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Google is making its voice assistant sound more like humans than robots. The company is working on a new text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2 which is essentially a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text you see on the screen. “The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesise time-domain waveforms from those spectrograms,” Google explains in a study titled ‘Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions’. “Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.53 comparable to a MOS of 4.58 for professionally recorded speech. To validate our design choices, we present ablation studies of key components of our system and evaluate the impact of using mel spectrograms as the input to WaveNet instead of linguistic, duration, and F0 features. We further ...

Digmine was first seen in South Korea A new cryptocurrency-mining bot, named “Digmine”, that was first observed in South Korea, is spreading fast through Facebook Messenger across the world, Tokyo-headquartered cybersecurity major Trend Micro has warned. After South Korea, it has since spread to Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, the Philippines, Thailand and Venezuela. It is likely to reach other countries soon, given the way it propagates, the report said. Facebook Messenger works across different platforms but “Digmine” only affects the Messenger’s desktop or web browser (Chrome) version. If the file is opened on other platforms, the malware will not work as intended, Trend Micro said in a blogpost. “Digmine” is coded in AutoIt and sent to would-be victims posing as a video file but is actually an AutoIt executable script. If the user’s Facebook account is set to log in automatically, “Digmine” will manipulate Facebook Messenger in order to send a link to the file to the a...

Bitcoin enthusiasts, beware! There is a new malware on the horizon, and its out to get your cryptocurrency. This cryptocurrency-mining bot, 'Digmine' first surfaced in South Korea and is spreading fast throughout the world, according to  Trend Micro , a Tokyo-headquarted cybersecurity firm. The only way the malware can spread is via the desktop version of Facebook Messenger when used on Google Chrome which helps the perpetrators take over the Facebook account. The malware is disguised to look like a video file being shared over Messenger. After the hackers take over your account, they have access to your friend list which helps spread the malware. What we know so far is that the malware only operates through Google Chrome and opening the infected video file on Messenger running on any other platform won’t result in an infection. After South Korea, Digmine has since spread in Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, the Philippines, Thailand, and Venezuela. It is likely...

iPhone X  users have discovered that family purchases cannot be authenticated via Face ID, according to a post on Apple's iPhone forum. The iPhone X is the first smartphone from  Apple  to sport the new  Face ID  facial recognition technology, and also the first one in a long time to not have Touch ID. The forum post mentions that every family purchase request prompts the user to type in their Apple ID and password. What is Face ID(Read the below Document) As we mentioned, family purchase approval requests  do not seem to work  with Face ID on the new iPhone X. Family Sharing is a feature offered for Apple devices users that wish them to be connected for purchasing subscriptions and apps. Ask to Buy, another one of Apple's features, lets children in the family choose to purchase apps, albeit with the approval of a 'family organiser'. This organiser can then choose to approve or decline the purchase decline from their Apple device. ...

    Earlier this week WhatsApp turned seven years old. It has been an amazing journey and in the coming months we're putting an even greater emphasis on security features and more ways to stay in touch with the people that you care about. But anniversary dates are also an opportunity to look back. When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people's use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple App Store was only a few months old. About 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia. Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft – which account for 99.5 percent of sales today – were on less than 25 percent of mobile devices sold at the time. As we look ahead to our next seven years, we want to focus our efforts on the mobile platforms the vast majority of people use. So, by the end of 2016, we will be ending support for WhatsApp Messenger on the following mobile platforms: BlackBerry OS and...

It feels like anything and everything is on sale ahead of Christmas this year. Just check  our deals channel  if you don’t believe me. Of course, that includes apps as well and we have a terrific roundup of freebies for you on Tuesday. There are nine iPhone and iPad apps in total on today’s list, and they’re all premium apps that have been discounted for a limited time. Grab them for free while you can! This post covers paid iPhone and iPad apps that have been made available for free for a limited time by their developers. BGR is not affiliated with any developers. There is no way to tell how long they will be free. These sales could end an hour from now or a week from now — obviously, the only thing we can guarantee is that they were free at the time this post was written. If you click on a link and see a price listed next to an app instead of the word “get,” it is no longer free. The sale has ended. If you download the app anyway, you will be charged by Apple. Copy ...

Facebook introduces “snooze” feature to temporarily unfollow friends for 30 days Back in September, Facebook had said that it was testing the “snooze” feature among a small section that allows users to mute a person, page or group for a certain amount of time, anything from 24 hours to 30 days without permanently unfriending or unfollowing them. The concerned people won’t be notified that the user has hit the “Snooze” button on them either, and they won’t be taken off the user’s friends list. “Seeing too many photos of your uncle’s new cat? Is your friend tempting you with endless photos of ramen on her Japan trip? It turns out, you’re not alone,” Shruthi Muraleedharan, Facebook product manager said  in an announcement blog post . “With Snooze, you don’t have to unfollow or unfriend permanently, rather just stop seeing someone’s posts for a short period of time. The people, Pages, and groups you snooze will not be notified. You will be notified before the Snooze peri...

Tech Specs Overview   Power to the pro. Pros love iMac. So we created one just for you. It’s packed with the most powerful graphics and processors ever in a Mac, along with the most advanced storage, memory and I/O — all behind a breathtaking Retina 5K display in a sleek, all-in-one design. For everyone from photographers to video editors to 3D animators to musicians to software developers to scientists, iMac Pro is ready to turn your biggest ideas into your greatest work. Up to 18 cores in an iMac. No, that’s not a typo. An iMac with 4 cores is remarkable enough. But an iMac with 8,10, 14 or 18 cores is an entirely different creature. Add Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.5GHz, and iMac Pro has the power and flexibility to balance multicore processing with single-thread performance. With new AVX-512 vector instructions and a new cache architecture, the processor handles even more data even more quickly. Which means you can render images, edi...

Microsoft AI News Everyday AI: Microsoft showcases progress in infusing AI into core products Artificial intelligence is playing a role in everything from helping blind people recognize currency to making search engines more intelligent and intuitive. At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Microsoft  showcased a number of advances  across its product line that use AI to help people get more nuanced information and assist with more complex needs. These advances include: AI in Office 365 : Microsoft announced new Office 365 AI capabilities to help subscribers discover insights from data, leverage organizational knowledge, arrive on time and more. Conversational bots : Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Bot Service and the Language Understanding service, part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, and showcased customers including UPS, Molson Coors and Equadex who are using these services. Cortana Skills Kit : Microsoft announ...