Lifeboat Foundation

Since the system is designed to help those who are losing their voices due to motor or cognitive impairment, the training is also flexible. If you can’t do a 15-minute training session, you can stop and start until you’ve made it through all the sentences. In addition, the training system is self-guided, so there’s no screen-tapping necessary.

While the system is not designed as a voice-over system, you can use Personal Vocie to save often-used phrases like “How are you?” “Thank you,” and “Where is the bathroom?”

Personal Voice will live under Settings/Accessibility on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and works with any of these devices running Apple silicon. For now, it only supports English.

The feature image you see above was generated by an AI text-to-image rendering model called Stable Diffusion typically runs in the cloud via a web browser, and is driven by data center servers with big power budgets and a ton of silicon horsepower. However, the image above was generated by Stable Diffusion running on a smartphone, without a connection to that cloud data center and running in airplane mode, with no connectivity whatsoever. And the AI model rendering it was powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile chip on a device that operates at under 7 watts or so.

It took Stable Diffusion only a few short phrases and 14.47 seconds to render this image.

This is an example of a 540p pixel input resolution image being scaled up to 4K resolution, which results in much cleaner lines, sharper textures, and a better overall experience. Though Qualcomm has a non-algorithmic version of this available today, called Snapdragon GSR, someday in the future, mobile enthusiast gamers are going to be treated to even better levels of image quality without sacrificing battery life and with even higher frame rates.

Continue reading “Powering AI On Mobile Devices Requires New Math And Qualcomm Is Pioneering It” »

Update: The image for the ChatGPT 3.5 and vicuna-13B comparison has been updated for readability.

With the launch of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), the world has become both enamored and concerned with the potential for AI. The ability to hold a conversation, pass a test, develop a research paper, or write software code are tremendous feats of AI, but they are only the beginning to what GenAI will be able to accomplish over the next few years. All this innovative capability comes at a high cost in terms of processing performance and power consumption. So, while the potential for AI may be limitless, physics and costs may ultimately be the boundaries.

Tirias Research forecasts that on the current course, generative AI data center server infrastructure plus operating costs will exceed $76 billion by 2028, with growth challenging the business models and profitability of emergent services such as search, content creation, and business automation incorporating GenAI. For perspective, this cost is more than twice the estimated annual operating cost of Amazon’s cloud service AWS, which today holds one third of the cloud infrastructure services market according to Tirias Research estimates. This forecast incorporates an aggressive 4X improvement in hardware compute performance, but this gain is overrun by a 50X increase in processing workloads, even with a rapid rate of innovation around inference algorithms and their efficiency. Neural Networks (NNs) designed to run at scale will be even more highly optimized and will continue to improve over time, which will increase each server’s capacity. However, this improvement is countered by increasing usage, more demanding use cases, and more sophisticated models with orders of magnitude more parameters. The cost and scale of GenAI will demand innovation in optimizing NNs and is likely to push the computational load out from data centers to client devices like PCs and smartphones.

Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia claim to have invented the next generation of composite glass that they say could help make unbreakable smartphone screens in the future. While scientists have been working to create unbreakable glass for years, the technology has largely remained out of reach. Despite increased research in this area over the years, there’s no solution yet that is implementable on a commercial scale, which means despite various display protection technologies, glass remains pretty much as fragile and brittle as it has always been.

While the study doesn’t prove causation, it raises important questions about the potential health risks of mobile phone use and highlights the need for further investigation.

Have you ever considered the potential health risks associated with your mobile phone? Our phones are digital devices emitting multiple radiations, and it doesn’t help that we always use them constantly.

A new study conducted by the UK Biobank suggests that there may be a link between mobile phone use and hypertension.

Continue reading “Study suggests a possible connection between mobile phones and hypertension” »

It simply does not make sense to keep the disks spinning.

Data storage on hard drives will soon become a thing of the past, according to an expert Shawn Rosemarin, who also owns a company selling solid-storage solutions. According to Rosemarin, we could see the last hard drive being sold in just about five years from now, PC Gamer.

Most computer users have long migrated to cloud storage solutions when it comes to safely storing their data. With content being streamed on smartphones and tablets practically everywhere, there is little reason to own a hard drive these days.

May 12 (Reuters) — Apple (AAPL.O) said on Friday it would open its first online store in Vietnam next week, as the iPhone vendor doubles down on emerging markets to drive growth amid slowing sales in China.

The opening on May 18 comes just weeks after the Cupertino, California-based company opened its first Apple stores in India — Mumbai and Delhi.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is betting that emerging markets will provide more opportunities for growth, with younger populations and relatively few iPhones.

Yeah, feels a bit harder to take it seriously when the company paying for the study has so much skin in the game.

Humane/Ted/YouTube.

The former Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno developed Humane with a “future that is even more intelligent and even more personal,” according to the company’s website.