Category: Specials

More than 10,000 restaurant locations use SoundHound’s platform to understand speech in a range of major languages, learn any restaurant’s menu, process orders directly to the point of sale (POS), and answer customer FAQs.

“Allset will help SoundHound bring voice AI solutions to even more restaurants looking to improve operational efficiency,” Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and co-founder of SoundHound AI, said in a statement on the deal.

For example, SoundHound has been working with White Castle, the US-based fast-food hamburger joint, to offer voice AI ordering technology at select White Castle drive-thrus for a year, with plans to roll out the technology to 100 locations by the end of 2024.

“Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, while Claude Pro and Team plan subscribers can access it with significantly higher rate limits,” an Anthropic announcement noted.  “It is also available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.”

More power, less cost

Anthropic claimed that Claude 3.5 Sonnet surpasses competitor models like GPT4.o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, Meta’s Llama 3 400B, and even its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus, on a wide range of evaluations. Notably, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves this leap in performance while maintaining the speed and cost-effectiveness of their mid-tier model, the Claude 3 Sonnet.

“The Claude 3.5 Sonnet represents a significant advancement in large language models, featuring notable improvements across key metrics,” said Prabhu Ram, head of the Industry Intelligence Group at CyberMedia Research. “It boasts double the processing speed of its predecessor, Claude Opus, at a fraction of the cost.”

“ASPs for augmented reality (AR) headsets have almost always been above this price point, but ASPs for VR, MR, and ER headsets have typically been lower,” he said. “Apple’s Vision Pro drove ASPs higher for MR headsets, but the addition of lower-cost devices from Meta and HTC have kept those ASPs from going much higher. Meanwhile, there were many devices for VR and ER priced below $500.”

Return to growth

Looking ahead, Llamas said that IDC is anticipating ASP erosion across all products: “Because the overall market is still in its early stages with more expensive first- and second-generation devices, prices will be high even as early adopters buy them. In order to reach scale in the mass market, vendors will need to reduce prices on later and upcoming devices.”

IDC is forecasting that “headset shipments will return to growth later this year with volume growing 7.5% over 2023. Newer headsets and lower price points will help with the turnaround expected later this year. Beyond that, headset shipment volume is expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.9% from 2024–2028.”

Windows

This month, Microsoft released one critical update (CVE-2024-30080) and 32 patches rated as important for Windows, covering the following key components: 

• Windows Win32 Kernel Subsystem, GRFX and drivers
• Networking (Wii-fi) and DHCP
• Storage and Error Reporting
• Crypto and BitLocker

The critical-rated patch relates to the core, but not often used, Message Queuing service (MSMQ) that could affect internal applications. Unusually, this patch has already been updated since the main release on Tuesday. That said, the Readiness team believes all these Windows patches can be added to your standard release schedule.

Microsoft Office 

There were no critical updates for Office this month, and only five patches rated as important. All five have low potential for exploitability (no worms, add-in vulnerabilities or Word macro issues) and should be added to your regular Microsoft Office update schedule.

After all, if you squint, you can just about see M4 Macs appearing at the top of that nearby hill now the iPad Pro has that chip. We also think new iPhones are very likely to be already rolling off production lines, and both the iPad Air and iPad Pro already host compatible chips.  So, if you’re in the market for new hardware, it’s on the way, but tens of millions of people won’t need to upgrade to try Apple’s new genAI shiny.

Competitors are gasping

When it comes to Apple Silicon — the fire horse on which AI rides in the newly rebirthed Apple universe — take note that it has taken competitors, even those working with Arm reference designs, literally years to even begin to catch up with the computational power and energy efficiency Apple’s designers achieved. 

With a road map to M4 and beyond already in place, Apple is quite evidently telling us that when it comes to processors the speed argument is done, dusted, and won. And don’t get me started on privacy after the Microsoft Recall farce.

Summaries in messages and mail

Sometimes we have little time, and yet whoever we’re interacting with has a great deal of complex information to share; the result is a lengthy email. Sure, the whole message should probably be read, but if you’re short of time, you can use Summaries in Messages to get the gist of the entire diatribe. Yes, if you completely rely on summaries you’ll probably miss something, but if you are in a hurry and just need the basics, Apple Intelligence has your back.

