.99 annually or $14.99 a month.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/calm-is-bringing-sleep-meditation-and-relaxation-shows-to-spotify-130009932.html?src=rss
The attorney told the ex-president to stop posting dangerous rhetoric on social media, adding that it could bring harm to Hunter Biden and his family.
A recently launched communications satellite suffered an anomaly during its deployment, affecting its ability to beam data to North and South America.
It is 2023 and, sorry, Siri somehow still didn’t catch that. Despite the tsunami of advancements generative AI systems have enjoyed in recent months, the synthetic assistants on our mobile devices remain nearly as hard of hearing as they were in 2011. A newly developed dataset from Meta AI, however, promises to improve the performance of such automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools by clustering speech at the “utterance level.”
Meta has long sought to improve its ASRs’ performance, teaching them to train without the aid of transcripts, recognize more than 4,000 spoken languages and even read lips at a higher proficiency than human experts. However, many of the datasets used to train ASR models are organized by demographic — age group, gender, nationality, English accent — which limit the variation of pronunciations that models are trained on, ultimately hindering their function in understanding a broad cross section of users.
To get around this, Meta AI has developed a dataset that instead relies on an utterance clustering method. “Instead of dividing a dataset based on speakers’ demographic information … our proposed algorithm clusters speech at the utterance level,” the Meta AI team explained in Wednesday’s blog post. “A single cluster will contain similar utterances from a diverse group of speakers. We can then train our model using the various clusters and use fairness datasets to measure how the model impacts outcomes across different demographic groups.”
Meta’s resulting dataset includes just over 27,000 command utterances collected from 595 paid US volunteers. Their utterances revolve around seven main themes — music, capture, utilities, notification control, messaging, calling and dictation — that other researchers can then use to train their own models and digital assistants on. Prompts included asking the speakers how they’d voice search for a song or make plans with friends and deciding where to meet up.
To evaluate this new system, Meta first trained a model on publicly-available, English-language Facebook videos. Researchers then evaluated that model using two other datasets: Casual Conversations v1, which Meta released in 2021, and a “de-identified dataset collected from a data supplier for ASR,” which includes 48,000 spoken utterances from 867 individuals.
The initial results proved promising, with model performance improvements “on all demographic groups in our evaluation datasets, though by far the largest gains are with respect to more inclusivity of accents,” per the blog. Overall, ASR performance increased by 10 percent using the clustering method, with large gains coming from the age 66-85 crowd as well, a traditionally underrepresented demographic in the voice command space.
“Our proposed algorithm is part of Meta’s long-term focus on responsible AI and just one part of our holistic approach to address fairness issues,” the researchers wrote. Looking ahead, the team is exploring adapting the system to other languages.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-new-dataset-train-speech-recognition-engine-clusters-speaker-130012841.html?src=rss
“My amendment has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or Black people or anybody can serve, OK?” the Arizona Republican said.
A recently launched communications satellite suffered an anomaly during its deployment, affecting its ability to beam data to North and South America.
Passkeys promise a future without passwords, where we access our accounts as easily as we unlock our phones, with a much higher level of security. Pick your big tech poison, like Apple, Google or Microsoft, and you’ve probably seen it announce a passkey takeover. While a full-on passkey revolution may be a bit away, you may be asked to set one up for your accounts soon.
The username and password approach to logins dates back to the 1960s. Ever since then, it’s been hackable. Passwords are guessable or phishable, especially if you fail to meet industry standards for a complex, strong password. For a while, the solution seemed to be multi-factor authentication, or a way to verify your identity at login via text message, app, hardware key or other methods. But passkey proponents are saying that solving login security problems means reinventing the first step, not adding on additional processes.
“It’s the closest to something that can be scaled to get rid of passwords that we’ve ever seen,” said Megan Shamas, senior director of marketing at industry association FIDO Alliance. A passkey is a digital authentication credential that is securely stored on your device. Instead of what Shamas called a “shared secret” method of passwords, passkeys are a unique key pair for every online service you use bound to the domain. So, if you create one for your online banking account, and a spoofed website prompts you to sign in, the passkey won’t work.
