Tag: talk
The Verge staff talk about their favorite backpacks and other bags
In August 2021, we asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their go-to laptop bags. Now, a year later, some are still using the same bags — but not all.
It’s surprising how attached you can get to a bag — especially the bag that you use to carry your laptop, your sweater, your lunch, your notebook, your exercise shoes, your kids’ diapers, or any of the other stuff you need. Whether you’re heading to the office, visiting a friend, hanging in a coffee shop, going on a hike, or just sitting outdoors to read or work, having a bag that can accommodate everything on your “gotta have this” list can help you avoid a lot of aggravation.
So, here’s this year’s staff picks — some old, some new. Most of the staff wrote about their backpacks,…
Exclusive: Kevin Hart, Regina Hall, Mark Wahlberg, & More Talk New Movie ‘Me Time’
Kevin Hart has teamed up with an all-star cast to bring the funny in the new Netflix movie, ‘Me Time.’
Indeed, the streamer’s latest comedy is anchored by Hart, Mark Wahlberg, and Regina Hall.
The film follows a stay-at-home dad, who is gifted with “me time” for the first time in a long time (while his wife and kids are away),
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Google is taking reservations to talk to its supposedly-sentient chatbot
At the I/O 2022 conference this past May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company would, in the coming months, gradually avail its experimental LaMDA 2 conversational AI model to select beta users. Those months have come. On Thursday, researchers at Google’s AI division announced that interested users can register to explore the model as access increasingly becomes available.
Regular readers will recognize LaMDA as the supposedly sentient natural language processing (NLP) model that a Google researcher got himself fired over. NLPs are a class of AI model designed to parse human speech into actionable commands and are behind the functionality of digital assistants and chatbots like Siri or Alexa, as well as do the heavy lifting for realtime translation and subtitle apps. Basically, whenever you’re talking to a computer, it’s using NLP tech to listen.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that” is a phrase that still haunts many early Siri adopters’ dreams, though in the past decade NLP technology has advanced at a rapid pace. Today’s models are trained on hundreds of billions of parameters, can translate hundreds of languages in real time and even carry lessons learned in one conversation through to subsequent chats.
Google’s AI Test kitchen will enable beta users to experiment and explore interactions with the NLP in a controlled, presumably supervised, sandbox. Access will begin rolling out to small groups of US Android users today before spreading to iOS devices in the coming weeks. The program will offer a set of guided demos which will show users LaMDA’s capabilities.
“The first demo, ‘Imagine It,’ lets you name a place and offers paths to explore your imagination,” Tris Warkentin, Group Product Manager at Google Research, and Josh Woodward, Senior Director of Product Management for Labs at Google, wrote in a Google AI blog Thursday. “With the ‘List It’ demo, you can share a goal or topic, and LaMDA will break it down into a list of helpful subtasks. And in the ‘Talk About It (Dogs Edition)’ demo, you can have a fun, open-ended conversation about dogs and only dogs, which explores LaMDA’s ability to stay on topic even if you try to veer off-topic.”
The focus on safe, responsible interactions is a common one in an industry where there’s already a name for chatbot AIs that go full-Nazi, and that name in Taye. Thankfully, that exceedingly embarrassing incident was a lesson that Microsoft and much of the rest of the AI field has taken to heart, which is why we see such strident restrictions on what users can have Midjourney or Dall-E 2 conjure, or what topics Facebook’s Blenderbot 3 can discuss.
That’s not to say the system is foolproof. “We’ve run dedicated rounds of adversarial testing to find additional flaws in the model,” Warkentin and Woodward wrote. “We enlisted expert red teaming members… who have uncovered additional harmful, yet subtle, outputs.” Those include failing “to produce a response when they’re used because it has difficulty differentiating between benign and adversarial prompts,” and producing “harmful or toxic responses based on biases in its training data.” As many AIs these days are wont to do.
Michael Sincere’s Long-Term Trader: ‘Women will talk about sex, death and religion more than they do about money.’ Tori Dunlap wants women to command the same financial respect that men get.
Frontier talk the future of Elite Dangerous and its controversial Odyssey expansion
The last year or so of Elite Dangerous has been the most dramatic since the game launched in 2014. The most recent update to Frontier Developments’ epic space sim, Update 13, saw the conclusion of the story’s Azimuth Saga, culminating in a disastrous attempt to stop the incursion of the Thargoids – Elite’s hostile race of insectoid aliens. It’s an event that has already had a major impact on Elite’s universe, and Frontier are excited to discuss the studio’s plans for the game and its narrative as it pushes into a new phase for the galaxy, simply known as “Aftermath”.
