Tag: Business For Sale

Roku’s new Voice Remote Pro might have just outsmarted smart speakers

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More than six years after Amazon introduced its first Echo speaker, Roku is finally releasing its own entertainment product with hands-free voice controls. But instead of building a smart speaker, Roku is adding “Hey Roku” voice commands to one of its remotes. With the Roku Voice Remote Pro, users can ask to launch apps, play specific videos, listen to music, control playback, or turn off the TV. The remote costs $30 on its own, and Roku hasn’t announced any plans to bundle it with its current line of streaming players. The announcement—one of several that the company is making today—is vintage Roku. The giant of streaming video believes devoutly in incrementalism, so while Amazon and Google have been selling millions of smart speakers that integrate with their respective Fire TV and Chromecast streaming platforms, Roku has hung back and waited for its own voice technology to improve. Read More …

You can talk to this new digital re-creation of Albert Einstein

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A maker of “digital humans” for customer service and chat applications has developed a digital version of Albert Einstein that you can talk to, either by speaking or typing. The company, New Zealand- and Austin-based UneeQ, worked with Hebrew University to get the Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s look, voice, and mannerisms right, Daryl Reva, its senior VP of marketing, told me. Wolfram Research, the creator of the WolframAlpha “computational intelligence” tool, contributed the natural language engine and knowledge base that acts as the digital human’s brain, Reva says. If you’d like to ask Albert some questions, click here . Since the Einstein character wasn’t designed for open-ended chats (UneeQ has another digital human called Sophie for that), he won’t answer just any question, but seems to respond best to questions on a finite set of subjects. You can ask digital Einstein questions about the theory of relativity and about his early life, for example. I asked him how he does his hair, and he was ready for me Read More …

TikTok is a thriving learning community—and may be the future of education

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Even pre-pandemic, the decline of traditional education was already underway. With exorbitant costs and a focus on standardized test scores, the industrial education model has become increasingly disconnected from the needs of both students and employers. Worse, little attention goes toward encouraging the skills and mentality needed for lifelong learning. As the cofounder of an education startup, I don’t think it has to be this way. A  recent Harvard study showed that students actually learn more when education is built on “active learning,” which promotes working collaboratively on projects. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the disruption of education as kids and young adults have been forced to learn from home Read More …

We’re not getting a national vaccine passport. Here’s why it never stood a chance

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Political arguments about vaccine passports have been raging for months : whether we need them, if they could be built equitably , and if they are ultimately an infringement on Americans’ rights to keep their health information private. But while other countries experiment with rolling out digital vaccination credentials, the U.S. national effort was doomed before it ever began. Security experts had hoped that the government would develop a national system for credentialing vaccine recipients. A national vaccine passport would create a single standard that could be used everywhere and would be potentially difficult to fake. But on Tuesday, the White House announced the federal government would not be “supporting” a vaccine credential system. Part of what that means is that there will be no centralized database where all vaccination records live—a crucial feature of vaccine verification systems in other countries like Israel and Estonia. “Unless there was a major change in how health data is viewed from a public and government perspective, it wouldn’t even be possible to create the database,” says JP Pollak, cofounder and chief architect of the Commons Project, which has developed a globally available mobile app for storing COVID-19 testing results. “States have the mandate for maintaining vaccination registries and states are required to report things like how many people have been vaccinated for COVID-19, but they actually are not permitted to transmit the personal information of people back to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].” . @PressSec Jen Psaki on possibility of the federal government supporting vaccine passports: “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential.” Full video here: https://t.co/TLFF718hVo pic.twitter.com/jJP0Ph95jH — CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2021 Since states are charged with maintaining vaccine registries, some, like New York, are creating their own credentialing systems Read More …