Category: Technology

Microsoft unveiled new plans prospects A feature set to blur the boundaries between traditional emails and more modern chat services.

A post on the company’s roadmap revealed “Outlook for Windows: Feedback,” where users on Windows devices will be able to “like, laugh, cheer, celebrate or drop a tear in response to emails.”

The Email client I hope this allows you to “apply your feelings and see how others react in Outlook emails without sending or receiving incremental emails”, because we’ve all been in a chain of unintended “respond everything”.

Outlook feedback and tapbacks

According to the post, these new tabbacks could arrive as early as this month. Microsoft is currently still in the development and testing phase, and Microsoft still hasn’t released and released this update in Outlook.

Microsoft has already played with feedback in its other communications services. difference Users can actually choose from any number of emojis when a full response isn’t needed.

Microsoft’s upcoming features have been saved in other notes on the site, the same descriptions for web browsers and Macs, as well as iOS and Android, all with the same October 2022 launch target date.

Elsewhere, the company is expanding its reactions to Teams chat users on all devices, unlocking more than 800 emojis.

Despite the popularity of instant messaging-type communication platforms, Microsoft remains committed to trusted email, which continues to occupy its place in external communications and sensitive information.

On the Beta channel, the PC maker plays with cloud settings for email signatures, which are currently limited to Windows devices. This long-awaited feature is designed to preserve signature settings after only one instance, which is good news for hot office workers and users of multiple PCs.

The catalog of PS Plus games for the month of October is good. If you are a big fan of Assassin’s Creed, this is it.

The PSplus October’s game catalog updates include six Assassin’s Creed games, the best of the bunch Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Join the Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed 3 Remastered, and the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles trilogy. side by side Assassin’s Creed Valhallathat’s a lot of love available on PS5.

JRPG fans have a lot in store for October as well, especially if you’re a Dragon Quest fan. Dragon Quest 11 S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition is an excellent choice if you’re looking to scratch the JRPG itch. Dragon Quest Heroes and Dragon Quest Builders games also joined him.

October is the perfect time to beat the ghost, consider downloading scary games like Inside and average If you are after some horror goodness. Finally, GTA Vice City: Definitive Edition completes the major additions to the catalog of October games from PS Plus. Everything will be available for download from it October 18 If you have a PS Plus Extra or Premium tier subscription.

See the full list of October Game Catalog add-ons at Official PlayStation Blog (Opens in a new tab).

PS Plus Extra subscribers have a lot to look forward to this month. There are a lot of great additions here that complement this month’s additions Free PS Plus Games. But then again, PS Plus Premium subscribers seem to be left to dry.

Premium subscribers are getting Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 Remastered this month, which feels a bit tricky considering this is the PS4 Titles that are likely to be downloadable via the additional tier as well. There are some PS3 Casting in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Everyday Shooter, but none for PS1, PS2 or PSP fans.

It looks like a missed opportunity on Sony’s part. It’s Halloween season, so what better time to show some of The best classic Resident Evil gamesOr any of the first four Silent Hill games? Fortunately, PS Plus Premium hosts one A very good PS2 survival horror gamebut October would have been the perfect time to add more.

Additions to PS Plus October Games Catalog

• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – Ultimate Edition (PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4)
• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (PlayStation 4)
• Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (Playstation 4)
• Assassin’s Creed 3 Remastered (PlayStation 4)
• Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China (PS4)
• Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India (PS4)
• Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia (PS4)
• Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition (PS4)
• Dragon Quest Builders (PlayStation 4)
• Dragon Quest Builders 2 (PlayStation 4)
• Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below (PlayStation 4)
• Dragon Quest Heroes 2: Explorer Edition (PlayStation 4)
• Inside (PS4)
• Mediator (PS4)
• Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker (PlayStation 4)
• Hohokum (PS4)
• Yakuza 3 Remastered (PS4)
• Yakuza 4 Remastered (PS4)
• Yakuza 5 Remastered (PS4)
• Limbo (PS4)
• Ultra Street Fighter 4 (PlayStation 4)
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (PS3)
• Everyday Shooter (PS3)

Microsoft announces a premium service for its teams Collaboration platform On the way as part of a phased rollout that will expire in 2023.

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite event, the company demonstrated its premium optional extra features Video conferencing software It will make meetings more personalized, smarter, and more secure.

Teams Premium preview will be available in December 2022. General availability will be available in February 2023, while more impressive features that take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) will be rolled out in the first half of next year.

Microsoft Teams Premium Features

‘Smart summary’ will allow AI Transcription of meetingsUse the recordings to label important moments, as well as chapters in meeting recordings for easy playback of related sections.

