“In the 1930’s they spent 48 hours working, 56 hours sleeping, 31 hours on home obligations, and 24 hours eating or running errands. What remained, a rather precarious 9 hours per week, was time spent in the pursuit of what could generously be called pleasure.”

From The One Percent Rule.

“In an age of increasingly sophisticated AI and the fear that one day humans will be made obsolete, the classical music world has remained relatively unfazed, with the prospect of a robotic symphony orchestra the stuff of a sci-fi movie.

Now though, that illusion has all changed, as a robot made its debut playing the cello with a symphony orchestra.

In a mesmerising piece written by Swedish-born contemporary classical composer and producer Jacob Mühlrad, the lines between acoustic and electronic music are skilfully blurred in this performance which took place in the Malmö Live Concert Hall.”

From Classic FM.

“‘All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,’ a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. 

The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short summaries. 

The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic—the episodes are laced with little human-sounding phrases like ‘Man’ and ‘Wow’ and ‘Oh right’ and ‘Hold on, let me get this right.’ The ‘hosts’ even interrupt each other.”

From MIT Technology Review.

“Amazon.com Inc.’s Audible will begin inviting a select group of US-based audiobook narrators to train artificial intelligence on their voices, the clones of which can then be used to make audiobook recordings. The effort, which kicks off this week, is designed to add more audiobooks to the service, quickly and cheaply — and to welcome traditional narrators into the evolving world of audiobook automation which, to date, many have regarded warily.”

From Bloomberg.