Ashneer Grover post-poverty-remark video: Former Shark Tank India judge Ashneer Grover who said he doesn’t like to “see poverty in films” during a recent appearance on The Ranveer Show, is now oozing elitism after he explained how the “Ameeron ki dictionary” (dictionary for the rich) completely does away with the traditional ABC phonics in a viral video with influencer Harshita Gupta. It’s “A for Armani, B for Balenciaga” and a series of ultra-luxurious brand names through to Z.
TCL — a company best known for its affordable TVs — has been trying to establish a foothold in the VR and AR space. Its latest and likely boldest entry comes in the form of the RayNeo X2, a pair of augmented reality smart glasses that can, among other features, translate conversations in real time.
Journalists recently got a hands on — or heads up — look at the RayNeo X2s at the Consumer Electronics Show that kicked off Thursday in Las Vegas.
TCL's X2s look like regular glasses frames, but hilariously oversized. Still, they're powered by some respectable hardware, running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2 platform that's used in the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset.
The lenses themselves house MicroLED waveguide displays, and if you have bad vision, come equipped with adjustable prescription inserts.
By tapping on the right temple, you can navigate through the X2's menus and activate its translation feature, which can not only translate text you're looking at, but translate and transcript someone you're speaking to, live. According to Scott Stein at CNET, he was able to understand someone speaking to him in Chinese.
The TCL augmented reality glasses can translate literally right before your eyes. They’re also far too big for my head and with a fringe AND a mask, I look just a tad silly. Still super cool #CES2023 pic.twitter.com/KXsdIntPol
— Asha Bee (@ashabeeeee) January 6, 2023
The specs might be an impressive stepping stone, but their clunky size indicates that AR glasses still have a way to go before you don't feel ridiculous wearing them. As Engadget notes, it's a little worrying that a company like TCL, which specializes in displays, couldn't get its own any smaller.
However, that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Google's unnamed prototype AR glasses that also boast a similar live translation feature, which Google teased last summer. Unlike the X2s, Google's glasses are less feature-packed, and can't capture images. Maybe the ideal sweet-spot for AR is not having the glasses do everything, and just having them be good at a few things, if that means they won't need to be absurdly large.
TCL expects to start rolling outs its glasses to developers by the end of Q1 and is expected to be available to consumers by July, according to Gizmodo.
More on VR and AR: Apple VR Headset Will Apparently Have Display Facing Outward to Show the User's Facial Expressions
A wave of VR and AR headsets and glasses are expected in 2023, arriving from companies including Apple, Sony, HTC and Meta. The number of future hardware players is growing, though -- add TCL to that mix.
You've probably heard of TCL as a TV manufacturer. TCL does a lot more than that, including phones. The Chinese electronics company has already dabbled in several generations of display-enabled glasses. Now, TCL is demonstrating two new prototype VR and AR headsets that show where things could go next: these devices were announced alongside a continually-evolving version of TCL's already-available NXTWear display glasses I tried a few years ago.
Neither the VR headset nor AR glasses are actual coming-to-market products, but both show clear paths where TCL, a maker of displays, could gain footholds. TCL is already a partner with Qualcomm on AR and VR devices, and both the VR and AR glasses I tried use the several-years-old Snapdragon XR2 that's in the Meta Quest 2.
TCL announced its move into AR glasses last January, but the new AR hardware, plus a surprise VR headset, is now actually available to demo in Las Vegas. I gave all three devices a test drive in a hotel suite ahead of this year's CES.
From a certain angle, these glasses look almost normal. Note the waveguides in the lenses, though, which help project the displays.
Scott Stein/CNETThe RayNeo X2 AR glasses, using built-in waveguides into the lenses that project Micro LED displays that hover in front of both eyes, look borderline normal from certain angles. The still-bulky glasses don't use Qualcomm's recently announced AR glasses-optimized AR1 chipset yet, but you could imagine they will. Representatives from TCL in Las Vegas confirmed that's eventually the plan, which will likely make these glasses even smaller.
