Google expands mission to make automated translations suck less
What started with Mandarin Chinese is expanding to English; French; German; Japanese; Korean; Portuguese and Turkish, as Google has increased the languages its Neural Machine Translation (NMT) handle. “These represent the native languages of around one-third of the world’s population, covering more than 35 percent of all Google Translate queries,” according to The Keyword blog. The promise here is that because NMT uses the context of the entire sentence, rather than translating individual words on their own, the results will be more accurate, especially as time goes on, thanks to machine learning. For a comparison of the two methods, check out the GIF embedded below.
Google says that the ultimate goal is to have all 103 languages in Translate using machine learning. In the immediate future, though, it’s opening up the NMT tech to businesses so they can use it how they see fit. If that increase in users means better translations, then, hey, everyone wins.
Source: The Keyword blog
Twitch chases YouTube with improved upload options
Content creators who have been testing the waters of Twitch’s new Uploads Open Beta can now wade in just a little deeper — the gameplay streaming site has announced a slew of improvements to the manual upload feature, including increased tag character limits, new language settings and, most importantly, much wider support for common video file formats.
In addition to the existing .MP4 support, Twitch users can now upload H.264-encoded videos in MOV, AVI and FLV formats. That’s still half as many as YouTube supports, but it’s a big step forward that should accommodate the needs of most users. Twitch’s upload tools have also been updated to include a default language setting and longer tags — up to 100 characters per individual tags and 500 for all tags total. Finally, Twitch has fixed a ton of small glitches, including a issues that kept users from uploading custom thumbnails and an experience-ruining bug that caused videos to restart near the end of their runtime.
While this update is relatively small, it shows how serious Twitch is about competing with YouTube’s vast library of non-live gaming videos. Twitch also says the improvements are the result of community feedback, and says more user requested features (like bold and italic text formatting in video descriptions) are on the way.
Source: Twitch
Mass Fidelity Rad Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
Two years ago Canadian company Mass Fidelity introduced the $600 Core — a networkable Bluetooth speaker that offered an ultrawide soundstage from a small box. Today, the company announced its follow-up, the Rad (the company stylizes this as “raD”, shorthand for radial dispersion), which uses the same networking system to communicate with other speakers in your house but is available at a lower price. While the Core used “Wave Field Synthesis” to create its stereo trick — which really did work based on our experience — the Rad uses a much simpler “radial” soundfield.
Mass Fidelity says the water-resistant product was a result of customers’ requests for a smaller, more rugged version that could be used outdoors or in a bathroom.The Rad is a little smaller than the Core at 5 inches square by 3 inches high, and it offers a five-speaker array, with four 1.5-inch drivers and a single 3-inch bass driver. The company says it’s capable of a frequency response from 75Hz to 20KHz and can be connected to the Core Wireless Subwoofer for even deeper bass.
The Mass Fidelity Rad (left) and the Core
Mass Fidelity
The Rad connects via Bluetooth to your portable device and is then able to link to up to eight other Rads or Cores in the home via a proprietary 5GHz wireless connection. The unit includes an onboard battery that can provide eight hours of playback as well as charge portable devices over a USB port. If you don’t want to connect over Bluetooth, you can also use the 3.5mm input.
We took a quick listen to the unit — it was apparent that the (more expensive) Core was demonstrably better at creating a stereo field, which the Rad wasn’t able to do convincingly. From our demo, the Rad sounded like a standard Bluetooth speaker
. We would really need to test it to give more specific impressions.
The unit is available for the next month on Indiegogo for $189 and will be sold at retail for $300. It’s expected to launch in April 2017.
This is how the world looks on Facebook’s population maps
Facebook’s Connectivity Lab today released its high-resolution population maps for Malawi, South Africa, Ghana, Haiti and Sri Lanka, with the promise to make more datasets available over the coming months. The population maps are a joint effort between the Facebook Connectivity Lab, Columbia University and the World Bank, though Facebook is interested in the project as part of its effort to launch wireless communication services in rural regions around the globe.
Facebook and friends used software to identify buildings in commercially available satellite images, and then estimated population using census data and a few other surveys and programs. Convolutional neural networks powered a model capable of identifying individual buildings in images from across the world.
“There has been a lot of work recently on neural networks that can recognize individual buildings with very high accuracy, but these models are finely tuned on the local characteristics of the region where they are trained,” the Connectivity Lab’s Tobias Tiecke writes. “We found that these models do not perform well at a global scale with realistic amounts of training data. Therefore, we developed a model that is trained only on binary labeled data — if an image does or does not contain a building — which allows for fast acquisition of the training data.”
Facebook’s preliminary findings suggest that of the 23 countries it studied, 99 percent of the population lives within 63 km of the nearest city, with 44 percent of people living in cities.
“Hence, if we are able to develop communication technologies that can bridge 63 km with sufficiently high data rates, we should be able to connect 99 percent of the population in these 23 countries,” Tiecke says.
Facebook has been toying with a handful of options for rural communication technologies, including the shoebox-size OpenCellular platform and a satellite initiative. The population maps will help Facebook streamline its designs.
“We would love to hear ideas (preferably also in an open manner) on how to bridge this distance in an economically viable fashion for line of sight and non-line of sight use cases, and we hope that by sharing these datasets we will stimulate further research,” Tiecke says.
