While we're patiently waiting for Spotify Wrapped 2023 to drop, it seems as though a tweak is on the way in terms of how recommendations are served up: Spotify would appear to be testing the option to turn off personalized recommendations.
This comes from code spotted in a beta version of one of Spotify's apps, by a MacRumors source. At the moment though, we don't know much else about this potential new feature or how it might work if it rolls out to users.
Personalized recommendations are of course based on listening history and habits, so presumably most people will want to keep them switched on to see more music that matches their tastes. Without the personalization, presumably the recommendations would be what's trending and popular, or picked out by Spotify staff.
It does seem that this will be an optional extra for users, so personalized recommendations are by no means going away. It might also be useful if someone else (like your kids) are using your Spotify account – though the Taste Profile features do help you modify the way your recommendations work, to some extent.
Keep on tracking
By default, Spotify does of course keep tabs on everything you do in the app, to make sure you're never short of something to listen to – you can have playlists automatically continue with related music, for example. These algorithm-driven recommendations apply to Spotify audiobooks and podcasts too.
There's a possibility that some people just don't want to be driven by algorithms and AI, or don't want Spotify keeping tabs on every playlist they put on, or both. Until we get an official word on what this new setting might mean, we can only speculate about why it would be implemented.
This built-in tracking is what makes features such as Spotify Wrapped 2023 work, giving you a deep dive into all the tracks you've played over the years – and perhaps surfacing some listening trends that you wouldn't otherwise have noted.
We will of course keep you posted if we hear anything else about what might be happening with Spotify and personalized recommendations. In the meantime, check out our Spotify tips and tricks guide to get more out of the music streaming service.
Rumors of some kind of Samsung smart glasses have been swirling for years at this point, but it looks as though the wait for an actual device might soon be over: Samsung has filed to register “Samsung Glasses” as a trademark in the UK.
This comes from UploadVR (via Android Central), and the filing comes with a description of the categories the product covers: virtual reality headsets, augmented reality headsets, headphones, smartphones, and smart glasses.
That covers a lot of ground. Virtual reality or VR means fully enclosed digital experiences, augmented reality or AR means looking at the real world with digital graphics overlaid on top, mixed reality or MR is enhanced AR where the digital elements and real elements interact, and extended reality or XR is used to mean VR, AR and MR all together.
Exactly which category the Samsung Glasses might fall into remains to be seen, but we know that the company is working on several different products offering these technologies, after previously being responsible for the Samsung Gear VR.
What to expect
Samsung itself has confirmed that it has an XR headset in the pipeline to rival the Apple Vision Pro, but it's not expected to appear until later in 2024, so that Samsung has time to get features such as display sharpness as good as they can be.
The term “glasses” really doesn't sound like a headset, anyway. Could it be that Samsung is also working on a pair of AR specs? We've seen suggestions of this in previous years, though no confirmation from Samsung itself.
Or, we might be talking about more basic smart glasses: able to take photos and videos, an on-board smart assistant, but no fancy augmented reality. See our Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses review for Meta's recent entry in this product category.
Right now it's not clear exactly what to expect – but it looks very much like Samsung will soon launch a device that you can wear on your face. Its next big launch event should be for the Samsung Galaxy S24 phone, sometime in January.
When Apple unveiled its Vision Pro headset, it made a point of saying you wouldn’t need any external controllers to use it, just your fingers. Well, that might not end up being true forever, as a recent patent has revealed that Apple has had an intriguing idea for how you could one day control the headset – and it might take things to the next level.
As spotted by Patently Apple, future iterations of the Vision Pro might include finger-pointer devices that look an awful lot like space-age thimbles. But these aren’t designed to help you with your knitting; no, they might one day let you draw and write with the Vision Pro more accurately than ever before.
Apple’s idea involves showing a virtual trackpad on the Vision Pro’s display. Once you’re wearing the finger controllers, they’d connect to the headset and allow it to track your finger movements more closely, giving you a more reliable way of interacting with the trackpad than if you were to simply use your unadorned fingers.
But this trackpad wouldn’t just be a floating area in space; it would be mapped to a physical location in front of you, such as a portion of the desk you’re sitting at. That’s important, because it would allow you to be more consistent with your trackpad motions. Try it now – you’ll find that tracing a shape on a solid surface is much easier and more comfortable than trying to do it in mid-air.
The Apple Pencil moment
(Image credit: Apple)
The addition of the finger trackers is an interesting move by Apple, as it seems to be an admission that the Vision Pro’s camera system is perhaps not yet accurate enough for really fine-grained work of the kind a trackpad would be good at.