The glasses have prescription inserts that are meant to be used instead of wearing your own glasses underneath. TCL has a wide range of inserts for this pair of glasses, including ones that could come close to my -8.2 myopic vision.
I tried a few simple demos with the glasses, which have their own touchpad control on one arm to navigate and tap through apps, but also support hand tracking (which I didn't get to try). The most impressive is a real-time translation tool that allowed me to understand someone in the room speaking in Chinese to me. However, the live transcription also presents what everyone in earshot is saying, too, including myself. It's reminiscent of what Google is already working on for its own assistive AR glasses project.
Another demo, showing navigation, shows pop-up directions much like what glasses including Google Glass have done. The glasses can also play music through their arms as levels low enough to not be heard by others, reminiscent of Meta's Ray-Ban Stories glasses.
TCL's VR headset looks unremarkable cosmetically, but does have its own prescription-adjusting dials inside: it's meant to be worn without glasses.
Scott Stein/CNETThe TCL NXTWear V VR headset, TCL's concept entry towards making a Quest competitor much like the Pico 4, feels like it still had unpolished tracking and controller movement, but the lightweight design is reminiscent of where headsets are going, and it has color passthrough cameras that could eventually work with mixed reality. It's definitely more compact than the Quest 2, and has what seems like a vivid display… except, I can't quite tell with my eye prescription. Much like the compact HTC Vive Flow VR goggles, this headset is also meant be worn without glasses, and has its own vision-adjusting diopter instead of prescription inserts, but the settings max out at a -7. My nearsightedness is worse. It's a problem future VR and AR headsets still need to solve.
TCL's NXTWear S glasses are really just hardware that projects a fixed but very vivid display mirrored from a phone, PC, or game system.
Scott Stein/CNETTCL also has another more advanced set of NXTWear S display glasses, a portable wearable display that's an improvement on a pair I tried a few years ago. The new model uses a better Micro-AMOLED display showing off a surprisingly vivid hovering screen of whatever they're plugged into, with a display resolution that TCL compares to 49 pixels per degree (translation: It's a limited viewing area, but looks like a full version of your phone display at a retina-resolution-type level of crispness). I connected with a TCL phone over USB-C, trying a new feature that turns the phone into a motion-controlled pointer that casts a line to the floating screen to select buttons and open apps.
Nobody has been able to make true everyday mass-adoption AR glasses work at a large scale yet, although many companies are trying and several already have products available. Qualcomm has already promised that a wave of new AR glasses are coming between 2023 and 2025, and TCL looks to have already shown a hint of what it's aiming for. If the company's VR/AR trajectory looks anything like its success path with TVs, it could be a major player for headset displays over time.
In a country where only 2 percent of the population regularly attend church, one doesn’t expect to find a national debate about the correct translation of John 3:16. And yet, across Norway, news that a forthcoming Bible translation will replace gå fortapt (get lost) with gå til grunne (perish) has roused strong feelings.
“Why change something that is completely understandable?” said one woman in Alta, a town on a fjord on the northern coast.
“Such judgment day and sulphur speeches do not belong in a modern, inclusive church—at least not during funerals,” said an Oslo woman on Facebook. “It adds stones to the burden for relatives.”
But the editors of the forthcoming Bible—commissioned by the Norwegian Bible Society and scheduled for publication in 2024—say they are not surprised. Receiving criticism is part of the process.
“It’s always a controversial thing to translate the Bible,” said Jorunn Økland, a biblical and gender studies scholar on the editorial team. “Whatever you do, it’s going to be controversial.”
The Bible was first translated into Norwegian in the 13th century, when it was published in parallel editions with the then-more-dominant Danish. The first full translation was not released until 1858. And yet, just as with English and German Bibles, the words of Scripture became part of the poetry of the language, a storehouse of images, widely seen as a cultural inheritance. Even those who identify as secular can feel protective of the words of the Bible.
