By David Shepardson BEIJING (Reuters) -U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Monday that she raised concerns about a number

Spotify has cloned the voices of its top podcasters and will use them to translate podcasts into other languages. Presenters including Lex Fridman and Kristen Bell now have podcasts on Spotify in which they interview their guests in Spanish – despite those conversations never actually having happened. Instead, Spotify took those podcasts and used a range of artificial intelligence technologies to create a match of their voice. They then translated the podcasts and used the voice clone to read them back out, giving an interview that is in another language but nonetheless sounds as if it was being spoken by the actual presenters. The company hopes that the technology means that people can listen to natural-sounding podcasts that were originally English – even if they do not speak the language. The technology is available for a limited number of podcasts in Spanish already, and Spotify will collect them in a devoted part of the app, and will also appear as a suggestion when someone starts listening to a relevant podcast. Soon it expects to use the technology for French and German, and will apply it to more podcasts. “By matching the creator’s own voice, Voice Translation gives listeners around the world the power to discover and be inspired by new podcasters in a more authentic way than ever before,” said Ziad Sultan, Spotify’s vice president of personalisation, in a statement. “We believe that a thoughtful approach to AI can help build deeper connections between listeners and creators, a key component of Spotify’s mission to unlock the potential of human creativity.” Spotify has already rolled out a number of other AI-powered features, including its AI DJ, which not only chooses songs but uses an artificial voice to introduce them. Like that AI DJ, the new translation technology is built on tools provided by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. It said the current techologies are “just the beginning”. “The creator and audience feedback from the pilot will provide important insights for future expansion, iterations, and innovations,” Spotify said in its announcement, and it said it would “continue exploring new ways to overcome barriers to storytelling”. Read More Tesla robot shown practising yoga Meta plans to develop ‘sassy robot’ chatbot for young users, report says Nasa just delivered a piece of a distant asteroid to Earth

Scientists have confirmed that the first black hole to ever be captured on camera is spinning in a major new discovery. The famous doughnut-shaped M87* black hole, 6.5 billion times more massive than the sun, first drew people’s attention in 2019 for becoming the first void to be pictured. Now, it has been confirmed that the M87* black hole is spinning, but experts have yet to determine just how fast. The announcement was made on 27 September. M87* has been observed for the last two decades via a network of radio telescopes. It is located in the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, which is around 55 million light-years away from Earth in the Virgo constellation. The instruments monitoring the black hole have observed a powerful jet of radiation and particles being expelled from its poles. According to research, the relativistic jets appeared to be on a kind of pendulum that swings every 11 years, observed over decades. Experts believe this is caused by interactions between gravitational interactions between the black hole and the material making up the disk around it. They say this provides “unequivocal evidence” that the black hole is spinning. Cui Yuzhu, a researcher at Zhejiang Lab in China and the study’s lead author explained in a statement: “We are thrilled by this significant finding,” adding, “Since the misalignment between the black hole and the disk is relatively small and the precession period is around 11 years, accumulating high-resolution data tracing M87’s structure over two decades and thorough analysis are essential to obtain this achievement.” Their findings matched with computer simulations, confirming that the jets emitting from the black hole change direction by around 10 degrees every 11 years. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Researchers have come up with a new way to generate electricity with solar panel technology by harvesting the energy produced by raindrops. The method, proposed by a team from Tsinghua University in China, involves a device called a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that creates electrification from liquid-solid contact. These are typically used to harvest energy from waves, as droplet-based TENGs (D-TENGs) have previously faced technical limitations that prevented them from working at any significant scale. By using solar panel bridge arrays, the researchers discovered such barriers could be overcome “Referring to the design of solar panels in which multiple solar power generation units are connected in parallel to supply the load, we are proposing a simple and effective method for raindrop harvesting,” said Professor Zong Li, who led the research. “The peak power output of the bridge array generators is nearly five times higher than that of the conventional large-area raindrop energy harvesting. The results of this study will provide a feasible scheme for large-area raindrop energy harvesting.” A study detailing the breakthrough, titled ‘Rational TENG arrays as a panel for harvesting large-scale raindrop energy’, was published in the journal iEnergy. “As an important part of the natural energy and water cycle, rainfall contains abundant renewable energy,” the study notes. “However, this kind of renewable energy lacks effective utilisation today... Therefore, finding a reasonable topology to relieve the inherent constraints of D-TENGs is of great significance for realising the large-scale raindrop energy harvesting.” It is one of a number of promising advances with solar panel technology in recent months, with an Australian team of researchers developing self-healing cells capable of recovering 100 per cent of their original efficiency after suffering degradation from space radiation. Earlier this week, scientist’s at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) unveiled a design for a double-sided solar panel capable of boosting efficiency rates by up to 20 per cent by harvesting reflected sunlight. Read More Scientists invent double-sided solar panel that generates vastly more electricity How tech could turn our homes into renewable energy power stations Scientists invent double-sided solar panel that generates vastly more electricity Scientists invent self-healing solar panels with ‘miracle material’ ‘Miracle material’ smashes solar panel efficiency threshold

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