Report: Next Sonos smart speakers will be called Era 300 and Era 100

Photo: Tim Foster/Unsplash

Sonos is gearing up to launch its next-generation smart speakers. The Verge reports that it'll be called Era 300 and Era 100. The flagship Era 300 is reportedly built to showcase spatial audio music tracks and Dolby Atmos content. But both will feature a completely new look compared to existing Sonos products.

You can reportedly expect the "richest fidelity" on a single speaker from Sonos with the Era 300. It's likely to offer USB-C line-in, Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, and possibly Bluetooth playback. Less is known about the Era 100, but it's expected to have an Era 100 SL model without built-in voice mics. It could end up being a Sonos One successor with up-firing Dolby Atmos support. 

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Google Bard is its ChatGPT rival

Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his blog post said, "Use Bard to simplify complex topics, like explaining new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old." (Screenshot: Google)

Google gave a sneak peek at its answer for OpenAI's ChatGPT. This automated text generation system took the world by storm in the two months since its public beta release. Google calls its long-rumoured chatbot AI Bard, and we expect to hear more about it during the "Google Presents" event on Wednesday. Google CEO Sundar Pichai considers Bard an "experimental conversational AI service. It is built on top of Google's existing Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) platform, which has been in development for the last two years. 

"Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models," Pichai declared in a blog post. "It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses." Now, it's unclear if it'll result in bigoted or racist responses, as we've seen on other chatbots. 

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Microsoft Teams Premium helps keep track of meetings with the help of GPT-3

Screenshot: Microsoft

A new feature coming to the Microsoft Teams Premium subscription service is one of the more useful integrations of OpenAI's GPT-3.5. It's the first more obvious integration of OpenAI's language processing expertise since the company and Microsoft announced their expanded partnership. This updated service will cost US$10 (around CA$13) per month and will automate some traditional administrative tasks in meetings, like taking notes or creating summaries.

Microsoft is calling this new AI-powered feature "intelligent recap." It is powered by GPT-3.5's intelligent recap and can create “automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights.” It applies even if you don't log on for the meeting.

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Musk says bots with 'good content' can use the Twitter API for free

Photo: Chris J. Davis/Unsplash

Twitter CEO Elon Musk drew backlash over a new decision to require developers to sign up for a "paid basic tier" to access Twitter's API starting on February 9. But it looks like Musk is changing his mind again. This time, he says bots providing "good content" can access Twitter's API for free. He said the platform would enable a "light, write-only" API for these bots. Now, we can't say what "good content" entails. 

But Musk justified the removal of the free access to the API with it "being abused" by bot scammers and spammers. Many developers have already announced they're shuttering their bots ahead of February 9. Musk has been looking for new ways to make money. And we've seen that from the recent decisions on the platform, including charging Twitter users to pay so they stay verified. The company is also reportedly looking to ask for US$1,000 from brands to keep their gold checkmarks on the platform.

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