It also prevents phishing attacks because you can’t give away your passkey like you can with a password or MFA phrase. We can’t call it “unphishable,” said Derek Hanson, vice president of solutions architecture and alliances at security authentication company Yubico, but it certainly thwarts the common attack vectors used today. At the very least, it makes it much more costly and difficult for a hacker to get in, making the hackers likely to move on to weaker targets.
For the user, they’re meant to be easier, too. Instead of trying to keep track of nearly 100 passwords or more, the passkey is stored on your device and connects automatically to the service. Similar to unlocking your phone, you’ll need to enter a pin, fingerprint, face scan or other simple authentication to log in. It seems too good to be true, and it sort of is, because it’s still a fragmented space. While the big names have made passkeys trend recently, they could also be holding back widespread use.
Currently, using a passkey locks you into a certain service provider, according to Sayonnha Mandal, Ph.D., lecturer at University of Nebraska Omaha. You can’t, for example, log in to websites on an Android phone with a passkey stored on a MacBook. It’s the kind of lock-in these companies tend to favor because it keeps customers loyal to their brand. So, it’ll take cooperation and “in the absence of a government industrial standard that everybody mandatorily has to adhere to, I don’t think by themselves, the companies would.”
But Shamas says that cross-platform accessibility is coming, as companies sign on to FIDO’s industry standards for passkey development. “The deep investment across the industry (including Apple, Google, and Microsoft) to develop and evangelize the passkey technology speaks to the broad belief in its promise,” said a Google spokesperson. At the time of publication, Google Chrome on Mac and Windows only stores passkeys on the local device.
For now, if a website offers you a passkey login option, you should probably sign up. At least for your most sensitive accounts like online banking, make the switch to passkeys as soon as it’s offered for an added layer of protection on those accounts, Mandal said. But, if passkeys do take over, it will be a slow transition. Services will likely still offer password options because it’s what consumers are used to, and passkeys still don’t have wide enough support.
In the meantime, it’s a good reminder to stay on top of your security settings. If passkeys aren’t available, make sure MFA is set up and your password is strong instead of just avoiding the security reminder pop-ups at log in.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/passkeys-passwords-authentication-security-133024414.html?src=rss
Hyundai has debuted its electric Ionic 5 N at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. The automaker says this high-performance version of the Ioniq 5 can go from zero to 62MPH in as little as 3.4 seconds and that it has a top speed of 161MPH.
The company revamped the entire Ioniq 5 for this model, which is its first performance N-brand production vehicle. The EV has front- and dual-motor variants. Opt for the latter and Hyundai says the Ioniq 5 N will be able to produce 641 horsepower when a boost mode is active. In normal operation, you may get 600 horsepower and 545 pound-feet of torque, though the automaker acknowledged that these numbers aren’t final.
Although the Ioniq 5 N has the same battery pack that previously stored 77.4 kWh of usable energy, revised chemistry means the EV can eke out 84.0 kWh, as Car and Driver notes. There’s an upgraded thermal management system for the battery, which includes an “increased cooling area, better motor oil cooler and battery chiller,” Hyundai says, all of which should help to maximize performance.
There’s a new regenerative braking system with 40cm-diameter discs at the front and 36cm ones at the rear. The EV is lower and wider at the bottom than the standard Ioniq 5 to accommodate wider tires on the 21-inch wheels. A more prominent diffuser that should increase downforce extends the length by 80mm as well.
Hyundai hasn’t yet announced pricing for the Ioniq 5 N, which is slated to go on sale in early 2024. The company has yet to reveal the EV’s range as well, though we should learn both key pieces of information in the coming months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hyundai-shows-off-its-high-performance-ioniq-5-n-ev-150053657.html?src=rss
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