But the drama surrounding Elite Dangerous isn’t limited to the game’s overarching story. As I gear up to chat with lead game designer Luke Betterton and senior producer Samantha Marsh, the Thargoid in the room is Elite Dangerous: Odyssey. Launched in May last year, Elite’s second expansion was, to put it lightly, not well received by Elite’s community. Complaints ranged from extensive bugs and performance issues to more fundamental criticisms about the implementation of the expansion’s on-foot exploration and FPS combat. Over a year on from release, the expansion still carries a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, standing in stark contrast to reviews for vanilla Elite Dangerous (now bundled with its Horizons expansion), which remain firmly positive.
What Paranormal Researchers Get Wrong When They Talk About Quantum Physics
Stream: Tink – ‘Pillow Talk’ Album
Tink has unlocked her brand new studio album ‘Pillow Talk.’
Arriving via Winter’s Diary / EMPIRE, the 16-track set showcases the star in all her multifaceted magnificence.
From her potent pen to her emotional vocal delivery, the rising singer-songwriter shines on the project – which is executive produced by Hitmaka.
Tink is joined by an eclectic list of guests such as Muni Long,
» Read more about: Stream: Tink – ‘Pillow Talk’ Album »
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NASA astronauts on Artemis could talk to a spaceship computer
Captain Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the Star Trek gang were in constant dialogue with the onboard Enterprise computer, asking it questions about the starship and their alien environments.
With NASA reviving its human space exploration program in a matter of days through Artemis, it seems only natural real astronauts of the 2020s who will crew the forthcoming missions would do the same. After all, boldly going where no one has gone before could be lonely, and having an A.I. sidekick might help on those long voyages.
When Lockheed Martin, the company that built the new Orion spacecraft for NASA, first dreamed up the talking computer, engineers figured they’d just throw an Amazon Echo Dot on the dashboard with a laptop and call it a day. But it wasn’t nearly that simple, said Rob Chambers, Lockheed’s director of commercial civil space strategy.
Beyond technical constraints, they had to overcome the menacing representations of an inflight space computer, in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike the collegial computer in Star Trek, “HAL” starts to glitch, takes control of the spacecraft, and then fights the crew’s attempts to shut it down.
That’s not merely a concern raised through science fiction. This summer A.I. developer Blake Lemoine, formerly of Google, went public with his belief that a chatbot he helped build had become sentient. The story sparked a global conversation about whether some artificial intelligence is — or could be — conscious.
Credit: Photo by CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images
Such claims work to reinforce fears long embedded in popular culture — that one day the advanced technology enabling humans to achieve extraordinary things could be too smart, perhaps leading to machines that are self aware and want to hurt people.
“We don’t want the HAL 9000, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t open the pod bay doors,'” Chambers told Mashable. “That’s the first thing that everybody said when we first suggested this.”
“We don’t want the HAL 9000, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t open the pod bay doors.That’s the first thing that everybody said when we first suggested this.”
Rather, Lockheed Martin and its collaborators believe having a voice-activated virtual assistant and video calls in the spacecraft would be more convenient for astronauts, affording them access to information away from the crew console. That flexibility might even keep them safer, engineers say.
An experiment to test the technology will ride along with Artemis on its first spaceflight, which could launch as early as Aug. 29. The project, named Callisto after one of Artemis’ favorite hunting companions in Greek mythology, is programmed to give crew live answers about the spacecraft’s flight status and other data, such as water supply and battery levels. The technology is being paid for by the companies — not NASA.
A custom Alexa system built specifically for the spacecraft will have access to some 120,000 data readouts — more than astronauts have had before, with some bonus information previously only available within Houston’s mission control.
Credit: NASA
No astronaut will actually be onboard Orion for this first mission — unless the dummy in the cockpit counts. But the inaugural 42-day spaceflight, testing various orbits and atmosphere reentry, will clear the way for NASA to send a crew on subsequent missions. Whether a virtual assistant is integrated into the spacecraft for those expeditions depends on a successful demonstration during Artemis I.
To test their Alexa, mission control will use video-conferencing software provided by Cisco Webex to ask questions and give verbal commands inside the spacecraft. Cisco will run its software on an iPad in the capsule. Cameras mounted all over Orion will monitor how it’s working.
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For the most part, the virtual assistant will be answering queries, like “Alexa, how fast is Orion traveling?” and “Alexa, what’s the temperature in the cabin?” The only thing the system can actually control are the lights, said Justin Nikolaus, an Alexa voice designer on the project.
“As far as control of the vehicle, we don’t have access to any critical components or mission critical software onboard,” Nikolaus told Mashable. “We’re safely sandboxed in Orion.”
