Microsoft built an AI-powered iOS app to help you learn Chinese

Language-learning apps are nothing new, with offerings from MIT and Duolingo ready to teach you a new way to communicate right on your phone. Now Microsoft is looking to teach you Chinese with a free new AI-powered iOS app.

The idea here is to provide users with a way to practice the Chinese language in the absence of real-life communicative partners. “You think you know Chinese, but if you meet a Chinese person and you want to speak Chinese, there is no way you can do it if you have not practiced,” said Microsoft’s Yan Xia in a blog post. “Our application addresses this issue by leveraging our speech and natural language processing technology.” There’s no word on plans to expand to other languages, but it’s not hard to see such an app helping you learn to converse in different tongues, too.

The app uses various AI tools like deep neural networks that are able to figure out what you’re trying to say and then evaluate your pronunciation. The AI has been trained on data from native Chinese speakers as well as Microsoft’s text-to-speech technology. As you use the app, you’ll get scored on your speaking ability and highlighted words that you need to work on, plus sample audio to hear how the words are actually pronounced. So far, the app has separate systems for beginners and intermediate learners to better help you move forward from your level of expertise. “The app will work with you as a language learning partner,” Xia said in the post. “It will chat with you and give you feedback based on what you are saying.”

Source: Microsoft

Blizzard offers more chances to become an ‘Overwatch’ pro

It’s tempting to compete for a spot in the Overwatch League — make it big and you could earn a solid income from your Mercy or Reinhardt skills. But getting there isn’t necessarily easy, and Blizzard thinks it can help. As of March, the studio is expanding Overwatch Contenders (its development league) to cover virtually the entire globe. The existing regional leagues in China, South Korea and Asia-Pacific are becoming Contenders leagues, while there are new Contenders leagues in Australia and South America. Your team will have more chances to prove itself and, hopefully, attract the attention of Overwatch League scouts.

The Open Division, designed for solo queue players, is also giving you a better chance at glory. Whenever a Contenders season ends, the leading four Open Season teams in a given region will be invited to compete in the Contenders Trials (whose first season starts in February) and potentially guarantee a spot in the next season. You don’t have to fully invest yourself in a team to draw attention, in other words.

It’s no shocker as to why Blizzard would do this. A more direct path to paid competition might not only encourage more Overwatch play, but lure players who would otherwise stick to third-party leagues. It’s hard to knock the move, though, as it could foster eSports interest among gamers who’d otherwise be daunted or might not realize that pro play was an option.

Source: Overwatch League

Amazon’s ‘The Last Post’ will premiere in the US on December 22nd

Amazon has announced that Prime Video will be the exclusive streaming platform in the US of the six-part series The Last Post, which recently aired in the UK on BBC One. The show takes place during the mid-1960s in current-day Yemen where, at the time, the British were still occupying the colony of Aden. The Last Post tells the story of the Royal Military Police and their families stationed in Aden around the time that citizens of the region began to rise up against British imperialism.

The series is loosely based on the childhood memories of The Night Of producer Peter Moffat whose father was an officer in the Royal Military Police. It stars Jessica Raine (Call the Midwife), Jessie Buckley (War and Peace), Amanda Drew (Broadchurch), Jeremy Neumark Jones (Denial), Ben Miles (Coupling) and Stephen Campbell Moore (History Boys). It will debut on Amazon Prime Video on December 22nd in the US and you can check out the trailer below.

White House reportedly considering personal phone ban for staff

Bloomberg reports today that the White House is considering a ban on personal phone use among its staff. According to anonymous sources, the ban has been proposed as a security measure not as an action against press leaks. However, some staff are concerned that because the White House already blocks websites like Gmail and Google Hangouts, this move would wholly isolate them from friends and family during the work day. Further, if staff instead use their government-issued phones for personal use, some worry about those calls being archived and made public.

Phones have been a bit of an issue in the White House. In October, Politico reported that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had been using a compromised personal phone, which might have been breached by outside parties as early as December of last year. And President Trump has also come under fire for using his personal, unsecured smartphone over his government-issued one as well as for discussing classified material in the public Mar-a-Lago dining room while guests snapped photos with their phones and his dinner guests and aides reviewed classified documents while using their phone flashes as reading lights.

The proposed ban on personal phones hasn’t been adopted yet and as Bloomberg reports, if it is enacted, it’s currently unclear when that would happen and to whom it would apply.