“It still provides many of the symbols and metaphors that create meaning,” said Jenna Coughlin, a professor of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. “When new translations are published, the changes can feel disorienting … even if the theological dimensions aren’t so important.”
According to Coughlin, the Bible is, in some ways, “a public book” in Norway. Christianity, after all, is enshrined in the constitution. An amendment separated church and state in 2012, but the governing document stipulates that Christianity, along with humanism, is the foundation upon which the country is built.
And membership in the Church of Norway remains high. Roughly three out of four people are on the membership rolls, even though the majority are atheist or agnostic. The Bible remains an important “cultural touchstone,” Coughlin said.
Many Norwegians also really like the translation the Bible Society published in 2011. For that edition, biblical scholars and language experts teamed up with renowned authors, who are considered the finest “stylists of modern Norwegian,” including Karl Ove Knausgård, Hanne Ørstavik, and Jon Fosse. The translation became a bestseller the year after publication.
“Its stroke of genius was how it underscored that in a time of increasing secularization, the Bible isn’t out of touch with society,” Økland said. “People may not go to church, but they still consider the Bible their own.”
Despite its popularity, the translation also received criticism, especially from church leaders and scholars. In the past 10 years, editors have collected more than 800 critical comments to consider in a revision.
In 2021, the Norwegian Bible Society tasked a committee to start working on an updated edition. As they started to lay the groundwork for revisions, the editors calculated they would need six or seven years. The Bible Society said they had one.
One way to deal with the compressed timeline, according to Økland, was to forgo a formal consultation process. Instead, the editors published drafts of their work in the fall of 2022 and waited for people to react.
“We invite the reactions as part of the democratic process. It’s a wonderful thing about how we work in Norway,” Økland said.
They got the feedback they were looking for. Responses were swift and vociferous. While some of the readers of Norway’s two Christian newspapers—Dagen and Vårt Land—praised the revisions, many objected to specific choices in very strong terms.
Lutheran Church of Norway bishop Halvor Nordhaug, for example, said he did not like the new edition’s use of the word slave, as in Romans 1:1, which reads, “Paul, a slave of Christ.” That would be hard, he said, to read aloud in a church setting. The majority of Norwegians would recoil from the casual analogy between faith and the horrors of slavery.
Theologian Glenn Øystein Wehus, professor of New Testament at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo, wrote about the translation of John 3:13 in Vårt Land. The get lost wording, he wrote, is clearer and more theologically appropriate. Perish on the other hand, “can lead the mind for many in a completely different direction, namely annihilation (that is, an extinction after death).”
Others objected to the gender-neutral address in some of the epistles, with “brothers and sisters” replacing “brothers.” There was also controversy over the word kjøtt (flesh) replacing menneske (human) in John 1:14.
Perhaps more seriously, some raised questions about the translation process, its transparency, and whether the editors and the Bible Society should have the authority that they claimed for themselves.
Torkild Masvie, bishop of the Lutheran Church in Norway, said the revisions would not be suitable for his small, confessional denomination. The traditionalist Lutherans currently use the 2011 Bible and a conservative 1988 translation known as the Norsk Bibel.
“The Bible Society does important work,” he said, “but if the end result is something that is not helpful for the congregations, then we have a problem.”
Masvie said church leaders should have been involved in the revision. He accused the Bible Society of keeping Norwegians in the dark.
“We should not give our allegiance to the Bible Society when it comes to our liturgy,” Masvie said. “We let them by default decide the language of our liturgy through the translations.”
Masvie’s relatively marginal voice is joined in this critique by some prominent religious leaders. Under the leadership of bishop Erik Varden, the Roman Catholic Church in Norway has grown from 95,000 people to more than 160,000 in just a few years. Vanden has also expressed frustration that neither he nor other Catholic leaders were consulted by the Bible Society.
“You have to listen to those who will use the Bible,” he said. “You can’t just go to the professional circles.”
