1. One thing that helps
If you've hit a skill plateau with your instrument of choice, worry not. A team at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo has created a robotic glove that can help accomplished musicians reach new heights.
Musicians often experience a skill plateau—a point where regular practice no longer leads to noticeable progress. This is especially true for highly trained individuals. The team have developed a robotic glove that enables expert pianists to train each finger individually, enhancing high-speed multi-finger coordination. Pianists gained better coordination and faster keystrokes, surpassing their previous limitations.
Amazingly, these improvements were also observed in the untrained hand, suggesting potential neural adaptations.
While this technology holds great promise for musicians striving to break past their current skill level, its applications extend beyond music. Professions requiring fine motor skills, such as surgery, could also benefit greatly.
2. One to be wary of
Would you let a stranger install cameras inside your house and watch your every move? Probably not. But that’s essentially what’s happening with our online presence.
Companies like Google, Apple, and Meta store vast amounts of data about us: our online conversations, shopping habits, and even the places we've visited. What happens to this data is left to the discretion of these companies.
Swiss software company Proton has reported that these tech giants have handed over data on 3.1 million accounts to the U.S. government over the last decade.
With the current chaos over in the USA I am sure I would not want to be handing over all my personal information to Trump, Musk and co. I find it frustrating when people say they "don't care who tracks my data" - the ramifications for the future will be huge.
3. One to amaze
Sesame is paving the way for human emotional attachment to AI through its ultra-realistic voices, Maya and Miles.
“I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt. I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound,” said one tester from Hacker News. If you want to try it, here’s the link. It’s free, so go ahead and give it a spin.
Sesame’s bot is powered by Meta’s Llama architecture, which seamlessly processes text and audio together using a multimodal approach. It can imitate breath sounds, chuckle, handle interruptions, and sound eerily human. If you close your eyes while listening, you might even feel like you're talking to a real person!
The key difference is how naturally the bot speaks. Most AI assistants tend to sound robotic. But Sesame AI carries a warmth that makes conversations feel more human. That said, if you listen closely, you can still pick up subtle clues that it's just AI.
I spent a few minutes chatting with it, and I’m impressed. No, I wasn’t crying when I closed my browser window after saying goodbye to Maya.