Science & Technology

I often use the iPhone’s Voice Memos at product briefings for interviews. As you can imagine, transcribing a 20-minute recording could be tedious. Thankfully, AppleInsider has learned of an AI-powered update coming to the Voice Memos and Notes apps on iPhone that will soon be able to transcribe and summarize voice…

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American philanthropist Melinda French Gates will resign from her post as co-chair of the Gates Foundation, the organization she co-founded with her ex-husband Bill Gates.

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A new Wicked trailer is coming Wednesday, and with that announcement comes a brief featurette showing director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) sharing his excitement for the Wizard of Oz-inspired musical—but mostly focuses on stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, including their emotional, adorable…

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OpenAI unveiled GPT-4 Omni (GPT-4o) during its Spring Update on Monday morning in San Francisco. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and OpenAI staff showcased their newest flagship model, capable of real-time verbal conversations with a friendly AI chatbot that convincingly speaks like a human.

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The fact that a show about a devious witch has us so confused feels completely on brand. It started back in late 2021 when Marvel revealed it was working on a WandaVision spinoff series focused on Kathryn Hahn’s breakout character, Agatha Harkness. Since then, the show has had at least four publicly announced titles,…

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Health officials in Minnesota and Wisconsin issued air quality warnings on Sunday after the smoke from wildfires raging in western Canada started to reach the Upper Midwest. And it’s causing plenty of anxiety in people across a large swath of the U.S. who are dreading the idea of spending yet another summer choking…

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In the tech world, developer conferences are like birthdays. These mega-events happen annually and remind us of the cadence of life and that time is a neverending circle. Google I/O 2024 will be no different when it kicks off on Tuesday, May 14.

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Doctor Who is one of the most malleable shows on Earth. Its heroes change every few years, its titular one literally transforms into someone new. Every week a different time, a different space, a different tone—and a new chance to deliver a story that’s also wildly malleable in quality. Doctor Who is about…

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Earlier this month, South Carolina resident Brent Norman had an especially unlucky time at the beach.

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You’ve got questions and Wes Ball has answers. His new film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, opened this weekend and io9 recently sat down with the director to talk all about it. We’ve covered all the non-spoiler stuff already but below, we dive into the film’s surprising prologue, some big character revelations,…

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Most folks who walk into a room with an 85-inch TV, let alone a 98-inch TV, offer one of two impressions, often verbalized with some screech of surprise. One is, “Wow, look at the size of that thing.” The other is, “That’s just too damn big.” TV Maker TCL, a company more known as the quality brand for those looking…

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This article originally appeared on Quartz.

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Ahmed Best—the man who brought Jar Jar Binks to life and then faced decades of horrifying harassment for it—shouldn’t have needed a Star Wars redemption arc, but he arguably has had one of a sort in the last few years, beyond a renaissance of prequels re-examination, in the form of Kelleran Beq: the Jedi gameshow host…

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GameStop and other meme stocks surged wildly on Monday morning as Keith Gill returned to social media. The leader of the 2021 meme-stock mania, also known as Roaring Kitty and Deep Fucking Value, sent a single tweet on Sunday night that shook the universe of meme stocks, as their fearless leader signaled a second…

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This article was updated on 5/13/2024 to include Edifier’s QR65 speakers.

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There’s a lot of really interesting things going on in Fallout’s first season, but few are as immediately fascinating as Walton Goggin’s mysterious hunter—known only to the inhabitants of the Wasteland as “The Ghoul,” but to audiences as the pre-war actor Cooper Howard. It’s a mystery that works thanks to an…

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Google’s Pixel releases are giving a major case of deja vu. I bought the Pixel 8 in October, but the Pixel 8a feels like nothing more than a reprise, save for the camera hardware and a few other bits. This speaks to Google’s slightly confusing trajectory regarding its hardware. As a two-time buyer of the first-tier…

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OpenAI is gearing up for a much-anticipated spring update to GPT-4 and ChatGPT on Monday, and multiple reports are pointing to voice as the next frontier for Sam Altman’s AI company. On Friday’s episode of the All-In podcast, Altman indicated that voice-based AI systems, much like in the 2013 film “Her,” could be a…

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

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