Victoria Song / The Verge: Oura Ring 4 review: more sizes, slimmer body, redesigned app, and better battery life and auto workout detection, but needs a subscription and no charging case — Oura furthers its lead among smart rings with hardware and software refinements, but its subscription is still its biggest downside.
French startup Gladia, which offers a speech-recognition application programming interface (API), has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. Essentially, Gladia’s API lets you turn any audio file into text with a high level of accuracy and low turnaround time. While Amazon, Microsoft and Google all offer speech-to-text APIs as part of their cloud-hosting product suites, they don’t perform as well as newer models offered by specialized startups. There has been tremendous progress in this field over the past couple of years, especially after the release of Whisper by OpenAI. Gladia competes with other well-funded companies in the…
Nick Fernandez / Android Authority TL;DR US-based Prime Video users are now able to subscribe to and watch Apple TV Plus using Amazon’s service. The Apple TV Plus add-on costs the same $9.99 monthly fee, but Amazon will handle the billing instead. The add-on’s availability will expand to other unspecified territories down the road. Update: October 15, 2024 (6:50 AM ET): Amazon has confirmed that the Apple TV Plus add-on is now available in Prime Video. Apple’s service still costs $9.99/month when used via Prime Video. Furthermore, you don’t need to download a separate Apple TV app or make an…
Music streaming company Spotify said today that it is testing music videos for premium users in 85 additional markets. The company first ran a video experiment in limited markets in March. Spotify originally rolled out music videos in beta in 11 countries, including the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya. Earlier this year, Egypt was added to the list. The company didn’t specify if these 85 new markets included the U.S. It’s a large market for the streaming giant but was omitted in the first set of regions where music videos were…
Bloomberg: The US awards $750M to Wolfspeed, which makes EV chips, alongside $750M in financing led by Apollo to build new $6B+ factories in North Carolina and New York — – US grant of $750 million will support NC, NY factory sites — Company has struggled to turn a profit over the past decade
Joe Hindy / Android Authority TL;DR At least one YouTube Music user can now upload custom playlist thumbnails using the service’s web client. So far, there is seemingly only a single report demonstrating the feature, which suggests a very slow or limited rollout. YouTube Music currently lets its users personalize their playlists by picking from AI-generated thumbnails. YouTube Music is the go-to music streaming app for millions of users around the world. Optionally bundled with YouTube Premium, the service offers unofficial tracks and covers that aren’t necessarily available elsewhere. Despite its popularity and exclusives, however, a key feature remains missing…
Alexandra Bruell / Wall Street Journal: The NYT sends a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Perplexity to stop using its content; Perplexity says it is “interested in working with every” publisher — Publisher demands that Perplexity stop accessing its content. Startup isn’t interested “in being anyone’s antagonist,” CEO says.
Chris Kornelis / New York Times: Lillian Schwartz, one of the first artists to use a computer to make films and who brought together art, science, and tech communities in the 1970s, died at 97 — Early in the digital era, she worked at Bell Labs on the intersection of art and technology, making films and at one point arriving at a novel theory about the “Mona Lisa.”
Hadlee Simons / Android Authority TL;DR Remote Lock lets users lock their phones remotely using just their phone number. However, there is scope for mischief here. Google mentioned that Remote Lock will be upgraded with a “security challenge,” and we have managed to activate the security challenge as a date picket. Google has been ramping up the overall health and security of the Android ecosystem, and the recent rollout of Theft protection features is testimony to that. These features aim to make stealing an Android flagship less desirable by adding roadblocks to its unauthorized use and resale. However, some of…
In a typical organization, finance is one of the most important functions. Yet teams are often bogged down by manual workflows. According to a survey by Paylocity, an HR software provider, 38% of finance teams spend more than a fourth of their time on manual jobs, like reviewing invoices. Matthieu Hafemeister, an ex-fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, says he’s seen many finance orgs struggle to scale up as a result of all the work they’re doing by hand. “The status quo for finance is countless point solutions that are cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister told TechCrunch. “Excel continues…