Øyvind Haraldseid, general secretary of the Bible Society, said in a statement that the editors are listening and all the criticism is being taken into consideration. They will keep flesh in John 1:14, but are still discussing whether or not to use slave instead of servant and have decided to go back to the 2011 translation of John 3:16. The revision will retain the familiar language, that those who believe in God’s only Son will not “get lost.”
Haraldseid also conceded the Bible Society was not as transparent as it could have been in the process, and should have sought out input from more interested parties.
“We will … continue to provide information about the audit through various channels in the future,” he said. “Bible translation is often a struggle with the text to find the right words that communicate the content of the text in our time.”
Unveiled tonight and tomorrow night to over 1,000 technology-focused journalists, analysts, and influencers attending the top two independent media receptions held during the world-renowned CES trade show, Verbum v1.0 will revolutionize real-time conversations, discussions, meetings, events, and online chats between and among individuals who speak different languages.
LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / January 4, 2023 / OneMeta AI™ (OTC PINK:ONEI) today unveiled version 1.0 of Verbum™, a web-based application designed to revolutionize communication between individuals who speak different languages, specifically, up to 82 different languages and 40 different dialects.
Based upon its proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, the Verbum platform provides five previously unavailable near-realtime communication capabilities within one digital tool. These are
Automated Verbal Translation
Verbum translates up to 82 languages and 40 dialects in near-realtime so up to 50 participants can hear the conversation in his/her native language.
Multilingual Closed Captioning
During a Verbum-powered online call or meeting, all participants can read auto-generated closed captioning in their native tongue, regardless of the language spoken by the original speaker.
On-the-Fly Transcription
Transcripts are auto-generated for up to 50 participants/languages for each online call, meeting, or event powered by Verbum.
Instantaneous Translation at On-Site Events
As speakers give presentations, Verbum instantaneously delivers the translated text of their speeches to the attendee's mobile devices in the native language of the device owners.
Multilingual Online Chat
Written customer chat messages are auto-translated by Verbum into a service rep's native language; their replies are then auto-translated back into text in the customer's native tongue.
"In spite of what Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author, Thomas Friedman, wrote in his book ‘The World is Flat,' the reality is that one of the biggest obstacles for ‘flattening' the world are the hundreds of languages and dialects used around the planet," said Saul Leal, CEO and founder of OneMeta AI. "Although many advances have been made with language translation and transcription capabilities, services and technologies around the globe, we still fall woefully short of truly enabling verbal and written communications for pragmatic every day experiences within business and training. Until today.
"With today's unveiling, we at OneMeta AI are unleashing Verbum, a transformative communications platform that changes the way people everywhere can communicate with other individuals in near-realtime. Whether you, your team, or your organization needs to communicate in a one-on-one setting, a one-to-many environment, or a many-to-many discussion, Verbum can handle it across 82 languages and 40 dialects. And with the 120+ languages/dialects we initially support, we are shattering language barriers and miscommunication challenges for over half of the world's population."
Verbum works on any internet-connected smartphone, computer, or tablet. Its verbal and written accuracy ranges between a highly accurate 92-97% on a language-to-language basis but does so in near-realtime speeds of 1 second or less for both verbal translations and written transcriptions.
"No digital tool or person-based service exists today that can come close to matching Verbum's translation and/or transcription capabilities, especially when taken in concert," Leal said. "In fact, it is not unusual for transcription service providers to take weeks to produce a foreign language transcription of a recorded conversation or discussion. By contrast, we do so in roughly a second.
"Additionally, providing an on-the-fly verbal interpretation service comparable to what Verbum offers would require an impossible combination of highly skilled language professionals capable of interpreting Spanish into Japanese, Tagalog into German, English into Afrikaans, or any other language pairing or combination you could think of. In other words, it's not doable. But with the AI and ML engines that power Verbum, it's not only possible, it's available today."
Similarly, Pablo Scotellaro, president of CERTAL, says Verbum dramatically transformed their recent conference at the Organization of American States, in Washington D.C., an event supporting people who speak and read three different languages.
