Next-gen AI-powered voice translator previewed by Vasco at CES - Fox Business - Translation

Making Money panelists Shah Gilani and Scott Martin reveal how Apple can craft excitement in the marketplace and break down the price of oil.

Vasco Electronics previewed its next-generation live voice translation device that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and can provide live translations of nearly 50 languages to your ear.

The company, headquartered in Poland, previewed the device at CES 2024 in Las Vegas last week. The Vasco Translator E1 uses earpieces that are connected to a phone app and can translate 49 languages in real-time with an audio translation that someone can hear through the earpiece. The translation also appears as text in the app for convenience.

The Translator E1 can accommodate conversations with up to 10 people when a mobile app is used. The tool allows each user to speak their own language and hear the response in that language. The earbuds fit over the ear, rather than in the ear, for hygienic purposes, and it can be used with two earpieces or one earpiece and a phone.

Tomasz Stomski, Vasco’s chief product officer, told FOX Business at CES that the E1 was designed to be more user-friendly for longer conversations than its Translator V4, which is more useful for a "fast conversation, like if you’re traveling or need to get something done quickly."

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

The Vasco E1 Translator earbud. (Courtesy of Vasco Electronics)

"We decided to go for something that is more natural so you don’t have to hold the device in your hand, you can put it on the table and put on your earbuds and set it to touchless translation mode and have a conversation," Stomski said.

Vasco currently sells the Translator V4, which is a handheld device that resembles a smartphone and provides live translation of conversations and can also be used to translate text from images taken by the user. The V4 can provide speech translation in 76 languages, in addition to photo translations in 108 languages and text translation in 90 languages – though it is most useful for translating shorter conversations.

Stomski said Vasco wants the translation tools to meet the needs of customers who travel regularly, as well as those who are ex-pats, working in international teams or are in families that have language barriers due to relatives being from different countries.

SAMSUNG UNVEILING ‘NEW ERA OF MOBILE AI,’ S24 LINEUP DURING GALAXY UNPACKED EVENT

The Vasco E1 Translator with earbuds in the case. (Courtesy of Vasco Electronics / Fox News)

The Vasco Translator E1 is expected to be available in the U.S. in the second quarter of this year, while it will be available this March in Europe. It’s also compatible with the Translator V4 for users who wish to use both devices.

Stomski explained that AI is used to help identify human voices to filter out background noise that could otherwise interfere with the live translation or the transcript generated by the devices.

"All of the translations there are connections with AI of course, but starting with the earbud – here we’ve got a model that helps us to recognize the human voice because we’re checking what is going into the microphone and we’re checking with the AI model if this is a human voice or this is like a car or a dog," he said.

The Vasco V4 Translator. (Courtesy of Vasco Electronics / Fox News)

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

Stomski added that the device uses several models from different providers, in addition to in-house solutions to cross-check speech translations as well as the image-to-text translations that Vasco’s tools can provide.

"We are constantly checking the quality of the translation for every pair because we cannot do it in a common language," he explained. Those translations are sent to Vasco’s cloud, which helps semi-automatically test the roughly 6,000 pairs of languages covered by the devices before those results are checked by humans.

Adblock test (Why?)

The Gift of Words: Rotary Club donates dictionaries - The Post and Courier - Dictionary

Members of the Kingstree Rotary Club recently distributed dictionaries to third grade students at Greeleyville Primary School, Kenneth Gardner Leadership Academy, and Hemingway Elementary School as part of The Rotary Dictionary Project, nationwide effort to provide young students with their own dictionaries.

Photo Provided

A group of third graders received a special gift recently—the gift of words. The Rotary Club of Kingstree has continued its ongoing charitable donations in support of education with its annual donation of Merriam-Webster dictionaries to third grade students at Greeleyville Primary School, Kenneth Gardner Leadership Academy, and Hemingway Elementary School.

Photo Provided

The Rotary Dictionary Project is a nationwide effort to provide young students with their own dictionaries. Members of the Kingstree Rotary Club distributed the dictionaries to Williamsburg County School District third grade students the week of January 16.

Rotary members brought joy to the children’s faces when they learned the book was theirs to keep making the project worthwhile.

Adblock test (Why?)