Via: Bloomberg

Cyber Monday 2017: Amazon Has $100 App Store and iTunes Gift Cards for $85

Amazon has extended a sale from Black Friday into Cyber Monday, offering you the chance to buy a $100 App Store and iTunes Gift Card for $85 with the promo code ITUNES15. This limited promotion can be applied to any iTunes gift card priced at $100 or more, so you also can get $15 off $150 and $200 cards sold by Amazon’s ACI Gift Cards Inc. storefront. There is a limit of one card per customer as well.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

You can specify any email address to be the recipient for the card, as well as a date closer to Christmas or any other holiday, making it easy to send the gift card as a present to someone this season.

Amazon’s offer is the only leftover iTunes gift card deal from Black Friday, and not many other deals in this area have surfaced today. For a longer list of Cyber Monday sales, check out our full roundup on the shopping event, as well as a particularly good deal on last year’s MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

Tag: Cyber Monday
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iPhone X Availability Improving at Apple Stores Around the World

Just over three weeks after the iPhone X launched, availability at Apple’s retail stores is steadily improving around the world.

Apple’s in-store availability tool reveals that the iPhone X is available for walk-in customers to purchase today in several major cities in the United States, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, although supplies vary by exact carrier, storage, and color.

Apple analyst Gene Munster, in a research note with Loup Ventures, said iPhone X availability jumped to 16 percent over the past seven days, compared to just two percent in the week prior. The data is based on daily monitoring of roughly 50 percent of Apple’s stores in the United States.

Likewise, in Canada, select iPhone X configurations are available today at Apple stores in major metropolitan areas such as Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Québec City, Toronto, and Vancouver.

A spot check of iStockNow.com revealed limited iPhone X availability for same-day pickup at Apple stores in Australia and Turkey as well, but supplies fluctuate throughout the day. Many stores receive new stock around 6 a.m. local time each day.

Apple’s supply chain has addressed issues with iPhone X production, according to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, so in-store inventories should continue to increase. Likewise, iPhone X orders placed on Apple.com are now estimated to ship in just 1-2 weeks, down from 5-6 weeks on launch day.

We still recommend calling your local Apple store ahead of time to confirm iPhone X availability, as supplies continue to sell out rather quickly.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
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Bitdefender Box 2 is bigger and bolder than its older brother

Pre-orders for the standalone Bitdefender Box 2 security solution and router have now opened up, offering consumers a discounted window of opportunity during which they can reserve the powerful security hardware. The new system bundles home management, parental controls, and malware protection in a hardware package that’s backed up by a year’s subscription to Bitdefender Total Security 2018.

Although we weren’t hugely impressed with the original Bitdefender Box when it debuted in 2015, this new version looks very different from its predecessor. It’s much bigger, with a large vertical footprint that contrasts heavily with the first Box’s design. The new Box 2 is said to be much more secure, too, helping to shore up the defenses of your internet of things devices and your home network itself.

Inside the hefty shell, the Box 2 incorporates a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor running at 1.2GHz, with 1GB of DDR3 memory and 4GB of onboard storage. It supports the latest Wi-Fi standards with MU-MIMO. All of that is designed to power its protective measures. Although the Box 2 can function as a standalone router (these are our favorites), it is being marketed more as a supplementary device than an entirely self-contained networking solution.

Whatever configuration you use it in though, Bitdefender claims that the Box 2 incorporates exploit prevention, anomaly protection, and brute-force protections, all through automated active monitoring of your home network. For more manual control over what your network can access, Box 2 includes powerful parental controls, letting you manage internet time and content, as well as look for anything which could be seen as cyberbullying or online predation.

Bitdefender’s Box 2 is also said to actively protect your network by continually scanning for vulnerabilities. If a new hardware or software installation could provide a new attack vector for hackers, it will let you know. This goes for devices on any platform, whether they’re Windows machines, iOS or Android mobile devices, or running MacOS.

Some of those protections even extend to when you aren’t in the home. The Box 2’s app will continue to monitor your devices and connections wherever you are. That goes both ways, with parents able to look at all the same reports and access the same controls, no matter where they go.

Bitdefender has all of this available to pre-order now at the pre-launch discount price of $200. When the Box 2 starts shipping out and officially goes on sale on December 6, its price will rise to $250.

Snapchat is assisting your search for the perfect filter with ‘computer vision’

Finding the perfect Snapchat filters will soon get a bit easier. Snapchat recently confirmed that the app now uses “computer vision” to recognize what’s in the photo. Once the app recognizes what’s there, Snapchat displays suggested filters based on what that photo contains, turning up pet puns for a photo of Fido or tasty graphics for food photos.

The feature is first launching in a handful of common categories. The app now includes computer vision for recognizing food, pets, sports, and beaches, and Snap Inc. says it is working to expand the object recognition to additional categories. The filter recommendations began rolling out quietly last week, with the company recently mentioning that more categories will be coming in the future.

