Here’s a quick look at everything that tickled my fancy this past week:
Alexa Grows Up
Thinking about getting someone an Echo speaker for the holidays? Well, they may be in a for a treat as Alexa is suddenly gaining the ability to change how she speaks. This may, for instance, give her the ability to read the latest headlines like a real newscaster by making use of various voice inflections.
As the Verge explains, “Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by the company’s development of “neural text-to-speech” technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that’s been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.”
It’ll be interesting to continue to track Alexa going forward to see what other new tricks she picks up along the way.
Flammable Ice
The future of energy consumption continues to get more and more interesting. Just days after writing about energy being harvested from rippling sheets of graphene we now have yet another potential source of energy on our hands in the form of flammable ice.
According to BGR, “As noted by the BBC, the government in Japan is currently exploring the feasibility of using flammable ice as a common energy source. As the name alludes to, flammable ice is essentially a deposit of methane and frozen water. At a quick glance, the substance certainly looks like ice, but because of its chemical make-up, it will catch on fire if you take a match to it.”
Considering all of the methane deposits that we have hidden underneath the Earth’s surface flammable ice could very well become a viable energy source in the near future.
AI Computer Chips
A new AI infused computer chip plugs directly into your existing computer via a USB plug in.
As CNET puts it, “It’s not the kind of thing most of us need, but it’s good for prototype creators who want to see what the brainlike neural network technology can do with a hardware boost. AI is good for tasks like speech recognition, photography and spam filtering, but Intel’s Movidius chips are geared specifically for processing visual information.
AI chips are a hot area in Silicon Valley, with companies like Apple and Google working on projects to speed up devices. AI not only opens up new abilities for computers, it also helps compensate for the faltering speed improvements from many general-purpose processors.”
The Faucet of the Future
The days of guessing what your water temperature is are now numbered.
As BGR puts it, “Sometimes the simplest little gadgets can be so cool, and that’s exactly the case with the DLAND RC-F03 Colorful LED Water Faucet Attachment. This little device screws into any standard tap in your sink and water flows through it normally. But here’s the cool part: it has different color LEDs inside that automatically turn on when water flows through it! Red means hot, blue means cold, and green means just right.”
Perhaps this technology could one day extend to shower heads and bath tubs as well.
The Halo Shirt
A new shirt design could help limit serious brain injuries in athletes by changing its shape in real-time.
According to Inc., “Halo’s collar, made from a ‘smart’ polymer, is soft but instantly stiffens when met with an accelerating force. That should help immobilize the neck when an athlete is hit in the head–in theory, limiting brain jostling, and helping to prevent whiplash, too.”
Such technology could be a real game-changer for athletes in contact sports like football and hockey.
Are any of these the Greatest Idea Ever?
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