Lifeboat Foundation

Waverly Labs, the company behind wearables focused on translation, has launched an app called Forum that helps users translate and transcribe audio in real time. The company says the solution is useful for lecturers, auditoriums and theaters. What’s more, it is also compatible with video calling apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

Forum is available on iOS and accessible through a browser. The app’s Android version will launch by the end of this quarter. It supports 20 languages and 42 dialects, including Arabic, Dutch, English, Hindi, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Users can join an existing session or create one and share a QR code with others.

Users have the option to switch to a new language in the middle of the session to get text and audio translation. There is also a profanity filter to block words that users don’t want to see in a chat. Forum also has hold-to-talk and pause-to-translate modes for a conversation that doesn’t need instantaneous conversation.

The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, SpaceX, on Monday announced that it has commenced the operation of Starlink services in Nigeria, the first African country to receive such.

Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX launched in 2019. It provides satellite internet access coverage to about 46 countries, which is also targeting the global mobile phone service after 2023.

Continue reading “SpaceX announces Nigerian operation, first in Africa” »

The phone, tablet or laptop you’re reading this on is likely having its battery slowly drained because of a surprising and widespread manufacturing flaw, according to researchers in Halifax.

“This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of,” said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.

The problem? Tiny pieces of tape that hold the battery components together are made from the wrong type of plastic.

After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

Maybe a New iPhone is a good idea for a second phone.

The one service Apple offered that could not be encrypted was iCloud. Now that will change.

Threat actors associated with the Roaming Mantis attack campaign have been observed delivering an updated variant of their patent mobile malware known as Wroba to infiltrate Wi-Fi routers and undertake Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking.

Kaspersky, which carried out an analysis of the malicious artifact, said the feature is designed to target specific Wi-Fi routers located in South Korea.

Roaming Mantis, also known as Shaoye, is a long-running financially motivated operation that singles out Android smartphone users with malware capable of stealing bank account credentials as well as harvesting other kinds of sensitive information.

Earlier this month, we reported how a program trained with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) was set to help a defendant contest his case in a U.S. court next month. Instead of addressing the court, the program, which will run on a smartphone, would supply appropriate responses through an earpiece to the defendant, who can then use them in the courtroom.

Mobile phone batteries with a lifetime up to three times longer than today’s technology could be a reality thanks to an innovation led by engineers at RMIT University.

Rather than disposing of batteries after two or three years, we could have recyclable batteries that last for up to nine years, the team says, by using high-frequency sound waves to remove rust that inhibits battery performance.

The research is published in Nature Communications.

How soon will that day arrive is the real question.

Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, has said that the company believes that the metaverse will become as essential as today’s smartphone, Business Insider.

Meta is the new avatar of Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook that is looking to build the next generation of the internet. In October 2021, Zuckerberg announced, with much fanfare, the company’s vision to build a new digital world where people will log in for work, communication, and entertainment.

It seems Google is feeling the heat from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot has taken the tech world by storm over the last couple months, as it can provide users with information they’re looking for in an easy-to-understand format. Google sees ChatGPT as a threat to its search business and has shifted plans accordingly over the last several weeks, according to The New York Times.

The report claims CEO Sundar Pichai has declared a “code red” and accelerated AI development. Google is reportedly preparing to show off at least 20 AI-powered products and a chatbot for its search engine this year, with at least some set to debut at its I/O conference in May.

According to a slide deck viewed by the Times, among the AI projects Google is working on are an image generation tool, an upgraded version of AI Test Kitchen (an app used to test prototypes), a TikTok-style green screen mode for YouTube and a tool that can generate videos to summarize other clips. Also in the pipeline are a feature titled Shopping Try-on (perhaps akin to one Amazon has been developing), a wallpaper creator for Pixel phones and AI-driven tools that could make it easier for developers to create Android apps.