One of the biggest disappointments from CES 2021 going virtual will be the lack of a splashy booth by Google. Whether you cared about the company’s bevy of Google Assistant-related announcements, it was hard to deny the stagecraft employed by the tech giant. From a report: For the last few years, Google boasted some of the most eye-catching CES booths, from…
Tag: digital assistants
Ann Syrdal, Who Helped Give Computers a Female Voice, Dies at 74
Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, died on July 24 at her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. From a report: Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the cause was cancer. As a researcher at…
Activate this ‘Bracelet of Silence,’ and Alexa Can’t Eavesdrop
Ben Zhao and his wife, Heather Zheng, computer science professors at the University of Chicago, designed what they are calling a “bracelet of silence” that will jam the Echo or any other microphones in the vicinity from listening in on the wearer’s conversations. The New York Times reports: The bracelet is like an anti-smartwatch, both in its cyberpunk aesthetic and in…
The End of Windows 7 ‘Marks the End of the PC Era Too’
ZDNet’s UK editor-in-chief Steve Ranger argues the end of Windows 7 “marks the end of the PC era, too.” When Windows 7 launched, the iPhone and its app store were around but were still novelties, while the iPad hadn’t arrived yet. If you wanted to get work — or pretty much anything — done on a computer, you needed a PC….
Microsoft Starts Rolling Out Windows 10 November 2019 Update
Microsoft today started rolling out the free Windows 10 November 2019 Update. For those keeping track, this update is Windows 10 build 18363 and will bring Windows 10 to version 1909. From a report: The Windows 10 November 2019 Update (version 1909) is odd because it shares the same Cumulative Update packages as the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903)….