Source: CIESIN, Facebook Connectivity Lab
Sony suspends player who found a sex organ in ‘Watch Dogs 2’
Ubisoft might pride itself on Watch Dogs 2’s plausible game world, but it looks like the open world title might be a little too realistic… and one player is paying the price for it. Sony suspended NeoGAF forum member Goron2000 from the Sony Entertainment Network (including PSN) after he discovered that at least one of the female character models in the game has a fully rendered vagina. It’s not exactly necessary in a hacking-themed action title where intentional nudity is very rare, is it?
Unlike the “Hot Coffee” scandal that surrounded Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas years ago, this gaffe isn’t inaccessible bits of code buried deep within the title’s back-end, it’s art assets within the final game that seemingly any player could happen upon. According to Sony, the player’s decision to share his discovery online (using the PS4’s built-in sharing and streaming features, no less) violated SEN guidelines forbidding players from sharing “adult or sexual” content.
Ubisoft has promised to patch the sex organ out of the game, and it’s important to note that the temporary ban will last until December 15th. However, the very fact that either happened has left Goron2000 and others scratching their heads. How did this make it past Ubisoft’s certification team? And is Sony right to boot a player who was sharing material the publisher/developer inadvertently approved, leaving a black mark on his account?
Sony hasn’t responded to our request for comment, but the player at the center of the ordeal tweeted that his PSN privileges have been reinstated as of 7:33pm Eastern.
Sony have undone the suspension. We won! I think? They never admitted fault of course. I want to thank everyone for their support today.
— Swizzasaur (@Swizzasaur) November 16, 2016
However, the incident highlights the problems with bending over backwards to include sharing features on consoles. If you’re going to make it easy to livestream or share photos on Twitter, you shouldn’t be surprised if users draw attention to the naughtier material.
Via: The Next Web, Polygon
Source: NeoGAF, Swizzasaur (Twitter)
Google Fiber TV app recommends live shows
Google just illustrated one of the advantages of having an app-centric television service like Fiber TV: you can refine the entire experience through a simple software update. It’s trotting out a new version of the Fiber TV app that will help you find something to watch, even if you’re not sure where to start. It now offers personalized recommendations for live TV, and will show you live sports events. You shouldn’t miss out on that new drama you were meaning to see, and you’ll know if that football game has already started.
The software is also much better at helping you catch up on your backlog. The home screen now emphasizes the next episodes of shows you’re watching, and will recommend DVR recordings to make sure that you don’t miss a beat. Both Android and iOS users should receive the new Fiber TV app in the weeks ahead — the biggest challenge is getting Fiber in the first place.
Source: Google Fiber Official Blog, App Store, Google Play
Results are in: Verizon is still the number one carrier in the U.S.
Third-quarter earning results are in for U.S. wireless carriers.
Fierce Wireless has helped deconstruct the third-quarter 2016 results from research firm Strategy Analytics.
Verizon and AT&T are not only the top two mobile service providers in America, but they’re also neck-and-neck for subscribers on their respective networks. Verizon covers about 143 million people, while AT&T is close behind with a count of 133 million. It’s also worth nothing that AT&T was number one for average revenue per customer, though it’s unclear if that revenue includes the cost of average monthly device payments.
T-Mobile has also jumped into third place with 69 million subscribers, while Sprint is trailing behind with a tally of 59 million. The Magenta carrier has seen a huge number of net additions over the past few years since beginning its Uncarrier campaign.
U.S. Cellular is still holding strong in fifth place with five million subscribers.
Google makes Translate more accurate and sophisticated
Here’s a bit of news that will make your translation prowess a little more sophisticated.
If you’re like me and you check yourself before you make a fool of yourself by butchering someone else’s native tongue, you’ll appreciate the latest update to Google Translate.
Google has announced that it’s launched the next step in making its translation services even better: Neural Machine Translation. This technique translates whole sentences at a time rather than tackling them word-by-word. The results are less robotic, more contextual translations that won’t make a fool of you when you’re overseas.
The Neural Machine Translation engine is now in action for English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.
You can use it with Google Search, the Google Translate app for Android, and on the web. Google said its goal it to eventually roll out Neural Machine Translation to all 103 languages, but until that’s fulfilled, consider contributing to the Translate Community, where you can help review translations. I just helped with Romanian!
Google PhotoScan: Here’s how it turns print photos into digital photos
Google has launched a scanner app for turning your old prints into digital photos that can be saved to the cloud.
The app, called PhotoScan, is now available. The idea is that you can ditch your traditional flatbed scanner, which takes like a year to scan a box of photos, and instead you can open up PhotoScan to speedily get the job done – with no glare or any of the downsides that come with essentially taking a picture of a picture. Here’s everything you need to know about the app.
What is Google PhotoScan?
Google has described PhotoScan as a “new, standalone app from Google Photos that easily scans just about any photo”.
How does Google PhotoScan work?
PhotoScan uses computational photography to detect edges, straighten the image, rotate it to the correct orientation, and remove glare. The app opens to the camera and gives you instructions to position a print photo within the frame. Four dots will appear over the photo. To scan it, move your phone over each of the dots and hold it until the circle is filled in. Once you’ve covered all four dots, the photo is scanned.
The app will scan in seconds – and all the high-quality scanned photos can be saved in one tap to Google Photos (search for “scans” inside Google Photos to find them). Or you can immediately slide the next photo under your phone and repeat the process. Photos are automatically cropped, rotated, and color corrected. Google worked with the Nat & Lo YouTube channel to show how the technology works (above).
Do you need to use Google Photos?
No. You can also save your digital photos to your camera roll or share them to other apps
When will Google PhotoScan be available?
It’s available now for iOS and Android devices.
Is Google PhotoScan free?
Yes. It’s free to download and use.
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