By adding more precision via the finger controllers, Apple could be paving the way for additional ways to use the Vision Pro. Activities like digital painting might become much more viable while wearing the headset, as could writing messages by hand.
That could make these finger pointers an accessory akin the iPad’s Apple Pencil: not necessary for most people to enjoy the device, but something that can seriously ramp up its potential in the right hands (or on the right fingers), and for certain applications.
Seeing as this idea is just a patent at this point, we don’t know when (or if) Apple will implement it; the company could just be exploring ideas. Still, it’s something to look out for in the coming months and years – perhaps it’ll even make an appearance in the second-generation Vision Pro, which could give that device a serious usability boost.
Stability AI, the developer behind the Stable Diffusion, is previewing a new generative AI that can create short-form videos with a text prompt.
Aptly called Stable Video Diffusion, it consists of two AI models (known as SVD and SVD-XT) and is capable of creating clips at a 576 x 1,024 pixel resolution. Users will be able to customize the frame rate speed to run between three and 30 FPS. The length of the videos depends on which of the twin models is chosen. If you select SVD, the content will play for 14 frames while SVD-XT extends that a bit to 25 frames. The length doesn’t matter too much as rendered clips will only play for about four seconds before ending, according to the official listing on Hugging Face.
The company posted a video on its YouTube channel showing off what Stable Video Diffusion is capable of and the content is surprisingly high quality. They're certainly not the nightmare fuel you see on other AI like Meta’s Make-A-Video. The most impressive, in our opinion, has to be the Ice Dragon demo. You can see a high amount of detail in the dragon’s scales plus the mountains in the back look like something out of a painting. Animation, as you can imagine, is rather limited as the subject can only slowly bob its head. The same can be seen in other demos. It’s either a stiff walking cycle or a slow panning shot.
In the early stages
Limitations don’t stop there. Stable Video Diffusion reportedly cannot “achieve perfect photorealism”, it can’t generate “legible text”, plus it has a tough time with faces. Another demonstration on Stability AI’s website does show its model is able to render a man’s face without any weird flaws so it could be on a case-by-case basis.
Keep in mind that this project is still in the early stages. It’s obvious the model is not ready for a wide release nor are there any plans to do so. Stability AI emphasizes that Stable Video Diffusion is not meant “for real-world or commercial applications” at this time. In fact, it is currently “intended for research purposes only.” We’re not surprised the developer is being very cautious with its tech. There was an incident last year where Stability Diffusion’s model leaked online, leading to bad actors using it to create deep fake images.
Availability
If you’re interested in trying out Stable Video Diffusion, you can enter a waitlist by filling out a form on the company website. It’s unknown when people will be allowed in, but the preview will include a Text-To-Video interface. In the meantime, you can check out the AI’s white paper and read up on all the nitty gritty behind the project.
One thing we found interesting after digging through the document is it mentions using “publicly accessible video datasets” as some of the training material. Again, it's not surprising to hear this considering that Getty Images sued Stability AI over data scraping allegations earlier this year. It looks like the team is striving to be more careful so it doesn't make any more enemies.
No word on when Stable Video Diffusion will launch. Luckily, there are other options. Be sure to check out TechRadar's list of the best AI video makers for 2023.
Google Photos continues to get smarter and it could soon gain the ability to let you set reminders for certain tasks and events, all from within the photo management app.
There’s already a myriad of smart AI-powered options within Google Photos, from being able to extract text from an image, translate languages, and use the Google Lens feature to pick out even more information in photos and search Google for highlighted items. But this forthcoming reminder function, spotted by The SpAndroid, continues to build out the Photos app into more than just a place to store, edit and peruse shots.
Much like the “Copy text”, “Search” and “Listen” ‘chips’ (aka prompts) that pop up to offer you various options, an incoming Google Photos update could soon serve up the option to “Set reminder”.
Tapping this effectively lets you create a calendar entry for a corresponding Google Calendar app. So let's say you snapped a photo of a restaurant board offering specials on certain days, you could use the new feature to then set a calendar reminder to check out the restaurant on a particular day.
As someone who snaps photos on his phone to serve as reminders and reference points, this new feature seems particularly handy. Sure, it’s not hard to bounce into a calendar app and set your own reminder, but being able to do things with fewer taps or swipes through app menus is certainly appealing to me. And it also means the information you’re after is right in front of you, rather than forcing you to bounce between apps.
Unfortunately, this reminder feature doesn't appear to have rolled out widely yet, with it not popping up in Google Photos on my iPhone 13 Pro or Google Pixel 7 Pro. However such updates can take time to roll out worldwide. I’m running Google Photos version 6.60, so I may need to wait until version 6.61 as that was used by The SpAndroid to test the reminder feature.