In Free Florida, the Dictionary Is Dangerous to Your Children - FlaglerLive.com - Dictionary

A simple pleasure Florida tends to deny its schoolchildren. “Out to Lunch,” above, is by J. Seward Johnson Jr. (© FlaglerLive)

Book bans are right up there with censorship, the desecration of cultural artifacts and the whitewashing of history, all of which Florida now does routinely in the name of development and white nationalist purity. But I admit: I had a lot of fun reading over at least parts of the list of 1,600 books the Escambia County school system has removed from shelves, supposedly to review and potentially ban. 

Librarians review books as a matter of course. They are professionals trained in the art of calibrating the right books to the right school audiences. So there’s nothing wrong with reviewing books along those lines. The problem is that those books have already gone through that process. Most have been on the shelves for years. Many are classics, some are dictionaries–dictionaries–and one of them is the Guinness Book of World Records. 

I don’t know what could possibly be objectionable in the Guinness book. Maybe the pitchforks of Escambia thought the book encourages children to drink dark beer. Apparently the book does give some attention to animal species, not human unfortunately, that can copulate “more than 50 times in the same three to four hours, all with the same female,” or female chimpanzees copulating with eight different males in 15 minutes. But I’m not sure how that’s sexually explicit. To me it reads more like the set up to one of those brain-twisting math questions on the SAT. 

Among the less esoteric rejections, we see titles by Walt Whitman, Sandra Day O’Connor Thurgood Marshall, just about every book by Maya Angelou, even though that famous passage of her getting raped when she was 9, in I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, is all of two lines, rendered in metaphor: “Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart.” And that’s it. 

Many titles that have been making headlines for the past two years are on an earlier Escambia list that led to a federal lawsuit. But that’s old news. Silencing Ann Frank’s Diary isn’t. Now we’re into not just censorship, but the erasure of people and memories, the erasure of man’s inhumanity toward particular people and races, as is the case with the removal of books by William Faulkner, Alice Walker and Toni Morison. 

By the time you find that two books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the greatest storyteller of the last century, have been removed, it’s no longer surprising that the Encyclopedia of World Costumes is also on the ban list. No doubt, Escambia schools think that children could become gay by spending time looking at frou frous. It’s absurd enough for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, except that that title is banned in Escambia, too. 

You can argue that book bans in the age of Amazon, Google and universal libraries are irrelevant. To some extent that’s true. Those of us with means can acquire any book we please, often overnight. But books aren’t cheap, and the days of online bargains are pretty much over. Besides: Americans don’t read much anymore and don’t even know what their children should read. So for a big segment of our school population, school libraries are it. Students either get their books there, or they don’t get them. Their cultural literacy is disproportionately at the mercy of what librarians put on shelves–what librarians are allowed to put on shelves. 

Most reading discoveries are by browsing–the serendipity of finding a great book, discovering a writer who seems to speak to you personally, a story that makes you feel less alone, less of the  freak everyone else makes you think you are, more of the human being that you have always been but are afraid to acknowledge. Those are the books that can make a life-changing–a life-affirming–difference in children’s lives. Those are the books that are being removed. 

A few people who call themselves parents but are really frustrated bullies who want everyone else to lead the miserable lives they do, at least when they’re not engaging in threesomes, have successfully made black holes of Florida’s school and classroom libraries and further marginalized slews of children whose one solace might have been that one book. 

It may not have been any one of the 23 Stephen King books banned, or the Grisham and Crichton and Koontz and maybe even the Picoults books that are literature’s equivalent of that gluey orange sauce McDonalds slathers on its burger imitations. But who are we to say what strikes a chord with a child’s imagination, what speaks to a child’s sense of wonder and self-discovery? Right now in Florida we may no longer ask the question. The bans have it. The rest is irrelevant. 

Orange County Public Schools spent $400,000 in tax dollars in overtime pay to media specialists to draw up their own list of nearly 700 titles now found unacceptable (including Milton’s Paradise Lost and the one regained, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and of course Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, now a metaphor for public schools, but also, thank heavens, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead: no one will miss her felony-worthy prose). Public money, spent to silence history and deny students literary fun or discovery on the bogus, never-tested assumption that these books harm their readers.

Flagler County went through its own round of deshelving libraries, though it’s done so in more pernicious ways. We don’t really know how many books have been banned because most have been “weeded.” That’s a deceptive term that pretends that removing a book because it’s not read as much or may have been bought by mistake is not book-banning. It is. Teachers and librarians would rather err on the side of caution, otherwise they’d get sued or fired. So you can be certain that whatever happened in Escambia is happening in Flagler and across the state. 

