News, new releases and what's buzzing in the world of technology:
Back to the future
Adobe has been experimenting with advanced neural filters in Photoshop to make photo editing easy for amateurs, and its latest Photo Restoration Neural Filter has been generating quite a bit of buzz. Created for digitising and processing old photographs, it is an AI-powered tool to retouch grainy images. While you could do this on Photoshop earlier, the filter reduces a complex workflow to a single click while removing scratches, noise and other imperfections. Other neural filters include those that can change a subject’s expression (by adding a smile, for instance), create a skin-smoothening effect, colourise images, add make-up, and do a “style transfer”—take the look of one image, including colour, hue or saturation, and put it on another. Neat!
From eye to ear
Indian lifestyle tech brand Noise launched its first pair of smart eyewear, developed by its R&D unit Noise Labs. The Noise i1 smart glasses double up as Bluetooth earphones, with a guided audio design to ensure the music flows into your ears. They also offer some noise-cancellation capabilities and around nine hours of playtime on a single charge; other features include motion estimation, motion compensation, a mic for calling, magnetic charging, and hands-free voice control.
Noise i1 is available for ₹5,999. For details, visit Gonoise.com
Microsoft ditches emotion-reading tech
Microsoft announced updates to its Responsible AI Standard recently, including the decision to retire “facial analysis capabilities that purport to infer emotional states and identity attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair, and make-up”. Through a blog post by Sarah Bird, principal group product manager, Azure AI, the company said its evaluation of face-recognition AI techniques prompted it to look at emotion classification and raised important questions about privacy, the lack of consensus on a definition of “emotions”, and the difficulty of attributing similar emotional states to facial expressions across individuals and cultures.
Your double brain
It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information we consume today. How much do we keep, what do we discard, how do we ensure the information we are carrying is useful? In Building A Second Brain: A Proven Method To Organise Your Digital Life And Unlock Your Creative Potential, productivity expert Tiago Forte provides a guide to creating “your own personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain”. The book lays out a methodology, developed by Forte, for not only saving and systematically reminding readers of the ideas, inspirations, insights and connections gained through experience, but putting them into action.
Also read: Amazon has a plan to make Alexa mimic anyone's voice
