After Atlas robots were shown parkouring through a complex obstacle course, jumping over gaps, balancing on narrow beams, and performing backflips in a 2021 video, new footage has now been released by Boston Dynamics showing the humanoid robot manipulating the world around it.
The last time Atlas was seen in a video, the robots did not have hands that could grip objects. However, this time, Atlas is now seen with crab claw-style hands and wrist mobility. In the demonstration, Atlas is placed in a construction worksite environment and is asked to move objects around to get to its end destination. Atlas is seen moving planks to create a bridge, throwing a bag full of two 10-pound (5kg) weights, pushing over a large wooden box, and performing an impressive double flip.
The new capabilities continue to push the limits of locomotion, sensing, and athleticism as Atlas is put to work. The hope is for the new abilities to have real-world applications in fields such as manufacturing, factory work, construction, and disaster response.
Boston Dynamic has been releasing these videos of Atlas doing increasingly more complicated things for years now. However, key questions about the use of these robots in work scenarios are still unanswered.
While these videos are indeed impressive, we suspect that Atlas has been specifically programmed to perform every action and is not doing them intuitively. We also do not know how much ‘run-time’ Atlas would have before needing to be charged again and these issues along with the cost and maintenance of the robot are large obstacles to widespread adoption in our view.
Updated: Feb 24, 2023
Audiobooks narrated by a text-to-speech AI are now available via Apple’s Books. This is a move with potentially huge implications for the multi-billion-dollar audiobook industry. Apple has said that their the new “digital narration” feature on its website will help make the creation of audiobooks more accessible to all, by reducing the cost and complexity of producing them for authors and publishers.
This represents a potential paradigm shift from the current audiobook model, which often involves authors narrating their own books in a process that can take weeks and cost thousands for a publisher. Digital narration has the potential to allow smaller publishers and authors to put out an audiobook at a much lower cost.
For now, there are just four different narration voices to start with, two female and two male, which are called ‘Helen’, ‘Madison’, ‘Jackson’, and ‘Mitchell’. Each voice is optimized for specific genres. For example, Jackson is for fiction or romance and so would be a deep and somewhat husky voice. All of them are non-accented American-sounding voices, however, it is likely that Apple will expand the program in the longer-term to English or Australian, and even regional voices such as a New York accent. Other languages like Spanish, French, German, and are also likely on the way.
Only a fraction of books written so far have been converted to an audio version with millions of titles remaining ‘unheard’. This is mainly because of the cost and complicated production process mentioned above, making small and independent authors and publishers hesitant. As a result, Apple will start with those ‘unheard’ longtail books first. Besides, Apple is not only applying this new technology to the existing titles in its library, but it is also reported in The Guardian that in recent months it has been approaching independent publishers as potential partners for future publications.
Updated: Feb 24, 2023
Microsoft is reportedly working on integrating some of OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI-powered functions into its Office apps, which include Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, as well as its search engine Bing. The company has already started testing of the text generating GPT model from OpenAI on Word to enhance its autocomplete feature.
For Outlook, Microsoft is also making use of OpenAI technology to improve search results without requiring the input of specific keywords. The aim is for it to soon to be able to even help suggest entire email replies and recommend necessary changes.
For its search engine called Bing, which has historically struggled to compete with the Google, Microsoft is also working on a new OpenAI enhanced version which is expected to be launched before the end of March 2023. The new vision, which makes use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, will be able to provide more humanlike answers to queries from users, instead of simply links to pages which may potentially have the information the user is looking for. It is also said that Microsoft would like to use this ability as a base to make Bing more competitive against and even challenge Google’s already powerful Knowledge Graph technology to offer better answers to users.
As part of this deal to integrate OpenAI technology into Microsoft’s core programs, it has also been reported that Microsoft plans to invest around USD 10 bln into OpenAI. If this proves to be correct true, that will take Microsoft’s ownership of OpenAI to 49%. Other investors and OpenAI will hold the remaining 49% and 2% stake of the company respectively. That deal would also include a clause that allows Microsoft to receive 75 % of OpenAI profit until it fully recoups the money invested. This news broke in The Verge.