And that’s what they call Free Florida. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

Adblock test (Why?)

In Free Florida, the Dictionary Is Dangerous to Your Children - FlaglerLive.com - Dictionary

A simple pleasure Florida tends to deny its schoolchildren. “Out to Lunch,” above, is by J. Seward Johnson Jr. (© FlaglerLive)

Book bans are right up there with censorship, the desecration of cultural artifacts and the whitewashing of history, all of which Florida now does routinely in the name of development and white nationalist purity. But I admit: I had a lot of fun reading over at least parts of the list of 1,600 books the Escambia County school system has removed from shelves, supposedly to review and potentially ban. 

Librarians review books as a matter of course. They are professionals trained in the art of calibrating the right books to the right school audiences. So there’s nothing wrong with reviewing books along those lines. The problem is that those books have already gone through that process. Most have been on the shelves for years. Many are classics, some are dictionaries–dictionaries–and one of them is the Guinness Book of World Records. 

I don’t know what could possibly be objectionable in the Guinness book. Maybe the pitchforks of Escambia thought the book encourages children to drink dark beer. Apparently the book does give some attention to animal species, not human unfortunately, that can copulate “more than 50 times in the same three to four hours, all with the same female,” or female chimpanzees copulating with eight different males in 15 minutes. But I’m not sure how that’s sexually explicit. To me it reads more like the set up to one of those brain-twisting math questions on the SAT. 

Among the less esoteric rejections, we see titles by Walt Whitman, Sandra Day O’Connor Thurgood Marshall, just about every book by Maya Angelou, even though that famous passage of her getting raped when she was 9, in I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, is all of two lines, rendered in metaphor: “Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart.” And that’s it. 

Many titles that have been making headlines for the past two years are on an earlier Escambia list that led to a federal lawsuit. But that’s old news. Silencing Ann Frank’s Diary isn’t. Now we’re into not just censorship, but the erasure of people and memories, the erasure of man’s inhumanity toward particular people and races, as is the case with the removal of books by William Faulkner, Alice Walker and Toni Morison. 

By the time you find that two books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the greatest storyteller of the last century, have been removed, it’s no longer surprising that the Encyclopedia of World Costumes is also on the ban list. No doubt, Escambia schools think that children could become gay by spending time looking at frou frous. It’s absurd enough for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, except that that title is banned in Escambia, too. 

You can argue that book bans in the age of Amazon, Google and universal libraries are irrelevant. To some extent that’s true. Those of us with means can acquire any book we please, often overnight. But books aren’t cheap, and the days of online bargains are pretty much over. Besides: Americans don’t read much anymore and don’t even know what their children should read. So for a big segment of our school population, school libraries are it. Students either get their books there, or they don’t get them. Their cultural literacy is disproportionately at the mercy of what librarians put on shelves–what librarians are allowed to put on shelves. 

Most reading discoveries are by browsing–the serendipity of finding a great book, discovering a writer who seems to speak to you personally, a story that makes you feel less alone, less of the  freak everyone else makes you think you are, more of the human being that you have always been but are afraid to acknowledge. Those are the books that can make a life-changing–a life-affirming–difference in children’s lives. Those are the books that are being removed. 

A few people who call themselves parents but are really frustrated bullies who want everyone else to lead the miserable lives they do, at least when they’re not engaging in threesomes, have successfully made black holes of Florida’s school and classroom libraries and further marginalized slews of children whose one solace might have been that one book. 

It may not have been any one of the 23 Stephen King books banned, or the Grisham and Crichton and Koontz and maybe even the Picoults books that are literature’s equivalent of that gluey orange sauce McDonalds slathers on its burger imitations. But who are we to say what strikes a chord with a child’s imagination, what speaks to a child’s sense of wonder and self-discovery? Right now in Florida we may no longer ask the question. The bans have it. The rest is irrelevant. 

Orange County Public Schools spent $400,000 in tax dollars in overtime pay to media specialists to draw up their own list of nearly 700 titles now found unacceptable (including Milton’s Paradise Lost and the one regained, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, and of course Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, now a metaphor for public schools, but also, thank heavens, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead: no one will miss her felony-worthy prose). Public money, spent to silence history and deny students literary fun or discovery on the bogus, never-tested assumption that these books harm their readers.