Ever smarter software
Given Google is pushing AI-powered tools into its software, as well as Pixel phones with the Pixel 8 Pro at the top of the pile, it’s no surprise to see it bolster Photos with AI-centric features.
It might seem creepy that Google could extract all manner of information from your smartphone snaps, but these tools can be very handy at times, letting you do more with less back and forth between apps.
I’m actually keen to see Google do more in embracing interoperability between its app ecosystem. I’d like Google Maps to pull Google Photos into my timeline so I can better retrace my steps when trying to remember where I went and when; you can manually add photos to Maps and map locations can be automatically added to photos, but it doesn't quite feel like there’s perfect harmony between the apps.
Nevertheless, it’s neat to see how Google Photos continues to evolve. I only hope it sticks to the side of being handy and not fall into the realms of creepiness.
Google hasn't been shy about pushing artificial intelligence into its various apps and services, and it seems that the venerable Google Maps could be next in line to get an integrated AI chatbot of its own.
Code hidden in the latest beta version of Google Maps for Android, as spotted by Android Authority, makes various mentions of in-app conversations – including the line “you're talking with a chatbot”, which sort of gives the game away.
However, only a few strings of related code have been spotted so far, so we don't have too much more information about this chatbot in terms of what form it will take, what it's designed to do, and how it will integrate with the rest of Google Maps.
Nothing is certain yet, and of course Google could easily change its mind about the Maps chatbot – but given the company's focus on AI these last few months, we wouldn't be surprised to see this new feature arriving in the app very soon.
Getting chatty
Without any official word from Google, we're left to speculate what an AI chatbot in Google Maps might do. As Android Authority points out, it could well be something to do with submitting reviews and comments to Google Maps, perhaps via the Local Guides program.
The line of code that says “thank you for your contribution” certainly backs that up. Perhaps a chatbot might swing into action when you've visited a place, asking what your experience was like or what you thought of the service.
Another possibility is that the upcoming bot will actually give you travel advice: what to see in a particular area, where the best places to stay are, and so on. This would be similar to the advice that Google Bard (now with Google Maps integration) can already give.
AI chatbots might also be used to field questions from Google Maps users to businesses – questions about opening hours and facilities, for example. Right now, these questions can be posted and answered by humans, but AI might be about to step in.
Microsoft’s Bing AI may be close to finally getting plug-ins, a feature that has been experimented with before, and will make the chatbot considerably more versatile and powerful (in theory, anyway).
Windows Latest reports that the update to add plug-ins has rolled out to a ‘small’ number of Bing Chat users over the weekend, and the tech site was one of those to get access.
Note that it appears the rollout is only happening for those using the Canary version of Microsoft’s Edge browser (and Windows Latest only got the feature in that preview release, not in the finished version of Edge).
We’re told that the AI currently offers five plug-ins to testers and you can pick any three of those to use in a session. If you want to change plug-ins, you’ll need to start a new Bing Chat session.
Windows Latest carried out some testing with a couple of those plug-ins, and the results seemed useful, with the OpenTable add-on providing some restaurant recommendations in a query.
Other plug-ins available in testing include Kayak, Klarna, and a shopping add-on for buying suggestions – we’ve already got you covered there, of course, especially for the imminent Black Friday sale – but it may be the case that different plug-ins appear for different users.
Analysis: Faster and better
Eventually, of course, there will be a whole load of plug-ins for the Bing AI, or that’s certainly Microsoft’s plan, although they’ll doubtless be rolled out in stages over time. One of those will be the much-awaited ‘no search’ function that was switched to be implemented via a plug-in not so long ago. (This allows the user to specify that the AI can’t use search content scraped from the web in its responses).
We’ve seen plug-ins in a limited test rollout before (in August), but they were pulled, so this is effectively a return of the feature – hinting it might arrive sooner rather than later.
Fingers crossed, and the good news is that Windows Latest observes that these new plug-ins seem to be more responsive and work better than the old efforts (performance-related concerns are likely one of the reasons that the test plug-ins got pulled earlier this year).
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup company, xAI, will debut its first long-awaited AI model on Saturday, November 4.
The billionaire made the announcement on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) stating the tech will be released to a “select group” of people. He even boasts that “in some important respects, it is the best that currently exists.”
It’s been a while since we’ve last heard anything from xAI. The startup hit the scene back in July, revealing it’s run by a team of former engineers from Microsoft, Google, and even OpenAI. Shortly after the debut on July 14, Musk held a 90-minute-long Twitter Spaces chat where he talked about his vision for the company. During the chat, Musk stated his startup will seek to create “a good AGI with the overarching purpose of just trying to understand the universe”. He wants it to run contrary to what he believes is problematic tech from the likes of Microsoft and Google.