AI will also support real-time meeting transcription in 40 languages. Microsoft says this will make the meetings more inclusive. This is undoubtedly true, but it is a shame that the feature is locked behind a paid subscription afterwards Previously announced for public publication.

Advanced security features, such as watermarking documents and limiting recording permissions, will protect companies from leaks. Microsoft 365 E5 customers will also be able to apply their existing Microsoft Purview information protection labels to meetings, and apply appropriate restrictions.

Setting up meetings will also be easier, as users can choose from a range of meeting types that will be customizable by IT teams, to get into meetings with the right settings in place faster.

Webinars, which can already be organized via Microsoft 365, are also worth an upgrade in Teams Premium. Users will be able to access a registration queue with manual approval, automated email reminders, a virtual green room, and control what attendees see.

But it’s not just the company’s internal meetings that will see reforms thanks to the new service. Business-to-consumer (B2C) engagement is also a win-win, thanks to an “advanced” personal appointment system that allows SMS reminders to be sent for meetings, a “branded lobby experience,” and the organization of scheduled as well as on-demand appointments.

It’s clear that Microsoft has made Teams Premium a good value for businesses of all shapes and sizes. However, what value is left to see, as Microsoft has yet to announce any price.

Over the past decade or so, artificial intelligence (AI) has become more prevalent in everyday life, from online ads that seem to know exactly what you’re looking at to music composition and other creative applications.

The idea of ​​making music using artificial intelligence raises questions about the nature of creativity and the future of human composers. From useful tools to groundbreaking prototyping, here’s a look at some of the latest innovations using artificial intelligence in the music writing process.

Score Cloud Songwriter

DoReMIR Music Research AB recently announced the launch of ScoreCloud Songwriter, a tool that turns original music into master sheets. The software uses information recorded with a single microphone, and can include vocals and instruments. Various AI protocols separate the sounds, then transcribe the music, including melody and chords, along with English lyrics. What you will get is a master sheet with the melody, words and chord symbols on it.

Sven Ahlbak, CEO of Doremer, explained in Media release. “Our vision is that ScoreCloud Songwriter will help songwriters, composers, and other music professionals, such as teachers and performers. It may even inspire music lovers who never thought they could write a song. We hope it will become an indispensable tool for creating, sharing and sustaining musical works. on her “.

Harmony dance spread

Harmonai is a company that creates open source models for the music industry, and Dance Diffusion is their latest innovation in artificial intelligence sound generation. It uses a mixture of publicly available forms to create audio parts – so far, about 1-3 seconds long – from nothing, as it were, which can then be interpolated into longer recordings. Since it is AI, the more users enter the audio files in order to learn from them, the more they will evolve and evolve. If you’re interested in how Dance Diffusion came together, here’s a video interview with the creators over here.

Here is one of their projects, an AI-powered endless solo that has been in play since January 27, 2021. It is based on the work of the late musician Adam Neely.

It’s still in the testing stages, but its implications are profound.

AudioLM by Google

Google’s new AudioLM bases its approach to sound creation on the way language is processed. It can create music for piano with a short excerpt of the input. Speech sounds into words and sentences, in the same way that music revolves around individual notes that come together to form melody and harmony. Google engineers used the concepts in Advanced Language Modeling as their guide. AI captures the melody as well as the overall structure and details of the sound waveform to create realistic sounds. Reconstructs sounds in layers designed to capture nuances.

Meta AudioGen

Meta’s new AudioGen uses an AI model of text-to-speech to create sounds as well as music. The user enters a text message, such as “the wind is blowing”, or even a combination, such as “the wind is blowing and the leaves are rustling” and the AI ​​responds with a matching voice. Developed by the Met and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the system is capable of generating sound from scratch. AI can separate different voices for complex situations, such as many people speaking at once. The researchers trained the AI ​​using a combination of audio samples, and it could create a new sound beyond its own training dataset. Besides sounds, he can create music, but this part of his functionality is still in its infancy.

What’s Next?

With the AI ​​music generation in its infancy, it is easy to dismiss its future impact on the industry. But it cannot be ignored.

An electronic band called YACHT recorded an entire album using artificial intelligence in 2019, using technology that has already been surpassed. Basically, they taught the AI ​​how to be a yacht, and he wrote the music. Then the band turned it on to their next album.

YACHT member and technical writer Claire L. Evans: ‘I’m Not Interested in Being Retroactive’, the inconsistency in a documentary on their 2019 album powered by artificial intelligence chain kicks off (As quoted in technology crisis). “I don’t want to go back to my roots and play acoustic guitar because I’m so afraid of the upcoming robotics apocalypse, but I also don’t want to jump into the trenches and welcome the new robotics pioneer either.”