Flagler County went through its own round of deshelving libraries, though it’s done so in more pernicious ways. We don’t really know how many books have been banned because most have been “weeded.” That’s a deceptive term that pretends that removing a book because it’s not read as much or may have been bought by mistake is not book-banning. It is. Teachers and librarians would rather err on the side of caution, otherwise they’d get sued or fired. So you can be certain that whatever happened in Escambia is happening in Flagler and across the state. 

And that’s what they call Free Florida. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

Adblock test (Why?)

[Galaxy Unpacked 2024] Breaking Language Barriers: Trying Out AI-Powered Live Translate on Galaxy S24 Ultra in ... - Samsung - Translation

Whether you’re in a business meeting, traveling abroad or making a restaurant reservation, communication is key. On January 17, when Samsung Electronics released its latest lineup of Galaxy products powered by Galaxy AI, the company also unveiled a personal interpreter right in your pocket. With the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s Live Translate feature, talking to anyone on the phone in another language is suddenly easier — no matter what kind of device the other person is using.

Samsung Newsroom put the Live Translate feature to the test with a call to a local modern Italian-American restaurant in downtown San Jose, California. Here’s the firsthand experience and how this innovation is breaking down language barriers and transforming the way users communicate.

Live Translate: Connect With People, Places and Cultures Any Time, in Any Language

To make the reservation, a Korean editor from Samsung Newsroom first pressed the Live Translate button on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, then dialed the number. Once she connected with a restaurant employee, an automated message announced, “Hello. This call is being translated and live captioned.”

▲ Samsung Newsroom called the restaurant using Live Translate to make a reservation.

“Hello, how may I help you?” replied a restaurant hostess on the other line. The Newsroom editor responded in Korean, “Hello! I’d like to make a reservation for this Thursday at 1:30 PM.” After pausing to listen to the translation, the restaurant asked for the total number of people. The editor continued in Korean, “Six. Can I make a reservation for a window seat?” The Live Translate feature then seamlessly conveyed this message to the restaurant employee in English.

▲ Live Translate feature on the Galaxy S24 Ultra. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other line — Galaxy S24 Ultra’s Live Translate feature works with all phone types.

※ GIF speed has been adjusted for better legibility.

The Galaxy S24 Ultra’s Live Translate feature supports up to 13 languages at launch, providing both audio and onscreen text translations of conversations. It remembers the language used for each person contacted, automatically setting it for future calls. Plus, it also functions seamlessly across all phone types — even a landline. When the Korean editor first tried it out, she was amazed at how immediately the language barrier disappeared.

On the day of the reservation, Samsung Newsroom visited the restaurant to sit down with the restaurant’s general manager, Drianna Cardarelli, and asked about her thoughts on Live Translate for the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

▲ Samsung Newsroom snapped picture-perfect photos of their lunch with the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

“I think it’s great for hospitality, especially for guests who don’t speak English,” shared Drianna. “I think that it will help a lot of guests feel more comfortable calling the restaurant with questions rather than reaching out to us through email or our online reservation platform.”

She saw Live Translate as a valuable tool for situations when a phone call is simpler than using an online platform, whether it’s for event planning or inquiring about job opportunities. “Sometimes, we have a lot of Spanish-speaking guests,” Drianna explained. “It would be great if they could just bypass asking to talk to someone fluent in Spanish. They can avoid having any issues at all — language barriers, gone.”

▲ Samsung Newsroom snapped picture-perfect photos of their lunch with the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Live Translate is one of the many features of the Galaxy S24 Ultra powered by on-device AI, which keeps phone calls private and secure. What’s more, this on-device AI processes calls quickly, even compared to the online version.

Galaxy AI is expanding possibilities for Galaxy users, empowering them to connect and create in new ways. Live Translate for the Galaxy S24 Ultra is helping break down boundaries to help everyone communicate seamlessly in other languages. Stay tuned to Samsung Newsroom for more updates on how Samsung is ushering in a new era of mobile AI.

Adblock test (Why?)

Samsung Galaxy S24's language translation feature works in WhatsApp - SamMobile - Samsung news - Translation

Two days ago, Samsung unveiled several new AI-powered features for the Galaxy S24 series. Most of these features are powered by powerful NPUs inside the Exynos 2400 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 For Galaxy processors inside those phones. Some of those features include real-time language translation during voice calls and messages.

While the company showcased language translation for text messages via the built-in Messages app, it looks like it also works with WhatsApp.