"Language is always one of the biggest challenges of any event where people speak and read different languages," Scotellaro said. "And yet with Verbum, we dramatically changed the communication obstacles and costs we would normally face at such an event. I look forward to working with the OneMeta AI team to address communication difficulties for other events and cross-border situations."
Pricing for Verbum starts at $49.99 per month. For more information, please visit www.verbum.ai.
Journalist, Analyst, and Influencer Test Drives of Verbum
Verbum will be showcased at two highly respected media showcases held tonight and tomorrow during the 2023 CES International trade show: Pepcom's Digital Experience! and ShowStoppers @ CES.
Specifically, the Digital Experience! media reception will be held tonight, 4 January 2023 from 7pm to 10:30pm (PT) in the Julius Ballroom of Caesar's Palace Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The ShowStoppers media reception will be held on Thursday, 5 January 2023 from 6-10pm (PT) in the Grand Ballroom of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.
Additionally, professional journalists, analysts, and/or influencers interested in signing-up for a free one-month evaluation account of Verbum should contact David Politis at david@verbum.ai.
About OneMeta AI
OneMeta AI's proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning tools allow the spoken and written word to be translated and transcribed in approximately one second across of scores of languages. Its first product, Verbum, supports near-realtime web-based conversations, discussions, meetings, events, and online chats in 82 languages and 40 dialects. OneMeta AI: Speak. Hear. Read. Understand.™
OneMeta AI, Verbum, and "Speak. Hear. Read. Understand." are trademarks of OneMeta AI, as are the OneMeta AI and Verbum logos. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
MEDIA CONTACT:
David Politis for OneMeta AI, me@davidpolitis.com, C: +1-801-556-8184
SOURCE: OneMeta AI
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Shaye J.D. Cohen works in an office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Volumes in English, Hebrew, and Aramaic are piled on every available and makeshift surface. Most of the texts are bound in leather, with pages as translucent as onion skins. The speckled pattern of the wool sweater Cohen wears is so similar to the stacks that he appears in near-camouflage at his desk.
Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, had always imagined translating the Mishnah into a single volume. Recently, he and two co-editors completed a daunting, decadelong journey attempting to do just that. The culmination was the publication of The Oxford Annotated Mishnah, presented in three volumes by Oxford University Press.
It is traditionally believed that this ancient body of Jewish law was given to Moses on Mount Sinai alongside the 10 written commandments. The Mishnah, known as the “oral Torah,” was memorized and passed down through recitation for generations, a basis for debate and interpretation meant to be deciphered in community.
It was eventually redacted and written down around 200 C.E., although exactly when and who ultimately edited the text is up for debate. But Cohen knows, “At some point in its history, the Mishnah does get written down as a book.”
Today, this cornerstone of Rabbinic literature is learned in book form — broken down into six sections (sedarim) containing 63 tractates (massekhtaot). Cohen, who has pored over the Mishnah since his own early yeshiva education, affectionately refers to it as “unyielding” in its arguments over Jewish law. The text breaks down in detail how virtually every important aspect of life should be lived, from how an oath is taken or broken, to the offering of charity, or negotiating a marriage contract. Even though it is prescriptive, there is still significant room left for interpretation and debate in conversations that continue to take place in Jewish study halls and synagogues around the world.
Cohen says that unless one has years of Jewish day school education and a strong grasp of Hebrew under the belt, reading the Mishnah can feel as disorienting as breaking into the middle of a complex conversation between strangers.
He set out to change that, somewhat naively, on his own at first. “I thought to myself, ‘Well gee, how hard can this be?’ I started to sit down and do it and after several months working on one tractate, I realized I would probably not live long enough to finish the project.” He switched tacks.
The result is what Cohen refers to as a “a group project.” Totaling 1,256 pages across three volumes, it was published in September and co-edited by Cohen together with Robert Goldenberg and Hayim Lapin. The process took more than a decade, harnessing the translation and interpretation skills of 50 scholars of diverse backgrounds from academic and religious institutions around the world. Sadly, Goldenberg didn’t live to see the publication, and the project proved too expansive to be printed into the single volume that Cohen had envisioned.