The onslaught of new technology is relentless. The only option is to jump on the train.

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Anja Wasenberg is a senior writer and digital content editor at Ludwig Van. She is an experienced freelance writer, blogger and writing educator at OntarioLearn.

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The company has been built through the acquisition of 17 companies over a period of approximately 4 years, has seen continuous strong organic growth from its customers in their target markets of healthcare and consumer packaged goods and continues on the journey of new customer acquisition. Westfall’s corporate methodologies backed by their “stack integration model” certainly advance as it relates to their value proposition but they have also increased the need for continuous improvement in key areas due to their growth. This has resulted in an organizational structure that poses unique and nuanced challenges to the supply chain. The company provides comprehensive manufacturing capabilities, including product design, mold making, injection molding, assembly and more to a wide range of customers, and as David Schultz, executive vice president of supply chain, said, Westfall Technik counts “all the biggest logos” among its customers.

Schultz, whose previous experience includes several senior operational positions and, more specifically, Chief Procurement Officer/Chief Supply Chain Officer for both private companies and publicly traded companies. He has held key operational positions with GE Plastics, Boston Scientific, and ConMed. He was also the president and founder of a packaging company in partnership with Nypro which was later sold after Jabil’s acquisition of Nypro. He began his work with Westfall in February 2022 specifically to help the company steer countless businesses in the same direction from an overall supply chain point of view. After quickly assessing value-enhancing opportunities, he reached out to Edmund Zagorin, CEO of Arkestro (San Francisco), whom he has known over the years at various supply chain events and conferences. During that time, Schultz received regular updates from Zagorin about his company’s new capabilities in applying AI/ML to strategic sourcing. Westfall adopted the company’s predictive procurement program in April, initially easing the platform in the company’s sourcing activities. .

“We started with the strategy of crawling, walking, and running,” Schultz says. Initially, Westfall tasked the predictive platform with sourcing so-called indirect materials — things like laptops and security cameras. After these early successes, Westfall and Arkestro moved into areas of significantly greater complexity.

“Despos de [indirect materials]We said, “Let’s really test this out—working with us on resins, our biggest purchases, and very complex direct materials with a lot of moving parts,” says Schultz. Westfall and Arkestro have teamed up to push the platform where they need it, helping to not only secure lower total costs but ensure continuity of supply.

“It wasn’t just prices,” Schultz says. “It was capturing total value across the supply chain. If you look at historical surveys of senior purchasing officials, price has always been the biggest concern. Last year was the first time it wasn’t priced — it’s operational efficiency as emphasized in a Deloitte Global survey. 2021 CPO. If you get a great price that’s great, but if it doesn’t show, does that really matter?”

Eliminate the time people spend correcting the inevitable mistakes

In the non-AI-powered procurement process, the heavy burden of data collection and comparison falls on people, invoking the inherent potential for human error and arduous corrective measures. “The traditional way that procurement teams interact with suppliers is to ask them for lots of data that is copied and pasted from multiple systems in one submission,” Arkestro’s Zagorin explains. “Then on the procurement side of the cycle, you can create another spreadsheet and look at each row and each view, side by side, using a pivot table. If there is an error; if the supplier misses a value in the price; it is often caught late So out of the process that it is difficult to detect or update it. After all, the error can form part of what is legally agreed upon”

Arkestro works within the systems and processes customers already use by including price and personalization recommendations in the company’s purchasing and workflows. It does this by recommending predictive pricing suggestions to buyers at the item level for any market basket, purchase order, or bill of materials, which can then be communicated directly to suppliers. Arkestro can also direct purchases to preferred suppliers and automate buyer and supplier email correspondence, saving time, attention and resources. The company is committed to standardizing business sourcing, purchasing, contracting and supplier management activities with real-time data standards and “manage by exception” anomaly detection.

“Arkestro actually recommends the price and terms in the supplier’s offer,” explains Zagorin. “Instead of the supplier having to take the time to come up with an offer just to get an opposition, not to mention the procurement team having to check and grade it all, Arkestro proposes an offer that it thinks is competitive, and the supplier can adjust it and submit. By proposing a mutually beneficial price, it reduces of cycle time which gives the supplier greater predictability and gives the procurement team better economics.”

Schultz says Westfall has benefited from using the software from a buyer’s point of view, but he’s also seen how quickly suppliers are drawn to it, too. “Arkestro initially started building this platform with suppliers in mind, which is critical to long-term success,” Schultz says. “If you don’t have a supplier base that believes in the integrity and simplicity of the system, you get nothing.”