Galaxy AI's language translation feature on Galaxy S24 also works with WhatsApp

The real-time language translation feature from the Galaxy AI suite also appears to be working on WhatsApp (via @sondesix), which is a third-party messaging app. As you can see in the image above, messages in Korean are being translated into English and vice versa. It isn't clear if WhatsApp has implemented the live language translation for the Galaxy S24 or if the feature works on all the messaging apps.

Samsung said that language translation can work in real-time on-device (without the need for an active internet connection) on the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+, and Galaxy S24 Ultra. And the speed of language processing seems to be pretty fast from what we've seen during the Galaxy Unpacked event. This feature has also been present on Pixel smartphones for the past year, and it could come to more phones with powerful NPUs onboard.

You can watch all the other AI-powered features in our in-depth One UI 6.1 vs One UI 6.0 video below.

Samsung has announced that some of those AI-powered features could come to existing high-end Galaxy smartphones in the first half of this year. However, the company hasn't revealed which features will be released to existing devices as a part of the One UI 6.1 update.

Adblock test (Why?)

The (Abridged) Dictionary of Maxxing - Yahoo Life - Dictionary

Our editors independently select the products we recommend. We may earn a commission on items bought through our links.

In Arrival, Amy Adams, a linguist and alien whisperer, says that language is the foundation of a civilization, the glue that holds people together, and the first weapon drawn in a conflict. If you immerse yourself in a language, she tells a pre-Jeremy Renner app Jeremy Renner, you can actually rewire your brain.

Today's Top Deals

It’s the kind of thing you consider after diving into the world of “maxxing,” where, on the other side, all nouns and verbs become things to be maxed, or else things that resist maxing. (As the suffix implies, it deal in extremes – you can both “nutrientmax” and “starvemax,” for instance, but there’s no way to “maxx” having a sensible and well-balanced diet.) Here are a few definitions for Maxxinista literacy:

Looksmaxxing – Dr. Monica Kieu, a California-based plastic surgeon describes  “looksmaxxing” on TikTok as “an online trend where people are looking to maximize their looks,” adding that at face value, it “seems pretty benign, because everyone wants to look good.” It can include taking care of your skin and working out, making it the big umbrella term for other “maxxings.”

But it can get extreme, like with the “mewing” craze, which involves pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth to change your jawline. Some people tape their mouths shut, and others are bone smashing, which Kieu calls an “absurd and dangerous trend… you’re literally beating your face with a hammer or some sort of heavy object to somehow reshape your face.”

Gymmaxxing – “It takes years to build a truly chiseled physique. It’s not something that can take a handful of months. You have to put in the work,” one Redditor says – so “gymmaxxing” seems to just be … pulling a Chris Pratt, just without the Marvel personal trainer money. Puts a name to the kind of gym bro mindset that’s existed as long as Planet Fitness has had a rocket to earth, but okay.

Anglemaxxing – Far less extreme than the others can get (albeit, still probably not the healthiest thing, body image-wise), because it’s just about taking photos at the right angle. Tell your parents and their forehead-dense selfies about it.

Skincaremaxxing – Using a dermaroller? Retinol? Sunscreen? Moisturizer? Exactly what it implies … sunscreen’s a good idea for everyone, but you probably don’t need to pay for, say, topical collagen or beaded exfoliants.

Shavemaxxing – Some people are promoting shaving the mug. Imagine broaching that to the Hipster Beard Community ten years ago.

Stylemaxxing – Also kind of self-explanatory, also not nearly as potentially harmful as the other ones related to “looksmaxxing,” unless you refinance your home to buy Tabis or stick up a Nordstrom.

Starvemaxxing – Extreme fasting; please eat normally.

Moneymaxxing – Not so much the pursuit of money, but the belief that having money will free you from inceldom? As opposed to looks?

Exposuremaxxing – “Female founder of Bumble became a billionaire via her dating app but where did she meet the man she married? On her app? NO, on a skiing trip in the Alps,” one X user proselytizes. “Introduced by a mutual friend. Most high impact action still happens IRL. You need to be exposure maxxing in 2024.” It seems to mean… putting yourself out there?

Therapymaxxing – Okay, here’s an unequivocally good one: writer Jeremy Jules advocates for not hiding things from your therapist, so you’re not actually wasting your time in therapy. A+.

Mad Maxx Fury Road – An all timer of a blockbuster!

More Top Deals from SPY

Best of SPY

Adblock test (Why?)