Siri wants a bite of the apple (intelligence)
While Amazon is making strides in its disembodied voice with artificial intelligence, Apple isn’t doing so well. It’s an open secret that Apple is desperate to make Siri a little smarter with the help of Apple Intelligence, the Big Fruit Company’s AI outfit. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman (via The Verge), Apple “won’t release a “true modernized, conversational version of Siri … until iOS 20 at best in 2027.”
That isn’t stopping Apple from releasing something AI-related during the iOS 18 lifecycle, reportedly targeting a release alongside iOS 18.5. This will be an LLM-powered Siri that “doesn’t work as smoothly as it could,” and will act as its own thing until Apple is confident in its more conversational AI assistant. That model will merge with the ‘old’ one and take on more responsibility than you’re currently used to.
This isn’t uncommon, apparently. Amazon’s smarter, subscription-based Alexa+ reportedly suffered several very long delays while Amazon continued to chisel away at the product. Whether Apple will follow in Bezos’ footsteps and charge a monthly service fee for the privilege of this more capable Siri remains to be seen – though considering the cost of the devices themselves, it’s unlikely.
We have… touchdown!
People, or more specifically, their machines are still going back to the Moon. The latest to manage the feat is Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, which arrived at 10h00 on Sunday, 2 March, in a little neighbourhood known as Mare Crisium. More impressive was its ability to land upright – the first commercial spacecraft to do so.
Firefly Aerospace wasn’t just there to flex or scope out its next holiday destination. It was contracted by NASA as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to help deliver some drilling machinery and, while it’s up there, snap a few images of the fast-approaching lunar night, grabbing HD imagery of a total eclipse. In its month-long journey, NASA said Blue Ghost “has already delivered the most science data to date for the NASA CLPS initiative.”
World’s largest call centre provider to use AI to soften speakers’ accents
A company called Teleperformance SE will use an AI technology dubbed ‘accent translation’ to soften the accents of Indian call centre agents. The tech, combined with similarly AI-powered background noise cancellation, is being rolled out to Teleperformance’s centres in India to “neutralize the accent of the Indian speaker with zero latency”.
According to Teleperformance deputy CEO Thomas Mackenbrock, speaking to Bloomberg, the tech “creates more intimacy, increases the customer satisfaction, and reduces the average handling time: it is a win-win for both parties.”
It will be used for some of the company’s international clients – Teleperformance handles outsourced customer support and content moderation for several notable tech giants – but which companies will see the toned-down accents hasn’t been revealed. Odds are the tech will be deployed for American customers, a region where call centre accents are frequently mimicked with humorous intent. Whether tweaking the native accents of agents will prove to make call centre hell a more pleasant experience remains to be seen. It might just add a further layer of cost on top of normal support interactions.
It’s a pity we’ll probably never experience the tech in person to see how effective it is at making call centre agents sound like ‘Jeff from Ohio.’
More than 20 years later, Steam just had its biggest day ever
For more than twenty years, Steam has been the go-to leader of PC gaming, guided by the light of our lord and saviour, GabeN. But never has it managed to cross 40 million concurrent users – until yesterday. Yup, there were 40 million users around the world using Steam at the same time.
That doesn’t mean everybody was gaming all at once. The ‘true’ number of gamers co-existing at one time is closer to 12 million – the rest were all browsing the storefront or had the application idling in the background – but even so, it’s a milestone Steam hasn’t hit before.
On Sunday, Steam peaked at 40,270,997, helped along by the release of Monster Hunter Wilds and the usual suspects on Steam’s charts like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and whatever else the PC community is fawning over right now.