Founded in 2017, Arkestro’s first customer was BASF, and Zagorin noted that they have “worked on enterprise-class technology since day one,” including the ability to handle data security, global currencies, and more. While these requirements have remained the same, other aspects of its business have changed.

“Our initial vision was really focused on helping manufacturers and industrial companies improve the RFQ process, as they need to collect and compare quotes for a new product launch, sourcing event, or approval of a large and complex purchase,” says Zagorin.

Read: Preview K 2022: Engineering materials for sustainability and e-mobility

Early on, the company picked up on the issue of manual entry of error-prone data. “Web forms with manual text fields alone won’t help much,” says Zagorin. “We realized that from a paper-clean standpoint, you need to apply machine learning, behavioral science and game theory to make sure stimuli match. This is why predictive learning is key.”

In the same way that Netflix or Amazon recommends users what to watch or buy based on past behavior, Arkesto works to learn and understand the companies that are publishing it. Where normally, sources can be isolated into different groups within a company, Arkestro hopes to open them up. “Traditionally, companies struggle to learn from their own buying and selling transaction history,” says Zagorin. “You buy a replacement part for a machine in one factory, and when you go to buy the same part, you basically start from scratch. We wanted a recommendation system that learns from buyer and supplier behavior and makes timely, relevant recommendations to suppliers and purchasing teams. The fact that recommendations learn and improve over time is a huge benefit. to our clients.”

Roku is expanding to new frontiers as the company unveiled its next line of smart home devices made in collaboration with Wyze.

On the surface, it looks like the company has just repackaged Wyze products and labeled them with Roku. The hardware is already the same, but all devices will be supported by Roku’s own software. in all, There will be multiple devices (Opens in a new tab) Matching Wyze’s modest pricing, a subscription service that adds even more features, and a companion mobile app where you can control everything. Devices fall into three main categories: cameras, lights, and wall sockets.

The majority of these devices will work with the Google Assistant out of the box with Amazon Alexa support coming in early November. All but two can be pre-ordered from the Roku online store today. Most cameras ship on October 17, while lights and sockets ship on October 26.

Roku’s Smart Home line will only be available in the US with no known plans to expand elsewhere at the time of writing.

smart home line

Both of the new Roku cameras can record in 1080p and offer color night vision with the ability to detect motion as well as sound. A feed can be viewed directly from the lens on Roku TV or Player. Two-way audio is also supported across all devices.

The differences between the cameras are due to the specific roles they occupy. For example, file Indoor Camera SE ($26.99) (Opens in a new tab) It is your base model that does everything we just described. Then you have a file 360° Indoor Camera SE ($39.99) (Opens in a new tab) Added automatic motion tracking and a much wider field of view. Outdoor options are designed to be weatherproof. wired Video Doorbell & Chime Set SE ($79.99) (Opens in a new tab) Available so you can see right outside your door. The wireless option starts in December.

soon is Floodlight SE Camera ($99.99) (Opens in a new tab)It, as the name suggests, has these two bright LED flashlights next to the lens. However, a launch date has not been set.

Cameras are the only devices that got some improvement with the new Roku Smart Home Subscription (Opens in a new tab) Service ($39.99 per year). Thanks to this, the cameras gain better detection features, including the ability to specifically detect people and packages, and store video on the cloud for up to two weeks. Motion and sound detection is still present in the free version but there is no video storage, only still images.

For lights, you can choose between LEDs and strips. What makes them “smart” is the ability to control the color and brightness level using the Roku Smart Home app. The Smart Light Strip SE (starting at $22.99) (Opens in a new tab)In particular, music can be synchronized using the smartphone’s microphone.

Finally, you have indoor and outdoor models of wall sockets. With them, forgotten devices can be turned off from a distance or you can create custom schedules for them via the Smart Home app. The difference is that the outdoor model is made to be weatherproof.

Safety in mind

Some of you may be concerned about the security of Roku’s Smart Home line after hearing that Wyze is involved.

The company had several security controversies. Big was huge Data breach in 2019 (Opens in a new tab) Which leaked information of 2.4 million users. Earlier this year, Wyze found herself in hot water again after reports of bad actors surfaced Possible access to user content. Needless to say, people may still be a little hesitant to trust Fayez and it seems like Rocco was aware of that.

according to fast company (Opens in a new tab) Interview with Roku CEO Anthony Wood Roku will be in charge of the security side of things by adding “two-factor authentication and [data] encryption. However, Wyze will still operate cloud services.

If you are interested in seeing what else the company has to offer, be sure to check out TechRadar’s list of the best Roku deals for October.