Keeping your home neat and tidy can feel like a full-time job. That's why it's

Dillon Danis said, 'If you go to my story I didn’t delete anything but everything with Tate is deleted and now I’m disabled this is actually nuts'

TL;DR: On May 22, Dyson announced a new suite of home products including upgraded cordless

These streamers have harnessed the unique features and opportunities offered by Kick to excel in their content creation and engage with their audience

Smartwatches have grown from a novelty for early adopter cyborgs to a robust and diverse

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By Rae Wee SINGAPORE Bitcoin stabilised above $25,000 on Tuesday after a steep dive overnight, as investors grappled

Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

Black Mirror season six has become even more immersive with the opportunity to make your own ‘Joan is Awful’ inspired poster, but fans noticed another aspect of the website that’s even more like the hit episode. Black Mirror premiered its sixth season with five new episodes, the first titled ‘Joan is Awful’ starring Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek. The episode follows Joan (Murphy) who turns on her TV to find ‘Streamberry’ (a parody of Netflix) has made a show about her life called Joan is Awful with Salma Hayek portraying Joan and showing the events that happened in Joan’s life that day. After losing her fiancé and job, in an attempt to stop Streamberry from using her likeness and her life for a show, Joan tries to sue Streamberry. That is until her lawyer points out that she had technically consented for Streamberry to portray her likeness and her life in the terms and conditions she had agreed to when signing up for the platform. Joan discovers that the show is produced using CGI and that Salma Hayek simply signed off on having her likeness digitally reproduced by Streamberry. Yesterday, the official Black Mirror Twitter account, along with official Netflix accounts (who temporarily changed their name to ‘Steamberry’) posted a link to a website named “You Are Awful” with the caption: “Sign up for Streamberry today!” When clicking on the link it takes you to a page similar to that of Netflix asking you to upload a photo of yourself “to set up your sweet new Streamberry profile!” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It then asks you to enter your first name along with a photo of yourself. In order to continue the process, you must consent for Netflix to use the image in its marketing campaign as well as read and agree to the terms of service and privacy statement. Many shared on Twitter their recreation of the original ‘Joan is Awful’ poster, with their own names and faces, but some fans were more hesitant to check the terms of service after watching the episode. One fan decided to read the terms of service, learning from Joan’s mistake in the show, and saw that there was a clause titled “Name and Likeness” where users agreed to “grant the Netflix entity that provides you with this Experience, its affiliates and respective successors and assigns and anyone authorised by any of them (collectively, “Netflix”), the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive right to record, depict, and/or portray you.” It also states that users give Netflix the right to “record, depict, and/or prorate you and use, your actual or simulated likeness, name, photograph, voice, actions, etc.” So maybe don’t be surprised if you see your name and face on Netflix in the future. 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.

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, brought back many previously banned far-right users, and removed moderation

NEWBURYPORT, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 18, 2023--

By Jane Lanhee Lee OAKLAND, California Lightmatter, a Boston-based startup using light for AI computing, said on Wednesday