Yet another chatbot
AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, and it’s the concept of an AI having “intelligence” comparable to or beyond that of a normal human being. The problem is that it's more of an idea of what AI could be rather than a literal piece of technology. Even Wired in their coverage of AGIs states there’s “no concrete definition of the term”.
So does this mean xAI will reveal some kind of super-smart model that will help humanity as well as be able to hold conversations like a sci-fi movie? No, but that could be the lofty end goal for Elon Musk and his team. We believe all we’ll see on November 5 is a simple chatbot like ChatGPT. Let’s call it “ChatX” since the billionaire has an obsession with the letter “X”.
Does “ChatX” even stand a chance against the likes of Google Bard or ChatGPT? The latter has been around for almost a year now and has seen multiple updates becoming more refined each time. Maybe xAI has solved the hallucination problem. That'll be great to see. Unfortunately, it's possible ChatX could just be another vehicle for Musk to spread his ideas/beliefs.
Analysis: A personal truth spinner
Musk has talked about wanting to have an alternative to ChatGPT that focuses on providing the “truth”, whatever that means. Musk has been a vocal critic of how fast companies have been developing their own generative AI models with seemingly reckless abandon. He even called for a six-month pause on AI training in March. Obviously, that didn’t happen as the technology advanced by leaps and bounds since then.
It's worth mentioning that Twitter, under Musk's management, has been known to comply with censorship requests by governments from around the world, so Musk's definition of truth seems dubious at best. Either way, we’ll know soon enough what the team's intentions are. Just don’t get your hopes up.
We’re approaching ever closer to the next generation of Windows, which most people expect will be Windows 12, and at Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite event, which took place this week, we got a peek at some potential Windows 12 features.
Qualcomm, a company that specialises in wireless-related semiconductors, software, and services, unveiled a flashy new processor chip, the Snapdragon X Elite and it’s made some bold claims. It’s been said that this chip will boost Windows on ARM devices in a big way, and will play a crucial role in the next generation of Windows devices’ functionality.
At the event, Qualcomm shared the stage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CVP (Corporate Vice President) Pavan Davuluri, to discuss the Snapdragon X Elite processor and the topic of NPUs (Neural Processing Units) in the context of future Windows machines.
The discussion was more about broad strokes and less to do with specifics, as there were no demonstrations of the new hardware or even explicit mentions of “Windows 12”, but we did learn about some features that are in the pipeline, which many people felt were hints at what the next version of Windows could be like.
(Image credit: Microsoft)
What AI will look like in future Windows versions
As Windows Central reports, Nadella first described his (and Microsoft’s) vision for how AI is shaping computing. Nadella thinks that generative AI (gen AI, as he called it) can be as major as smartphones and mobile computing (something he’s previously declared at the Envision event we attended last week), the emergence of cloud computing, the internet, and the personal computer have been in the recent past. He thinks gen AI will impact human-computer interaction, potentially making it more intuitive and friendly to us and make it easier to change human behavior.
According to Nadella, gen AI will transform what operating systems (OSs) are as we know them, how a user interface (UI) looks like, how we engage with applications on devices, and more. UI changes are signifiers of bigger more fundamental change overall, and Nadella calls this “a big UI change.”
Nadella then went on to discuss Microsoft’s new reasoning engine, a system that “reasons” and mimics our own thought process. He cited the example of Microsoft’s Github Copilot, an AI coding assistant, which helps you brainstorm ideas and create. The overhaul of UIs and a modern reasoning engine will mean that, as Nadella puts it, “all software categories can be changed.”
(Image credit: GitHub)
Microsoft's big hybrid computing wager
After that, Nadella highlighted hybrid computing, which Windows Central points out has been a continued topic of discussion in what next generations of OSs like Window 12s might look like, and is another major area of development for Microsoft. According to Nadella, Microsoft’s vision includes hybrid computing being crucial to improving computing capability for low-powered or older devices by processing some things locally on the device and making use of the cloud for others.
This is apparently a critical area of innovation which makes use of the new generation of powerful NPUs to maximize the potential of local and cloud computing simultaneously. A hybrid approach to computing is also important because the scale of some AI processes and features require more processing power than a standard PC can handle. Hybrid computing basically expands the scale of what’s possible from your PC, particularly to do with AI, though it does mean you need an internet connection.