Built-in transcription tools

Apple Intelligence lets you generate summaries and transcripts of audio recordings captured with the Notes app or during a phone call. This is going to be popular with a lot of people — particularly researchers, students, and journalists. (If you’re concerned about privacy, all parties in a phone call will be told this activity is taking place.)

The new audio transcription and summarization features in Notes enable a device to take notes for the user, Apple says. This lets them, “stay present in a situation where they need to capture details about what’s happening,” which means you can stay focused in that meeting and still have a useful and usable aide memoire.

DuckDuckGo has released an AI-powered portal to some of the most popular chabots and said it will not disclose or otherwise use what users type into the window to train up large language models — the basis for the generative AI (genA) tech.

“Chats are private, anonymized by us,” DuckDuckGo lead designer Nirzar Pangarkar wrote in a blog post. “Our mission is to show the world that protecting your privacy online can be easy.”

DuckDuckGo AI Chat currently allows users to access four popular AI chatbots: Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta Llama 3, and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B) — the latter two, open-source models. The optional AI Chat feature is free to use within a daily limit, and can easily be switched off.

For usage insights, it’s possible to get information about customer data, audiences and customer journeys without running SQL queries. A user could ask the AI assistant, for example, which attributes in a customer profile are leading to a conversion, said Bhambri, the sort of task that might require contacting different colleagues and consulting multiple documents. 

Unlike other aspects of the launch, the ability to ask for operational insights is still in public beta, Adobe said. 

The AI assistant can also be used to create content. In addition to creating audience segments based on a customer’s own data, it’s possible to produce assets that can be included in an email marketing campaign, for instance. In this case, Adobe’s Firefly image model could be used to generate images and design layout within the relevant AEP app. The ability to quickly create content variations allows for greater experimentation, Bhambri said, and can help personalize communications to different audiences. 

Messages improves

While I think enterprise users will be most pleased that Apple is expected to introduce RCS support in Messages with iOS 18, other improvements include new in-message Tapback icons to give users a wider selection of potential reactions, and the capacity to animate individual words. You’ll also be able to share higher quality videos and images with Android-using colleagues than beforeS.

Making Mail more useful

Mail needs far more attention than it gets. It really should integrate more effectively and in a more GUI-led way with applications, documents, and tools.  I want Mail to become the ultimate PIM for any user, as capable for enterprise use as for anyone else. Apple took strides toward this last year with the introduction of email reminders, scheduled sending and an “unsend” function. This year, it plans additional functionality, including potential email responses you can automatically use. Calendar will also integrate with the Reminders app, so you can create reminders from within Calendar.

Settings – simplified

If you get lost while attempting to manage critical Settings on your iPhone, you’re not alone. Identifying the relevant setting isn’t always so straightforward, and the nesting of these doesn’t necessarily conform to your personal subjective opinion of where they should be. Why is Apple’s tool to collect your “significant locations” data hidden right at the bottom of the last page in Privacy & Security>Location Services>System Services, for example?

According to Forrester Research’s 2023 Generative AI Jobs Impact Forecast, the technology will influence 4.5 times more jobs than it replaces. The technology will also make up nearly 30% of the jobs that are lost to automation by 2030.

“We forecast that generative AI will replace 90,000 jobs in 2023, growing to 2.4 million by 2030,” the study said. While 2.4 million jobs replaced by genAI sounds high, Forrester notes that automation and AI overall will replace just 4.9% of US jobs by 2030. And job losses over the next two years will remain modest until questions about intellectual property rights, copyright issues, plagiarism, model refresh rates, model bias, ethics, and model response reliability are resolved, the research firm said.

The latest report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the impact of genAI reads like a “best of times, worst of times” tale. The study found as much as 60% of jobs will be exposed to the effects of AI. About half of the jobs affected by AI and genAI could benefit from enhanced productivity. For the other 50%, however, genAI tools could be used to execute tasks now done by humans, which could lower labor demand, lead to lower wages, and reduce hiring.