Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new ’20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere—in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they’ll be all up in your audiobooks too. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a… Continue reading Amazon’s Audiobook Narrators Can Now Make Their Own AI Voice Clones
Author: Wired Magazine
The Best Tested and Reviewed Mesh Wi-Fi Routers of 2024
Currently, there are four Eero systems on the market worth considering, offering a broadly similar experience. The first two are dual-band systems (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz). Folks with internet connections up to 500 Mbps can go with the regular Eero 6. If you have a faster connection, up to 1 Gbps, and your home… Continue reading The Best Tested and Reviewed Mesh Wi-Fi Routers of 2024
The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying
One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable. Music industry publication Mix spoke with… Continue reading The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying
This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over
On the subject of money and ownership. Earlier this year, following the cancellation of several Black TV shows, you wrote, “studios and streamers no longer care about loyalty or enduring legacy.” Why does Hollywood, in 2024, still have such a difficult time aligning its legacy with its business? Well, here’s the thing, the legacy business,… Continue reading This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over
The $129 AirPods 4 Have Features the $549 AirPods Max Don’t
If Apple wanted to bury the fact it’s leaving its most expensive headphones as the least technically capable in its lineup, it didn’t do a very good job. It all started promisingly. At Apple’s September Glowtime event, CEO Tim Cook teed up VP of hardware engineering Kate Bergeron for the big reveal by stating that… Continue reading The $129 AirPods 4 Have Features the $549 AirPods Max Don’t
The Bird Flu Outbreak Takes a Mysterious Turn
This year in the United States, 14 people have tested positive for avian influenza, or bird flu. Nine of those became infected after coming into contact with poultry, and four got the virus from exposure to dairy cows. The source of the remaining, most recent case remains a mystery. The Centers for Disease Control and… Continue reading The Bird Flu Outbreak Takes a Mysterious Turn
Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works
Apple is making every production PCC server build publicly available for inspection so people unaffiliated with Apple can verify that PCC is doing (and not doing) what the company claims, and that everything is implemented correctly. All of the PCC server images are recorded in a cryptographic attestation log, essentially an indelible record of signed… Continue reading Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works
An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job
It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did. So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have… Continue reading An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job
This New Tech Puts AI In Touch with Its Emotions—and Yours
A new “empathic voice interface” launched today by Hume AI, a New York–based startup, makes it possible to add a range of emotionally expressive voices, plus an emotionally attuned ear, to large language models from Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI—portending an era when AI helpers may more routinely get all gushy on us. “We… Continue reading This New Tech Puts AI In Touch with Its Emotions—and Yours
The Best iPhone 15 Cases (2024), Tested and Reviewed
I am often surrounded by dozens of phone cases, and many of them are perfectly fine! They just don’t stand out, or they have one quirk I don’t like. That’s what you’ll find below. You might enjoy them more than I do. OtterBox Figura MagSafe Case for $50: These tie-dye phone cases are super rad.… Continue reading The Best iPhone 15 Cases (2024), Tested and Reviewed