This is how Microsoft’s new brainchild, the AI assistant Windows Copilot, functions. Many of the functions it carries out happen in the cloud, and its functionality is a mix of on-device and in the cloud. Microsoft is also developing a new system architecture to make all of this happen that will allow developers to realize what Microsoft calls ‘hybrid apps’. Microsoft is looking to components like the Snapdragon X Elite chip to make this a reality.
(Image credit: Pexels)
High stakes and possible high rewards for Windows Copilot
Nadella calls Windows Copilot a “marquee experience,” so Microsoft is clearly placing big bets on it. It wants it to become the next Start button, which is certainly bold – that iconic element of Windows made a huge and lasting impact when it debuted in Windows 95. Nadella claims that you won’t even need to give it a direction or instruction – you can describe your intent and Copilot will pull up what you need. It could assist our workflows and activities like learning, creating, queries, and more.
Right now, you have to go to Start, find the application you want or navigate your File Explorer to find a specific file, and then get on with your work. With generative AI, the idea is that you state your intent (your wish, if you will) and your wish becomes reality with Copilot bringing you everything you need.
We’ve already seen that Microsoft is putting a great deal of effort into Copilot, and showed us previews of the sorts of things it’ll be able to do. If you try Copilot for yourself, you’ll see that it’s not quite there yet, but the vision is intriguing. Rumor has it that Microsoft is developing natural language models (a type of logical and systematic model that props up what we currently call AI) that will improve file searches and better restore previous activity. Davuluri spoke at length about other platform-related developments to help facilitate app-emulation and how generative AI will help shape each user’s individual experience.
So, it’s a long discussion that gives an interesting look into Microsoft’s future, but keeps it nebulous enough to not spoil too many surprises. For example, we still don’t know what “Windows 12” will be named officially. What we do know is Microsoft’s clear intent with an AI-centric UI that could radically change how we use PCs and devices, context-aware AI functionality that will personalize user experiences, and a focus on incorporating hybrid computing. It all sounds very exciting and it’s great for buzz-word bingo, but I think users are eager to see some solid details about what they can expect in the next version of Windows OS.
A team of researchers at the University of Chicago has created a tool aimed to help online artists “fight back against AI companies” by inserting, in essence, poison pills into their original work.
Called Nightshade, after the family of toxic plants, the software is said to introduce poisonous pixels to digital art that messes with the way generative AIs interpret them. The way models like Stable Diffusion work is they scour the internet, picking up as many images as they can to use as training data. What Nightshade does is exploit this “security vulnerability”. As explained by the MIT Technology Review, these “poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning” the wrong thing. For example, it could see a picture of a dog as a cat or a car as a cow.
Poison tactics
As part of the testing phase, the team fed Stable Diffusion infected content and “then prompted it to create images of dogs”. After being given 50 samples, the AI generated pictures of misshapen dogs with six legs. After 100, you begin to see something resembling a cat. Once it was given 300, dogs became full-fledged cats. Below, you'll see the other trials.
(Image credit: University of Chicago/MIT Technology Review)
The report goes on to say Nightshade also affects “tangentially related” ideas because generative AIs are good “at making connections between words”. Messing with the word “dog” jumbles similar concepts like puppy, husky, or wolf. This extends to art styles as well.
(Image credit: University of Chicago/MIT Technology Review)
It is possible for AI companies to remove the toxic pixels. However as the MIT post points out, it is “very difficult to remove them”. Developers would have to “find and delete each corrupted sample.” To give you an idea of how tough this would be, a 1080p image has over two million pixels. If that wasn’t difficult enough, these models “are trained on billions of data samples.” So imagine looking through a sea of pixels to find the handful messing with the AI engine.
At least, that’s the idea. Nightshade is still in the early stages. Currently, the tech “has been submitted for peer review at [the] computer security conference Usenix.” MIT Technology Review managed to get a sneak peek.
Future endeavors
We reached out to team lead, Professor Ben Y. Zhao at the University of Chicago, with several questions.
He told us they do have plans to “implement and release Nightshade for public use.” It’ll be a part of Glaze as an “optional feature”. Glaze, if you’re not familiar, is another tool Zhao’s team created giving artists the ability to “mask their own personal style” and stop it from being adopted by artificial intelligence. He also hopes to make Nightshade open source, allowing others to make their own venom.
Additionally, we asked Professor Zhao if there are plans to create a Nightshade for video and literature. Right now, multiple literary authors are suing OpenAI claiming the program is “using their copyrighted works without permission.” He states developing toxic software for other works will be a big endeavor “since those domains are quite different from static images. The team has “no plans to tackle those, yet.” Hopefully someday soon.
So far, initial reactions to Nightshade are positive. Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University, told Technology Review this could make AI developers “respect artists’ rights more”. Maybe even be willing to pay out royalties.
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