A photo of a pet, for example, will bring up a sticker of “it’s a pawty” while a beachfront shot will put an “ocean view” sticker into the top of that filter carousel, and food photos put a sticker for “what diet?” at the forefront.

As Snapchat’s filter options grow, the new features prevent users from having to dig through the options by putting the most relevant filters at the top of the filter options alongside the “smart filters” that add in the date, location, temperature, or speed.

The addition isn’t Snap’s first go-round with computer vision either — the technology already powers options like the ability to search through public photos in Stories and find a photo of a dog even if the word “dog” was never actually used. Snap Inc. has also patented a similar object recognition program that could help boost advertising, with companies paying to have their filter pop up when a user snaps a photo of a related object.

The update comes as Snap Inc. is preparing a major redesign for Snapchat after reporting disappointing financial results.  The company announced a redesign earlier this month, with CEO Evan Spiegel saying that the new design will make Snapchat easier to use. An anonymous source later said that the redesign would be coming on December 4 but Snapchat has not confirmed that information. Snapchat’s user base is currently largely made up of people between the ages 13 and 34 and Spiegel said the redesign is aiming to attract more age groups to the platform, as well as users from more countries.

PlayStation VR dominates third-quarter VR headset sales

A new study from market analyst firm Canalys has found that high-end virtual reality headset sales for the previous quarter have exceeded just over a million units for the first time. Of that number, almost half are PlayStation VR headsets, with Oculus Rift units following up with just over a 20-percent market share. The HTC Vive platform brings up the rear with 16 percent of all headsets sold.

Although virtual reality acceptance in the mainstream gaming space has been slower than some predicted, sales continues to grow month by month and the third quarter of 2017 has seen the biggest growth in top-tier VR yet. During that three-month period, more than a million VR headsets were sold, with almost half of those being PSVR units.

Coming out of the study conducted by Canalys, this data shows a healthy growth in the industry, at least partially driven by recent price cuts. With the Oculus Rift discounted to $400 — $350 in the Black Friday sales — and the HTC Vive squeezing its price down to $600 for its hardware bundle, top-tier virtual reality is more affordable than ever.

“VR adoption in the consumer segment is highly dependent on price, and Oculus’ strategy of lowering prices has definitely helped drive adoption,” said Canalys Research Analyst Vincent Thielke. He went on to highlight how upcoming, affordable, midrange headsets like the Oculus Go and HTC Vive Focus, may serve to expand the market even more in the months to come.

Canalys is also intrigued by the potential of new entrants in the VR marketplace, including headsets supporting Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality platform. There are also new VR headsets from the likes of Pimax which could have a significant impact as they raise the bar for what high-end consumer virtual reality is capable of delivering to users.

A notable absence from this latest study, however, concerns entry-level VR headsets. The Samsung Gear VR, and even more economical devices like the Google Cardboard and its contemporaries, are still the most popular VR headsets. Although lacking many of the features of their higher-end counterparts, they are much more numerous, numbering in the millions at last count.

An estimated $30 billion in Bitcoins may be lost forever

Though there may be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold bullion scattered around the world’s oceans in undiscovered shipwrecks, much more digital coinage may have been lost in the past decade alone. Of the 16.4 million Bitcoins said to be in circulation in the middle of 2017, close to 3.8 million may have been lost. That works out to more than $30 billion.

One of the best features of Bitcoin is its ability to be stored offline on local hardware — so called, “cold storage.” Having a cryptocurrency “wallet” on a hard drive or flash drive means it is protected from being stolen online, but if you lose access to that device, those coins are also lost forever. That’s where the majority of the estimated lost horde of cryptocurrency has gone, with many early miners and investors misplacing the currency before it was ever worth anything.

As it stands, there are said to be some 5 million Bitcoins that are out of circulation (not actively being traded). According to estimations made by Chainalysis, via Fortune, as many as half of those may have gone missing, been lost, or misplaced over the near-nine years that Bitcoin has been active. That works out to around 2.5 million Bitcoins, or just over $20 billion at the time of writing.

That is a relatively high estimation of how many of those coins have been lost, with more conservative estimates pegging it at more like 30 percent, or around 1.5 million Bitcoins. But that would still work out to just under $13 billion.

A further million coins are said to be lost, due to them being the original Bitcoins that pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto mined before disappearing. Although it’s always possible that he will re-emerge and claim his fortune, it seems more likely at this stage that his $8 billion-plus fortune will remain untouched.

Chainalysis also estimates that some two percent of all Bitcoins traded throughout 2017 so far were lost, too. That accounts for a billion dollars’ worth of the currency. Although such losses are expected to continue, they should gradually become rarer occurrences, due to the added care owners are likely to take with their cryptocurrency since its value spike throughout the year.