“Ultimately, what we tried to accomplish was to make the Mishnah accessible to people for whom it was otherwise inaccessible,” Cohen said. The $645 price tag makes the work less than financially accessible to all, but he expects that a more affordable edition will be on the horizon soon.
Prior translations of note paved the way for this one. Cohen nods to a 1930s edition by Herbert Danby, an Anglican priest working in the British colonial administration in Jerusalem. “He gets a big gold star and credit for giving us the language of the Mishnah,” Cohen concedes. “He’s the first one as far as I know to translate the entire Mishnah into English.”
None of Danby’s thee’s and thou’s appear here. The Oxford Annotated Mishnah is broken into lines that appear more like poetry with sections short enough to be studied on a lunch break and kept in the back of the mind over an afternoon. Cohen said, “We have lots of white space on the page. We try to break down sentences into short phrases. We have running headers in the text to help the reader realize we have a slight change in focus.” Occasional footnotes define obscure words or manuscript variants.
Cohen said that the endeavor easily could have lasted beyond any of the contributing scholars’ lifetimes if they had been determined to reach consensus on every minute concept. Their compromise on a more realistic timeline began with how they approached the annotations.
He briefed contributors, “Our goal is to always provide enough information to the reader so that the text makes sense — and then you stop.” What he didn’t want was a prescriptive commentary that told readers how to understand the Mishnah.
“This isn’t beach reading,” Cohen said, smiling. “The goal is for the intelligent, serious reader to make sense of the text and move on.” He hopes that the translation will open up the Mishnah to scholars of early Christianity and other audiences that have had difficulty finding an entry point to the work.
To achieve that result it wasn’t necessary for each of the contributors to translate the Hebrew words identically. In fact, it is this disagreement, and the conversations that come from it, that make the experience of engaging with the Mishnah exactly what it is today.
Communities around the world have ushered in the New Year, tying up the loose ends of 12 months filled with both great losses and great growth. One, perhaps unsuspecting, 2022 event to reflect on? English dictionary updates. Yes, you read that right.
The Oxford English Dictionary added a total of 18 new LGBTQ-related words in 2022 — an effort to acknowledge the diverse communities of LGBTQ people around the world, their shared and conflicting histories, and the new ways individuals speak to, write about, and organize around their identities.
In its March 2022 update, the Oxford English Dictionary introduced select entries addressing "contemporary themes" and relevant "big issue" topics. These words included common vernacular in climate change discourse, such as "decarbonize," and popularized concepts among social justice advocates (and their detractors) like "critical race theory." The dictionary also added several new LGBTQ-related terms, including "gender-affirming" and "demisexual."
The rest of the year followed suit, with the addition of words like "enby" (a semi-portmanteau of "non-binary") and a shared definition for new words "gender expression" and "gender presentation". The site even added more cultural slang terms, like the LGBTQ definitions of "top" and "bottom." Surprisingly, the acronym "LGBTQ" itself was among a new group of words introduced in September 2022. Better late than never?
In addition, the reference site introduced specific English terms relevant to indigenous perception of gender and sexuality. "Brotherboy” and “Sistergirl” are two new entries referring to gender presentation and identity in Australian Aboriginal communities, while "Muxe" is a gender identity phrase used by Zapotec communities in southern Mexico.
Several of the words also encapsulate the global pushback to LGBTQ existence, an unfortunate marker of 2022. The dictionary now includes additional definitions of "gender-critical" and "TERF", as well as as “anti-gay” and “anti-homosexual."
On top of a wave of updates by online reference site Dictionary.com, among others, the year seemed to receive a hearty academic acknowledgment of ongoing social activism, especially the ways in which marginalized communities influence the rest of the world's vocabulary. Let's see the trend continue in 2023, with greater nuance, and maybe a bit more haste. Just a thought.
