High-end audio manufacturer KEF and Porsche Design are bringing an extra dash of style to its already luxurious space-themed series of audio product.
Today the pair announced a new jet-black edition of the Space One Wireless and Motion One In-Ear headphones as well as the Gravity One Bluetooth speaker – dubbed simply, the Black Edition.
While the Space One Wireless headphones have been out for some time, the latest edition not only sports a new visage, but will also support aptX HD and 30 hours of battery life with noise cancellation turned on.
The Black Edition headphones and speaker aren’t exactly cheap, but their prices aren’t astronomically high, either: The Space One Wireless will come in at £349 ($395); the Motion One at £219 ($250) and the Gravity One will cost £329 ($380).
So when will you be able to travel to the edges of space and time to snag a pair? The Black Edition headphones will come out on May 2, and will be available worldwide through Porsche Design’s website.
During the opening F8 2018 keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the company’s latest Instagram updates: Spotify integration, AI-based anti-bullying comment filters, AR camera effects and four-way video chat.
During the Day 2 keynote, Facebook revealed how your daily Instagram updates are giving its AI technology a deep-learning crash course in image recognition—one that’s apparently made its AI even smarter than Google’s at categorizing objects in photos.
Facebook pulled this off, amazingly enough, by instructing its AI to read photo hashtags and interpret photos’ subject matter.
Using this strategy, called “weakly supervised training”, Facebook’s AI achieved a record 85.4% accuracy rating on an industry-wide test of image recognition, beating out Google’s previous record.
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A Facebook Engineering blog post went into detail on the methods. Facebook gave the AI 3.5 billion Instagram images to learn from, labeled with 17,000 hashtags for categorization.
Facebook then trained the AI to push aside nonvisual or vague tags and focus on ones that provide the most specific categorization.
The team was able to train their AI using this method in just a few weeks by spreading the process across 336 GPUs at once. Compared to the usual method of teaching AIs to categorize photos using visual clues, this method was much faster and less labor-intensive.
A “supervised learning process often yields the best performance results,” the post reads, “but hand-labeled data sets are already nearing their functional limits in terms of size. Scaling up to billions of training images is unfeasible when all supervision is supplied by hand.”
Thus, while most object recognition software can figure out that a subject in a photo is a bird, Facebook’s AI will use hashtags or captions to figure out that it’s actually, say, a Meadowlark.
Facebook’s AI potential
Some important things to note, in light of Facebook’s recent privacy scandal: Facebook’s engineers only used public photos to train its AI—nothing from private accounts.
Plus, the AI is focused on object recognition, not facial recognition. So, it won’t be using hashtags to figure out which of your Facebook friends is your #bff.
Instead, it’ll be using this information to improve automated audio captions for the visually impaired. And the engineers also foresee “using AI to better understand video footage or to change how an image is ranked in Facebook feeds”, or to “improve the way we resurface Memories on Facebook”.
And today, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, said at F8 that the company uses AI to automatically remove spam, fake accounts and propagandist content from Facebook, including “two million pieces of ISIS and al-Qaeda content”.
Others, like Sphero’s R2-D2 and BB-8, focus less on hand-coding and more on cool features, like the Force Band.
Now Misty Robotics, a spinoff of Sphero, has announced Misty II, a crowdfunded robot that can be coded to do pretty much anything you want, from greeting guests to controlling your smart home devices to bringing you a beer—that is, if you’re a good enough coder to teach it how.
Designed for more serious robot fans, Misty II retails for $3,200 (about £2,350, AU$4,250), but as of publication a limited number are on sale for 50% off.
Robots coming to US backers should ship out December 4, while international buyers will have to wait longer (no specific date was provided).
To justify the price tag, Misty Robotics (MR) stuck tons of tech goodies onto the robot. It runs on two Snapdragon processors (no word on which model), a Windows 10 IoT Core, and an Android 7 operating system for navigation.
Misty II’s head comes with a 4K Sony camera for facial recognition and a 4.3-inch LCD display to express emotions.
Credit: Misty Robotics
Misty II comes equipped with some handy capabilities out of the box. It will map your household for self-navigation, recognize the faces of its owners, greet visitors with unfamiliar faces, self-charge when it needs to (it apparently has “up to two hours” of charge), respond to voice commands, and show off its “adaptive personality” engine.
“We are focused on creating the personal robot of the future that developers and makers can build upon as well as share skills and ideas for what a robot can be,” Ian Bernstein, Founder and Head of Product, said in a statement.
“Crowdfunding the Misty II robot aligns with our mission of building a community for developers and makers… We are excited to see what they build on Misty and then share with the larger community.”
Misty II will recognize and respond to people or objects with different emotions based on its mood | Credit: Misty Robotics
The Misty Robotics site lists a number of skill ideas to code into the Misty II, such as guarding your house while you’re out, “interpreting Ikea instructions”, changing the TV channel for you, and playing with your pets.
It uses a simple Blockly coding interface, and MR claims coding your bot to perform tasks like these will take less than 30 minutes.
But more advanced actions will likely require knowledge of Javascript, which Misty II also supports.
Misty II comes with a cute backpack for storing computer attachments like USB sticks or Arduino hardware for advanced computing.
You can also control it with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. And its operating system can run Tensorflow, Caffe, and WindowsML “within hardware optimized runtimes”.
Who is this for?
Is Misty II truly something that casual robotics fans with no coding knowledge can enjoy, or will most of Misty II’s coolest tricks require getting hardcore into coding?
“Misty II is built for programmers, students, and entrepreneurs interested in robots but have never been able to ‘program a robot’ because they were either too expensive, required a degree in programming, or lacked useful skills for everyday tasks,” MR’s product page reads.
So, hobbyists interested in advanced robotics will have an opportunity with Misty II to learn coding with a fun platform that they wouldn’t normally get outside of a robotics company or engineering program.
But, as with Segway’s crowdfunded Loomo companion robot, Misty II has a high price tag for people who won’t be using it for professional development. People looking for a cute robot companion and nothing else might want to look for a cheaper alternative.
You may also want to hold out for Misty III. CEO Tim Enwall told CNET that the next iteration of Misty could have improved AI and battery life, among other things.