The space-faring Alexa might not seem so advanced. But engineers had to figure out how to get the device to recognize a voice in a tin can. The acoustics of Orion, with mostly metal surfaces, were unlike anything developers have encountered before. What they learned from the project is now being applied to other challenging sound environments on Earth, like detecting speech in a moving car with the windows rolled down, Nikolaus said.
The most significant change from off-the-shelf Amazon devices is that the system will debut a new technology the company calls “local voice control,” which allows Alexa to work without an internet connection. Back on Earth, Alexa operates on the cloud, which runs on the internet and uses computer servers warehoused in data centers.
In deep space, when Orion is hundreds of thousands of miles away, the time delays to reach the cloud would be, shall we say, astronomical. Looking toward the future, that lag could stretch from seconds to an hour to transmit messages back and forth to a spacecraft on its way to Mars, about 96 million miles from Earth.
That’s why engineers built a spacecraft computer to handle the data processing, Chambers said.
“It’s not canned things. It’s actual real-time processing,” he said. “All that smarts has to be on the spacecraft because we didn’t want to suffer the time lag of going back up to the spacecraft, back down to Earth, back up, and back down again.”
“All that smarts has to be on the spacecraft because we didn’t want to suffer the time lag of going back up to the spacecraft, back down to Earth, back up, and back down again.”
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
For the questions that Alexa can’t handle offline, Callisto will tap into the Deep Space Network, the radio dish system NASA uses to communicate with its farthest spacecraft, and route the signals to the cloud on Earth. This could allow Callisto to support a wider range of requests, like reading the news or reporting sports scores.
Or ordering more toilet paper and trash bags — seriously.
The designers built in the capability for astronauts to buy things from Amazon. Overnight delivery to the moon wouldn’t be an option, but sending flowers to a spouse on Earth for a special occasion would.
Cisco also will use the Deep Space Network to provide video-conferencing calls. Engineers say astronauts would be able to use this tool for “whiteboarding” meetings with their Houston colleagues. Imagine how handy that would have been for the Apollo 13 crew as NASA tried to talk them through how to make a round air filter fit into a square hole with no visual aids.
Broadcasting pictures in high resolution across the solar system isn’t easy, especially with such limited data capacity. One of the reasons Lockheed Martin chose Cisco as a collaborator was for the company’s expertise in video compression, Chambers said. As video travels through space, the data can get garbled. Cisco worked on error-correction technology to smooth out the transmissions.
“One of my colleagues at Cisco refers to this as trying to do 4K, high bandwidth, gigabit-type ethernet, using a 1980s dial-up modem,” he said. “Obviously, the Deep Space Network is very, very capable, but we’re trying to do modern video-conferencing.”
“One of my colleagues at Cisco refers to this as trying to do 4K, high bandwidth, gigabit-type ethernet, using a 1980s dial-up modem.”
To make the custom virtual assistant, the collaborators spent time interviewing astronauts. One of the things they asked for was a dictation service, Nikolaus said. Often their notepads and pens float away. It’s hard to use a computer in a weightless environment, too.
“If you go to a keyboard and you’re not used to microgravity and you start typing, your force on the keyboard pushes your body away from it,” Nikolaus said.
But: Alexa, can you fly me to the moon?
Yes, if what you want is a little Frank Sinatra crooning through the cabin.
Alexa, can you open or close the pod bay doors?
Fortunately, no. The system can’t do anything to put the astronauts in danger, Chambers said.
“We think about that a lot, not necessarily that they’ll become sentient and, you know, Rise of the Machines, and [become] our software overlords,” he said.
But software is complex. Strange behaviors can occur through unexpected convolutions of activities, he said: “What we do is we architect the system such that it is actually not possible for this device to talk to this other device.”
So if all goes according to plan, perhaps the most havoc the real HAL could cause is to prank an astronaut’s family with an unwanted Amazon Fresh pizza delivery.
Call Of Duty Devs Talk About What Goes Into Making A Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Mission
Activision has revealed the creative process of making Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s Dark Water level, which was first showcased at Summer Game Fest Live.
A Call of Duty blog post describes the trailer as a “vertical slice.” That shows off core features, visuals, audio, and overall player experience. The campaign mission is meant to set the tone for what players can expect upon its release on October 28. “Dark Water balances being completely realistic while being completely ludicrous,” said Rich Farrelly, lead-level designer at Infinity Ward.
Sound designers for the game got creative and toyed with microphones on a lake to create authentic boat sounds used in the mission. At the same time, another recorded the sounds of precipitation and added rain sound to give the players a more immersive experience. A senior lead audio designer stated the engine being used opens itself up to better audio and is on par with some Hollywood films.